Back to the well

by Lindsay Fendt, Searchlight New Mexico | May 20, 2021
8 min read
oil worker at a produced water treatement facility near Malaga, NM
An oil worker hooks up a hose from a tanker truck to pump produced water from a fracking well into a treatment facility, near Malaga, New Mexico. Photograph by Don J. Usner, Searchlight New Mexico

EDITOR’S NOTE: This article has been made available to the Sun by our content-sharing partner, Searchlight New Mexico, a nonpartisan, nonprofit news organization dedicated to investigative reporting in New Mexico.

On March 15, New Mexico Governor Michelle Lujan Grisham sent a letter to President Joe Biden, praising his commitment to climate action and touting New Mexico’s leadership in the area. She then asked if oil and gas leasing in the state could continue in spite of a federal moratorium. 

New Mexico, she said, was already contributing to stopping climate change—and it needed the revenues from oil and gas too much to slow drilling. As though to reinforce her point, the state legislative session concluded the following week without taking any steps to curb oil and gas emissions.

“It was kind of like a final cherry on top,” said Castille Aguilar, a campaign organizer for Youth United for Climate Crisis Action, a youth-led climate action group. “The idea that we can be leaders on climate change while continuing to give the industry free rein is just a lie, a huge lie.”

For activists like Aguilar, this spring was emblematic of the Lujan Grisham administration’s hands-off approach to climate policy. Democratic state leaders receive less campaign support from the industry than their Republican counterparts, but they still nix policies that could impede the immediate flow of oil (and dollars) in the state. Lujan Grisham and the Democrat-majority legislature talk about energy transition as something to come in the distant future, while tapping industry revenues to fund investments in education and other social policies.

Their hesitancy has opened a door for the industry to further cement its influence in the state. In fact, New Mexico has never leaned as heavily on industry dollars as it does today. In April, monthly oil and gas royalties from state lands hit an all-time high at $110 million, and in 2020, oil and gas funds made up more than a third of the state’s general fund.

New Mexico runs on oil graphic

When Democrats assumed control of both the legislature and the governor’s mansion in 2019, environmental groups had high hopes for climate action. Over the previous eight years, former Governor Susana Martinez had gutted funding for environmental agencies and deregulated the oil and gas industry. Lujan Grisham swept into office full of promises of a greener future.

She advised state agencies to prioritize climate change, and she formed a task force to monitor progress towards climate goals. That same year, the legislature passed the Energy Transition Act, which requires New Mexico to become completely carbon neutral by 2045. 

However, legislation and regulations that would have immediately curtailed the oil and gas industry fizzled. Bills that would have raised oil and gas royalty rates and paused new fracking permits never made it out of committee. The state environment department put out draft rules designed to curb methane releases from oil wells, but left gaping loopholes that would have allowed the vast majority of the state’s oil wells to continue polluting unchecked. After months of intense pressure from environmental groups, the state finally changed course, closing most of them.

“The governor and Democratic leadership can’t have their cake and eat it too,” Aguilar said. “They can’t claim to be climate champions while increasing oil and gas extraction in our state.”

Since then, no legislation that would stem oil and gas production has reached the governor’s desk, while droves of bills to spend the tax revenue from that industry have. 

“The governor is proud to have successfully gotten so many of her legislative priorities over the finish line in the recent legislative session, as well as in previous sessions,” Nora Meyers Sackett, a spokeswoman for the governor’s office, said in a statement. Lujan Grisham did not respond to requests for an interview.

Over the years, the state’s budget has become increasingly reliant on oil and gas funds. In the 2020 fiscal year, that share was about $2.6 billion—just over a third of the state’s general fund. Since 2006, the state has used oil and gas revenue for at least 28 percent of its budget and sometimes as much as 37 percent. 

Industry leaders have made their growing influence clear.

“The future and the opportunities that New Mexico has is directly tied to the success of the oil and gas industry,” said Robert McEntyre, the communications director for the New Mexico Oil and Gas Association. “That’s something that policymakers on both sides of the aisle have long recognized.”

