New Mexico court weighs fight over coal-fired power plant — Susan Montoya Brown, Associated Press
New Mexico's largest electric provider wants the state's highest court to overturn a 2021 decision by regulators who rejected a proposal to transfer its shares in a coal-fired power plant to a Navajo energy company.
The state Supreme Court heard arguments Tuesday in a case that could determine how long the Four Corners Power Plant will continue to operate. Providing power to customers in Arizona and New Mexico, it's one of a handful of remaining coal-fired plants in the Southwestern U.S. that are slated for closure over the next decade.
Navajo Transitional Energy Co. had sought to take over Public Service Co. of New Mexico's shares, saying that preventing an early closure would help soften the economic blow to communities that have long relied on tax revenue and jobs tied to coal-fired generation.
The arrangement was proposed as PNM looked for ways to remove coal from its portfolio. A condition of a multibillion-dollar merger with a subsidiary of global energy giant Iberdrola required the New Mexico utility to show that it was taking steps to do so.
In rejecting the plan, the New Mexico Public Regulation Commission said PNM had failed to specify how lost power would be replaced to ensure the lights would stay on for the utility's more than 500,000 customers. The concerns were amplified at the time since the utility already was warning about delayed solar and battery storage projects that were meant to replace the capacity lost with the closure of another major coal-fired power plant in the region.
Jason Marks, an attorney for the Sierra Club, told the court Tuesday that the New Mexico utility had rushed to submit the application to abandon the Four Corners Power Plant because of the pending merger with Avangrid.
"If this was a normal case, they could have developed their replacement resource portfolios. There was more than enough time to do that but they came in with what they had on the shelf. They repackaged it and they came in with a case of hypotheticals," said Marks, a former commissioner.
PNM attorney Rick Alvidrez argued that the Navajo energy company was the driver of the filing, not the merger. He asked the court to declare that the commission was wrong in dismissing the application since it had decided in an earlier case to approve the abandonment of the other power plant — the San Juan Generating Station — based on modeling and potential replacement power sources.
PNM's abandonment request sought to recover $300 million it has invested in Four Corners using bonds that would be paid off by utility customers. While considering the application, commissioners had raised questions about what costs the utility should be allowed to recover and how much authority regulators have to determine whether those costs are prudent.
PNM had argued the arrangement would benefit its customers as well as the Navajo Nation.
The plant is located on tribal land between Shiprock and Farmington in northwestern New Mexico. The majority owner — Arizona Public Service Co. — hasn't indicated any plans to end operations before 2031 because doing so could undermine the reliability of that utility's network.
Marks told the court Tuesday that the purpose of New Mexico's Energy Transition Act — passed in 2019 — was to shift from coal to renewable resources and to forbid regulated utilities from using transactions to move coal plants off their books to an unregulated entity.
"This form of the abandonment was against public policy and that really needs to be considered," he said. "It definitely goes head on into what the Legislature wanted with the ETA."
EPA cites 2 oil and gas firms over Permian Basin pollution — Michael Biesecker, Associated Press
Two Texas companies have resolved Clean Air Act violations with the Environmental Protection Agency by agreeing to reduce emissions of planet-warming methane and other harmful pollutants wafting from the nation's largest oil and gas producing region.
EPA announced Monday that Matador Production Company has agreed to pay $6.2 million in fines and mitigation measures related to 239 oil and gas well pads in New Mexico. Permian Resources Operating agreed earlier this month to pay $610,000 and make improvements to its equipment to settle environmental violations.
The enforcement actions came after EPA flew a helicopter equipped with a special infrared camera that can detect emissions of hydrocarbon vapors that are invisible to the naked eye.
EPA announced a new round of overflights in August, four days after publication of an investigation by The Associated Press that showed 533 oil and gas facilities in the region are emitting excessive amounts of methane and named the companies most responsible.
Colorless and odorless, methane makes up about 95 percent of natural gas and a potent greenhouse pollutant that traps 83 times more heat in the atmosphere over a 20 year period than an equivalent amount of carbon dioxide.
The AP used 2021 data from the group Carbon Mapper to document massive amounts of methane venting into the atmosphere from "super emitters" across the Permian Basin, a 250-mile-wide bone-dry expanse along the Texas-New Mexico border.
A partnership of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory and academic researchers, Carbon Mapper used an airplane carrying an infrared spectrometer to detect and quantify the unique chemical fingerprint of methane in the atmosphere. Hundreds of sites were shown persistently spewing the gas across multiple overflights.
EPA has said the timing of its 2022 overflights was not related to AP's story and that similar aerial surveillance had been conducted in years past. The federal complaint filed against Matador said unlawful emissions were observed in 2019, while Permian Resources was cited for evidence collected during overflights in 2020.
