2 New Mexico Republican lawmakers seek to impeach Democratic governor over gun restrictions - By Morgan Lee, Associated Press
Two Republican legislators filed a resolution Wednesday aimed at initiating impeachment proceedings against Democratic Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham over her emergency public health orders suspending the right to carry firearms in some public places in greater Albuquerque, such as parks and playgrounds.
The resolution from Reps. Stefani Lord of Sandia Park and John Block of Alamogordo accuses the governor of violating her oath of office to uphold the state and federal constitutions.
"The point is that she has too much power," said Lord, founder of the advocacy group Pro-Gun Women. "We're just trying to say to her, 'You have too much power, you're acting like a dictator. ... And we're going to impeach you.'"
Block accused the governor of "violating the Constitution to make a political statement," noting that Lujan Grisham said she expected legal challenges from the outset.
Lujan Grisham spokesperson Maddy Hayden said in an email that the two sponsors of the resolution are more interested in political stunts than crafting meaningful legislation, citing their bills to criminalize necrophilia and offer sex offenders an early release from prison if they agree to chemical castration procedures.
"There's not much to say in direct response to this inane effort" at impeachment, Hayden said.
It's unclear whether the resolution, which outlines articles of impeachment, will advance to public committee deliberations in the state House, where Democrats outnumber Republicans 45 to 25.
Lujan Grisham, a second-term Democrat, invoked the emergency orders last year in response to a spate of gun violence including the fatal shooting of an 11-year-old boy outside a minor league baseball stadium.
Gun rights advocates have filed legal challenges to the orders and are urging the New Mexico Supreme Court to block them. The court recently heard oral arguments in the lawsuit brought by Republican state legislators, the National Rifle Association and several residents of the Albuquerque area, who include retired law enforcement officers, former federal agents, licensed firearms instructors and a gun shop owner.
In the federal court system, a judge has allowed enforcement of the gun provision to continue while legal challenges run their course.
New Mexico lawmakers convened Tuesday for a 30-day session and could take up a broad slate of firearms proposals from the governor that aim to reduce gun violence, including a permanent statewide ban on firearms in public parks and playgrounds.
New Mexico Motor Vehicle Division wants to issue electronic driver's licenses and ID cards — Associated Press
The New Mexico Motor Vehicle Division wants to develop and issue electronic driver's licenses and identification cards.
A bill sponsored by Sen. Roberto "Bobby" J. Gonzales of Ranchos de Taos would authorize the division to offer electronic credentials to customers at no additional cost to their physical licenses and identification cards.
If the bill is approved by lawmakers, the division would develop the interfaces needed for the licenses to be used with digital wallets in a manner that ensures the security of customers' data.
When opened on a smart phone or similar device, the electronic license or identification card would display a simplified version of the printed credential with more detailed data encrypted in the file.
Electronic credentials can be updated in real time, such as when the division receives an address update from a driver or when a license is suspended or revoked.
"Technology is always changing and this bill will ensure that New Mexico can be at the forefront of the movement toward electronic licenses," Gonzales said Thursday.
Eight states, including Arizona and Colorado, currently offer mobile licenses to their residents, and 10 other states are in various stages of development.
Court documents underscore Meta's 'historical reluctance' to protect children on Instagram - By Barbara Ortutay, AP Technology Writer
Newly unredacted documents from New Mexico's lawsuit against Meta underscore the company's "historical reluctance" to keep children safe on its platforms, the complaint says.
New Mexico's Attorney General Raúl Torrez sued Facebook and Instagram owner Meta in December, saying the company failed to protect young users from exposure to child sexual abuse material and allowed adults to solicit explicit imagery from them.
In the passages freshly unredacted from the lawsuit Wednesday, internal employee messages and presentations from 2020 and 2021 show Meta was aware of issues such as adult strangers being able to contact children on Instagram, the sexualization of minors on that platform, and the dangers of its "people you may know" feature that recommends connections between adults and children. But Meta dragged its feet when it came to addressing the issues, the passages show.
Instagram, for instance, began restricting adults' ability to message minors in 2021. One internal document referenced in the lawsuit shows Meta "scrambling in 2020 to address an Apple executive whose 12-year-old was solicited on the platform, noting 'this is the kind of thing that pisses Apple off to the extent of threating to remove us from the App Store.'" According to the complaint, Meta "knew that adults soliciting minors was a problem on the platform, and was willing to treat it as an urgent problem when it had to."
In a July 2020 document titled "Child Safety — State of Play (7/20)," Meta listed "immediate product vulnerabilities" that could harm children, including the difficulty reporting disappearing videos and confirmed that safeguards available on Facebook were not always present on Instagram. At the time, Meta's reasoning was that it did not want to block parents and older relatives on Facebook from reaching out to their younger relatives, according to the complaint. The report's author called the reasoning "less than compelling" and said Meta sacrificed children's safety for a "big growth bet." In March 2021, though, Instagram announced it was restricting people over 19 from messaging minors.
In a July 2020 internal chat, meanwhile, one employee asked, "What specifically are we doing for child grooming (something I just heard about that is happening a lot on TikTok)?" The response from another employee was, "Somewhere between zero and negligible. Child safety is an explicit non-goal this half" (likely meaning half-year), according to the lawsuit.