New Mexico’s dependence on natural resources has been a feature of the tax structure since statehood in 1912. As decades passed, the resources being pulled from New Mexican earth changed—coal, then uranium, then natural gas—but the economic model never did. 

The latest oil boom overlapped with years of steep tax cuts, resulting in a state budget with natural resources as its primary source rather than a piece of the pie. For nearly two decades, state government has focused on slashing taxes. Martinez, Lujan Grisham’s predecessor, still touts that she made 61 cuts to state taxes and fees.

But this tax structure is not set in stone.

“We have oil and gas, and so we have chosen to provide tax cuts in other areas,” said Bill Jordan, the government relations officer at New Mexico Voices for Children, an advocacy group. “Other states have figured out how to pay the bills . . . and they do it without oil and gas.”

To do this, some officials in state government have begun pushing to find other sources of revenue.

“We want to have a transition plan,” said Stephanie Garcia Richard, public lands commissioner and head of the office that oversees state land use. “We want to transition and not just leave New Mexico in a lurch.”

Garcia Richard’s office has begun leasing land to renewable energy companies. The office is also looking at recreation, manufacturing and research as potential income sources in preparation for the day that New Mexico’s oil wells inevitably shut off. Still, efforts to end New Mexico’s oil and gas dependence remain in their infancy.

That may be in part due to oil and gas’s influence in state and local elections. Industry money was the largest source of state campaign contributions in 2020, according to an analysis from New Mexico Ethics Watch.

The industry’s contributions to candidates span the entire state, both political parties and almost every level of government. More than half of the oil and gas contributions between 2017 and 2020 came from individuals or entities outside New Mexico. Chevron, based in California, was the single largest contributor to candidates from New Mexico in both state and federal elections. Oklahoma-based Devon Energy and Texas-based Occidental Petroleum and Concho Resources also cracked the top five contributors. 

Between 2017 and 2020, 225 candidates in New Mexico accepted direct contributions from the oil and gas industry. Of the candidates who won their elections, six — Phelps Anderson, James Strickler, Cathrynn Brown Novich, Candy Ezzell, Joshua Hernandez and Rachel Black, all Republicans — ran campaigns funded more than 50 percent by oil and gas, and 32 others had campaigns financed more than 20 percent by the industry. 

While more Republicans took money from industry-linked donors, high-ranking Democrats also drew in large contributions. Lujan Grisham received $233,626, far less than her Republican opponent Steve Pearce, who received more than $800,000 in contributions from oil and gas. Brian Egolf, Democratic speaker of the state House, brought in $87,150, and Joseph Cervantes, Democratic chair of the state Senate Judiciary Committee, took $46,682 from the oil and gas industry, accounting for more than 20 percent of his total campaign contributions.

It’s difficult to trace campaign contributions or meals provided by lobbyists directly to votes and policy, but the oil and gas industry leaders have made no secret of their efforts to grab a seat at the table in government. Democratic state leaders aren’t turning them away. 

Just days before Lujan Grisham made her public appeal to Biden for a moratorium exemption, her staff privately asserted the administration’s strong link to the industry in an email to an Eddy County official obtained by the corporate watchdog group Documented and published by HuffPost.

“We have been communicating frequently with the large operators and the trade associations,” wrote Caroline Buerkle, a top Lujan Grisham staffer. “They have all been appreciative of her efforts.”

Graphics by Joe Rull, Searchlight New Mexico

author

Lindsay Fendt got her start covering the environment as a reporter for The Tico Times in San José, Costa Rica. She covered human rights, immigration and the environment throughout Latin America before moving to Colorado in 2017 for the Scripps Fellowship in Environmental Journalism at the University of Colorado. Before joining Searchlight, Lindsay worked as a freelancer and is finishing a book about the global rise of murders of environmentalists.