EPA spokesman Timothy Carroll said federal regulators have initiated additional enforcement actions based on the agency's 2022 flyover. He declined to provide the number of additional companies currently facing potential sanctions, citing the ongoing investigations.
Methane emissions in themselves are not illegal under current federal law, but the Clean Air Act does regulate other pollutants also contained in the gasses emitted during fossil fuel production, such as volatile organic compounds that contribute to health problems including asthma, lung infections, bronchitis and cancer.
"Air quality in the Permian Basin is at risk of not meeting national standards," said Assistant Attorney General Todd Kim of the Justice Department's Environment and Natural Resources Division. "We will continue to work with the State of New Mexico to ensure that oil and gas production operations are operating within the law to improve air quality and public health in surrounding communities."
EPA said its settlement with Matador will result in a reduction of more than 16,000 tons of air pollutants that are harmful to human health. There will be additional reduction in emissions of methane and other greenhouse gases equal to about 31,000 tons of carbon dioxide — equal to taking more than 6,000 gasoline-powered vehicles off the road for one year.
Emails and a voicemail seeking comment from Matador Resources Company, the Dallas-based corporate parent of Matador Production Company, received no response.
Emails to Permian Resources, based in Midland, Texas, also received no response. The voicemail for a phone number at the company listed for media inquires was not accepting new messages on Tuesday.
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Follow AP Global Investigative Reporter Michael Biesecker at twitter.com/mbieseck
40 killed in fire at immigration detention center in Mexico — María Verza, Morgan Lee, Associated Press
Migrants fearing deportation set mattresses ablaze at an immigration detention center in northern Mexico, starting a fire that killed at least 40 people, the president said Tuesday, in one of the deadliest events ever at a Mexican immigration lockup.
Hours after the fire broke out late Monday, rows of bodies were laid out under shimmery silver sheets outside the facility in Ciudad Juarez, which is across the U.S. border from El Paso, Texas, and a major crossing point for migrants.
Twenty-nine people were injured and were in "delicate-serious" condition, according to the National Immigration Institute.
At the time of the blaze, 68 men from Central and South America were being held at the facility, the agency said.
Immigration authorities identified the dead and injured as being from Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador, Venezuela, Colombia and Ecuador, according to a statement from the Mexican attorney general's office. Guatemala Foreign Affairs Minister Mario Búcaro said 28 of the dead were Guatemalan citizens.
Mexico President Andrés Manuel López Obrador said the fire was started by migrants in protest after learning they would be deported.
"They never imagined that this would cause this terrible misfortune," López Obrador said.
The deaths forced the government to rent refrigerated trailers to hold the migrants' bodies, Chihuahua state prosecutor Cesar Jáuregui told reporters.
The detention facility is across the street from Juarez's city hall.
At a nearby hospital, Viangly Infante Padrón, a 27-year-old Venezuelan migrant seeking asylum in the U.S. with her husband and three children, waited for her husband, who was being treated for smoke inhalation. The previous evening, she was waiting outside the detention center for his release when the fire broke out.
"There was smoke everywhere. The ones they let out were the women, and those (employees) with immigration," she said. "The men, they never took them out until the firefighters arrived."
She saw several dead bodies before finding her husband in an ambulance. "I was desperate because I saw a dead body, a body, a body, and I didn't see him anywhere."
Earlier, about 100 migrants gathered Tuesday outside the immigration facility's doors to demand information about relatives.
Katiuska Márquez, a 23-year-old Venezuelan woman with her two children, ages 2 and 4, was seeking her half-brother, Orlando Maldonado, who had been traveling with her.
"We want to know if he is alive or if he's dead," she said. She wondered how all the guards who were inside made it out alive and only the migrants died. "How could they not get them out?"
Authorities did not immediately answer that question, but López Obrador had said the migrants piled the mattresses in a doorway.
Márquez and Maldonado were detained Monday with the children and about 20 others. They had been in Juarez waiting for an appointment from U.S. authorities to request asylum. They were staying in a rented room where 10 people were living, paying for it with the money they begged in the street.
"I was at a stoplight with a piece of cardboard asking for what I needed for my children, and people were helping me with food," she said. Suddenly agents came and detained everyone.
Everyone was taken to the immigration facility but only the men were placed in the cells. Three hours later, the women and children were released.
Tensions between authorities and migrants had apparently been running high in recent weeks in Ciudad Juarez, where shelters are full of people waiting for opportunities to cross into the U.S. or for the asylum process to play out.
More than 30 migrant shelters and other advocacy organizations published an open letter March 9 that complained of a criminalization of migrants and asylum seekers in the city. It accused authorities of abusing migrants and using excessive force in rounding them up, including complaints that municipal police questioned people in the street about their immigration status without cause.