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Understanding New Mexico's proposed new social studies standards for K-12 students

“The primary purpose of social studies is to help young people develop the ability to make informed and reasoned decisions for the public good as citizens of a culturally diverse, democratic society in an interdependent world.”
—National Council for the Social Studies 

Reader Michael L. Hayes of Las Cruces commented: What impresses me is that both the proposed standards and some of the criticisms of them are equally grotesque. I make this bold statement on the basis of my experience as a peripatetic high school and college English teacher for 45 years in many states with many students differing in race, religion, gender and socioeconomic background, and as a civic activist (PTA) in public education (My career, however, was as an independent consultant mainly in defense, energy and the environment.)

The proposed social studies standards are conceptually and instructionally flawed. For starters, a “performance standard” is not a standard at all; it is a task. Asking someone to explain something is not unlike asking someone to water the lawn. Nothing measures the performance, but without a measure, there is no standard. The teacher’s subjective judgment will be all that matters, and almost anything will count as satisfying a “performance standard,” even just trying. Students will be left to wonder “what is on the teacher’s mind?” or “have I sucked up enough.”

Four other quick criticisms of the performance standards. One, they are nearly unintelligible because they are written in jargon. PED’s use of jargon in a document intended for the public is worrisome. Bureaucrats often use jargon to confuse or conceal something uninformed, wrong or unworthy. As a result, most parents, some school board members and more than a few teachers do not understand them.

Two, the performance standards are so vague that they fail to define the education which teachers are supposed to teach, students are supposed to learn, and parents are supposed to understand. PED does not define words like “explain” or “describe” so that teachers can apply “standards” consistently and fairly. The standards do not indicate what teachers are supposed to know in order to teach or specify what students are supposed to learn. Supervisors cannot know whether teachers are teaching social studies well or poorly. The standards are so vague that the public, especially parents or guardians, cannot know the content of public education.

Three, many performance standards are simply unrealistic, especially at grade level. Under “Ethnic, Cultural and Identity Performance Standards”; then under “Diversity and Identity”; then under “Kindergarten,” one such standard is: “Identify how their family does things both the same as and different from how other people do things.” Do six-year-olds know how other people do things? Do they know whether these things are relevant to diversity and identity? Or another standard: “Describe their family history, culture, and past to current contributions of people in their main identity groups.” (A proficient writer would have hyphenated the compound adjective to avoid confusing the reader.) Do six-year-olds know so much about these things in relation to their “identity group”? Since teachers obviously do not teach them about these other people and have not taught them about these groups, why are these and similar items in the curriculum; or do teachers assign them to go home and collect this information?

Point four follows from “three”; some information relevant to some performance measures requires a disclosure of personal or family matters. The younger the students, the easier it is for teachers to invade their privacy and not only their privacy, but also the privacy of their parents or guardians, or neighbors, who may never be aware of these disclosures or not become aware of them until afterward. PED has no right to design a curriculum which requires teachers to ask students for information about themselves, parents or guardians, or neighbors, or puts teachers on the spot if the disclosures reveal criminal conduct. (Bill says Jeff’s father plays games in bed with his daughter. Lila says Angelo’s mother gives herself shots in the arm.) Since teacher-student communications have no legal protection to ensure privacy, those disclosures may become public accidentally or deliberately. The effect of these proposal standards is to turn New Mexico schools and teachers into investigative agents of the state and students into little informants or spies.

This PED proposal for social studies standards is a travesty of education despite its appeals to purportedly enlightened principles. It constitutes a clear and present danger to individual liberty and civil liberties. It should be repudiated; its development, investigated; its PED perpetrators, dismissed. No state curriculum should encourage or require the disclosure of private personal information.

I am equally outraged by the comments of some of T or C’s school board members: Christine LaFont and Julianne Stroup, two white Christian women, who belong to one of the larger minorities in America and assume white and Christian privileges. In different terms but for essentially the same reason, both oppose an education which includes lessons about historical events and trends, and social movements and developments, of other minorities. They object to the proposal for the new social studies standards because of its emphasis on individual and group identities not white or Christian. I am not going to reply with specific objections; they are too numerous and too pointed.