The high level of frustration in Ciudad Juarez was evident earlier this month when hundreds of mostly Venezuelan migrants tried to force their way across one of the international bridges to El Paso, acting on false rumors that the United States would allow them to enter the country. U.S. authorities blocked their attempts.
After that, Juarez Mayor Cruz Pérez Cuellar started campaigning to inform migrants there was room in shelters and no need to beg in the streets. He urged residents not to give money to them and said authorities would remove them from intersections where it was dangerous to beg and allegedly a nuisance to residents.
Migrant advocates who recently denounced more aggressive tactics said Tuesday that the immigration facility was over capacity and that the site of the fire was small and lacked ventilation.
"You could see it coming," the advocates' statement said. "Mexico's immigration policy kills."
The national immigration agency said Tuesday that it "energetically rejects the actions that led to this tragedy" without any further explanation.
The "extensive use of immigration detention leads to tragedies like this one," Felipe González Morales, the United Nations special rapporteur for human rights of migrants, said via Twitter. In keeping with international law, immigration detention should be an exceptional measure and not generalized, he wrote.
Mexico's immigration lockups have seen overcrowding, protests and riots from time to time.
In October, a group of mostly Venezuelan migrants rioted inside an immigration center in Tijuana. In November, dozens of migrants rioted in Mexico's largest detention center in the southern city of Tapachula near the border with Guatemala. No one died in either incident.
Mexico has emerged as the world's third most popular destination for asylum-seekers, after the United States and Germany. But it is still largely a country that migrants pass through on their way to the U.S.
Asylum-seekers must stay in the state where they apply in Mexico, resulting in large numbers being holed up near the country's southern border with Guatemala. Tens of thousands are also in border cities.
Meanwhile, at a Mass celebrated in memory of the migrants, Bishop Mons. José Guadalupe Torres Campos lamented the sudden grief that had descended upon the migrant community.
"The shout, the cry of everyone is enough, enough of so much pain, enough of so much death," he said.
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Verza reported from Mexico City. Associated Press videojournalist Alicia Fernández and writer Guadalupe Peñuelas in Ciudad Juarez, Mark Stevenson in Mexico City and writers Sonia Pérez D. in Guatemala City and Elliot Spagat in San Diego contributed to this report.
Food for thought: Free meals for all New Mexico students - By Susan Montoya Bryan, Associated Press
Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham on Monday signed legislation to provide free school meals to all students regardless of family income, as New Mexico and several other states look to fill the gap left by lapsed federal pandemic-era benefit programs and address the strain to family budgets caused by food prices.
The bill cleared the Legislature during the recent 60-day session, with lawmakers setting aside more than $22 million in the state budget to help pay for the program. Additional money will be used to improve school kitchens so healthier meals can be prepared.
"When we feed our children, we're feeding our future – these investments today will yield benefits tomorrow through generations of healthier New Mexicans," the Democratic governor said in a statement issued after she celebrated with dozens of elementary school students.
California and Maine have made universal meals permanent, legislation to do so is advancing in Vermont, and Nevada pitched in $75 million to extend free school meals for this school year. In Colorado, voters approved a ballot measure last fall giving school districts the opportunity to offer free lunches.
Nationally, debts for unpaid school meals have been rising, indicating the need to continue providing free meals to ensure students are able to concentrate in the classroom. A recent report issued by the Food Research & Action Center showed participation in school breakfast and lunch programs was higher during the last school year than that of pre-pandemic levels.
About 67% — or 309,000 New Mexico students — are eligible to receive free and reduced-price lunches through the National School Lunch Program, according to the New Mexico Public Education Department.
Signing of the legislation could impact nearly 70,000 students who normally would have had to pay for school meals, with department officials expecting a 5% to 10% increase in participation in districts that operate national school lunch programs.
Lujan Grisham included the proposal in her State of the State address, saying that wherever kids are, there ought to be a kitchen working to keep them healthy, strong and ready to learn.
Still, some say more money will be needed to bankroll the effort over time. This year, New Mexico was awash in new revenue due in part to a financial windfall from oil production.
Legislative analysts have estimated that providing meals at no costs to students at participating schools could total between $27 million and $40 million in recurring funding from the state's general fund.
Advocacy groups see universal free school meals as the next step in New Mexico's march toward combating historically high food insecurity rates in a state that has long struggled with generational poverty. Other recent efforts include legislation in 2020 that eliminated student co-pays for reduced-price school meals and a 2017 measure that made New Mexico the first state in the U.S. to ensure children can't be humiliated by school meal debts.
The new law aims to boost the amount of food that comes from local growers through farm-to-table grants. Currently, about 168 farmers, ranchers and food businesses sell locally produced products to schools in 19 of the state's 33 counties.
Supporters also hope the new law will lead to less food waste by requiring kindergarten through sixth grade students to have more time to sit down and eat, and by collecting unused food for use by food pantries, students and other charitable organizations.
Budget guru to New Mexico Legislature retires after 25 years – Associated Press
The director of the budget and accountability office for the New Mexico Legislature is retiring from the agency he led for 25 years through a historic recession, a collapse in the oil economy, the COVID-19 pandemic and a new and unprecedented financial windfall.
Director David Abbey will leave the agency known as the Legislative Finance Committee this summer. He guided the office through the tenure of four governors, earning recognition for ensuring state government solvent in the aftermath of the 2007-2009 Great Recession, a 2014 collapse in oil prices as well as the pandemic.
New Mexico is one of about five states where the Legislature prepares its own budget plan, independent of the executive branch.
Abbey said he was especially proud of his work on funding for full-day kindergarten, extended learning at public schools and the state's home visiting program that helps parents of infant children.
The state's financial challenges extend to bountiful eras, he said, such as this year when lawmakers deployed a multibillion-dollar general fund surplus to critical programs and thousands of new construction projects.
"How do you not just throw money at problems? ... How do you make sure it gets spent effectively, how do you get good outcomes?" Abbey said.
With a staff of about 40 economists, program analysts and support staff, the Legislature's budget and accountability office not only develops annual spending recommendations but also conducts performance evaluations of executive state agencies and crucial state programs.
The state's current financial windfall is linked closely to the oil sector in the No. 2 state for petroleum production behind Texas.
"We're a very poor state, but we're rich in finances right now," Abbey said. We've seen it come and go."
Lawmakers who oversee the Legislative Finance Committee next meet in May to begin the process of appointing a successor.
Judge rules district attorney can't be co-counsel in Baldwin case - By Morgan Lee, Associated Press
A New Mexico judge said Santa Fe's district attorney shouldn't serve as co-counsel in the manslaughter case against actor Alec Baldwin and a weapons supervisor in the fatal shooting of a cinematographer during a 2021 movie rehearsal. Judge Mary Marlowe Sommer on Monday said the district attorney should either lead the case on her own or turn it over entirely to another prosecutor.
Baldwin and movie armorer Hannah Gutierrez-Reed have pleaded not guilty to charges of involuntary manslaughter in the shooting death of cinematographer Halyna Hutchins. The charges carry a maximum penalty of 18 months in prison and fines.
Hutchins died shortly after being wounded Oct. 21, 2021, during rehearsals at a ranch on the outskirts of Santa Fe. Baldwin was pointing a pistol at Hutchins when the gun went off, killing her and wounding the director, Joel Souza, on the set of the Western movie "Rust."
District Attorney Mary Carmack-Altwies is regrouping after the resignation of special prosecutor Andrea Reeb in the wake of missteps in the filing of initial charges against Baldwin and objections that Reeb's role as a state legislator created conflicting responsibilities.
Carmack-Altwies has been preparing to appoint a new special prosecutor and also guide the complex case as co-counsel. But a defense attorney for Gutierrez-Reed objected to the arrangement, arguing it would be illegal under New Mexico law and fundamentally unfair to a 25-year-old defendant with limited financial resources.
Marlowe Sommer, the judge, said Monday during a court hearing by videoconference that the district attorney had misread key provisions of state law in assembling a team to prosecute the case.
"Basically, what I'm ruling, Ms. Carmack-Altwies, is that you are going to use (the law) in the way I've interpreted it, which means that you may not co-counsel, or you stay the course and not use a special prosecutor and prosecute it on your own," Marlowe Sommer said.
Baldwin's attorneys did not intervene in Monday's arguments. A weekslong preliminary hearing in May will decide whether evidence against Baldwin and Gutierrez-Reed is sufficient to proceed to trial.
Carmack-Altwies has several days to respond to the judge's ruling.
The district attorney said her agency is contending with a shortage of staff attorneys and that a new special prosecutor will need her help in getting up to speed on the case quickly. She also said her continued involvement as co-counsel would provide an extra measure of accountability as an elected prosecutor to political constituents.
Defense Attorney Jason Bowles said the district attorney was unfairly exceeding her authority.
"We are representing Hannah Gutierrez-Reed — she is a 25-year-old female who does not have all of those resources and does not have a war chest," Bowles said. "And the state is essentially saying we get to put all this money together, a special taxpayer appropriation, to go after not only Mr. Baldwin, but also Hannah Gutierrez-Reed. That's not what the statute was designed to do."