Ms. LaFont urges: “It’s better to address what’s similar with all Americans. It’s not good to differentiate.” Ms. Stroup adds: “Our country is not a racist country. We have to teach to respect each other. We have civil rights laws that protect everyone from discrimination. We need to teach civics, love and respect. We need to teach how to be color blind.”

Their desires for unity and homogeneity, and for mutual respect, are a contradiction and an impossibility. Aside from a shared citizenship, which implies acceptance of the Constitution, the rule of law and equality under the law, little else defines Americans. We are additionally defined by our race, religion, national origin, etc. So mutual respect requires individuals to respect others different from themselves. Disrespect desires blacks, Jews or Palestinians to assimilate or to suppress or conceal racial, religious or national origin aspects of their identity. The only people who want erasure of nonwhite, non-Christian, non-American origin aspects of identity are bigots. Ms. LaFont and Ms. Stroud want standards which, by stressing similarities and eliding differences, desire the erasure of such aspects. What they want will result in a social studies curriculum that enables white, Christian, native-born children to grow up to be bigots and all others to be their victims. This would be the academic equivalent of ethnic cleansing.

H.E.L.P.

This postmortem of a case involving a 75-year-old women who went missing from her home in Hillsboro last September sheds light on the bounds of law enforcement’s capacity to respond, especially in large rural jurisdictions such as Sierra County, and underscores the critical role the public, as well as concerned family and friends, can play in assisting a missing person’s search.

Reader Jane Debrott of Hillsboro commented: Thank you for your article on the tragic loss of Betsey. I am a resident of Hillsboro, a friend of Rick and Betsey, and a member of H.E.L.P. The thing that most distresses me now, is the emphasis on Rick’s mis-naming of the color of their car. I fear that this fact will cause Rick to feel that if he had only gotten the facts right, Betsey may have been rescued before it was too late. The incident was a series of unavoidable events, out of everyone’s control, and we will never know what place the correct color of her car may have had in the outcome. It breaks my heart to think that Rick has had one more thing added to his “what ifs” concerning this incident.

Diana Tittle responded: Dear Jane, the Sun undertook this investigation at the request of a Hillsboro resident concerned about the town’s inability to mount a prompt, coordinated response to the disappearance of a neighbor. From the beginning, I shared your concern about how our findings might affect Betsy’s family and friends. After I completed my research and began writing, I weighed each detail I eventually chose to include against my desire to cause no pain and the public’s right to know about the strengths and limitations of law enforcement’s response and the public’s need to know about how to be of meaningful assistance.

There was information I withheld about the state police investigation and the recovery. But I decided to include the issue of the car’s color because the individuals who spotted Betsy’s car emphasized how its color had been key to their identification of it as the vehicle described in Betsy’s Silver Alert. Because the misinformation was corrected within a couple of hours, I also included in this story the following editorial comment meant to put the error in perspective: “The fact that law enforcement throughout the state was on the lookout in the crucial early hours after Betsy’s disappearance for an elderly woman driving a “light blue” instead of a “silver” Accord would, in retrospect, likely not have changed the outcome of the search” [emphasis added].

I would also point to the story’s overarching conclusion about the inadvisability of assigning blame for what happened: “In this case, a perfect storm of unfortunate circumstances, many of them beyond human control, hindered the search that it would fall to Hamilton’s department to lead.”

It is my hope that any pain caused by my reporting will eventually be outweighed by its contribution to a better community understanding of what it will take in the future to mount a successful missing person’s search in rural Sierra County.

1 thought on “Back to the well”

  1. Dennis Dunnum

    Until we get rid of Citizens United, which has nothing whatsoever to do with citizens and everything to do with corporations, AND get some serious publicly financed election systems we will be under the thumbs of both corporations and the wealthy (often the same people). Unless you are either independently wealthy or bought by corporate interests, you cannot afford to run for office—even in-state and, often, in local elections. It would also help if we educated our children to be critical thinkers.

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