In a statement, Meta said it wants teens to have safe, age-appropriate experiences online and has spent "a decade working on these issues and hiring people who have dedicated their careers to keeping young people safe and supported online. The complaint mischaracterizes our work using selective quotes and cherry-picked documents."
Instagram also failed to address the issue of inappropriate comments under posts by minors, the complaint says. That's something former Meta engineering director Arturo Béjar recently testified about. Béjar, known for his expertise on curbing online harassment, recounted his own daughter's troubling experiences with Instagram.
"I appear before you today as a dad with firsthand experience of a child who received unwanted sexual advances on Instagram," he told a panel of U.S. senators in November. "She and her friends began having awful experiences, including repeated unwanted sexual advances, harassment."
A March 2021 child safety presentation noted that Meta is "underinvested in minor sexualization on (Instagram), notable on sexualized comments on content posted by minors. Not only is this a terrible experience for creators and bystanders, it's also a vector for bad actors to identify and connect with one another." The documents underscore the social media giant's "historical reluctance to institute appropriate safeguards on Instagram," the lawsuit says, even when those safeguards were available on Facebook.
Meta said it uses sophisticated technology, hires child safety experts, reports content to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, and shares information and tools with other companies and law enforcement, including state attorneys general, to help root out predators.
Meta, which is based in Menlo Park, California, has been updating its safeguards and tools for younger users as lawmakers pressure it on child safety, though critics say it has not done enough. Last week, the company announced it will start hiding inappropriate content from teenagers' accounts on Instagram and Facebook, including posts about suicide, self-harm and eating disorders.
New Mexico's complaint follows the lawsuit filed in October by 33 states that claim Meta is harming young people and contributing to the youth mental health crisis by knowingly and deliberately designing features on Instagram and Facebook that addict children to its platforms.
"For years, Meta employees tried to sound the alarm about how decisions made by Meta executives subjected children to dangerous solicitations and sexual exploitation," Torrez said in a statement. "While the company continues to downplay the illegal and harmful activity children are exposed to on its platforms, Meta's internal data and presentations show the problem is severe and pervasive."
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, along with the CEOs of Snap, Discord, TikTok and X, formerly Twitter, are scheduled to testify before the U.S. Senate on child safety at the end of January.
FEMA leader overseeing NM fire compensation fund to step down, agency announces - By Patrick Lohmann, Source New MexicoAngela Gladwell, the director of the federal office overseeing nearly $4 billion in compensation for victims of a wildfire accidentally triggered by the federal Forest Service, is stepping down as part of what the agency describes as a restructuring of federal disaster response across the state.
The move comes amid sustained criticism of the performance of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, which Source New Mexico and ProPublicahave reported on for the past year. The office didn’t pay its first claim until April, and through midsummer it had paid less than 1% of its allocation. The pace has picked up since, but many residents were in limboas they awaited checks to rebuild. FEMA faces two lawsuits over itsdecision not to pay for intangible losses, even though the state Attorney General maintains it should. And it faces other lawsuits claiming it has missed payment deadlines.
Calls from advocates and local elected officials for Gladwell to be replaced have increased in recent weeks.
Gladwell is a longtime FEMA official who was tasked to create the Hermits Peak-Calf Canyon Claims Office in late 2022. The office oversees compensation to victims of the wildfires that were ignited accidentally in early 2022 by the United States Forest Service. The blaze destroyed at least 430 homes and cost billions of dollars in damage and suppression costs.
On Wednesday morning, claims office spokesperson Deborah Martinez said FEMA is launching a new effort to consolidate recovery programs in New Mexico into a single operation, including the claims office, and that Gladwell would “transition to a new role” within FEMA as part of that change.
Martinez did not immediately respond to requests for comment on what exactly that consolidation means or how long Gladwell’s departure has been in the works, except to say that the office “is in the beginning stages” of the change and that more information would be forthcoming. Gladwell and other claims office officials have never mentioned a plan to consolidate federal disaster recovery operations here in numerous public meetings since the office was created.
“Shortly after the passage of the Fire Assistance Act in 2022, Angela Gladwell was appointed to the director role and successfully built a compensation program from the ground, assembling a team of locally hired staff with knowledge of New Mexico and the communities affected by the wildfires,” Martinez said.
FEMA will soon hire a chief operating officer to lead “on-the-ground long-term” recovery efforts, Martinez said. She did not respond to a request for comment on how the office will select this person, including whether he or she will be from New Mexico or hired from within the claims office.
A local group, the Coalition for Fire Fund Fairness, along with attorneys for thousands of victims have called for Gladwell to be replaced by someone who they said would better understand New Mexico’s culture and laws, like a former judge. The group’s founder, Manny Crespín, Jr., called FEMA’s announcement “welcomed news” and asked that the new leader not be “another FEMA bureaucrat.”
The Hermits Peak Fire Assistance Act allows FEMA to appoint an independent administrator to oversee the claims office. Instead, the office hired Gladwell, a FEMA employee for more than 25 years in Washington, D.C. In November 2022, after the office announced Gladwell as director, she declined to comment on why the agency didn’t hire an independent overseer.
Martinez said claimants need not worry about the effect of the change or Gladwell’s departure on their claims. They will continue to be processed without interruption, she said.
As of Dec. 21, the latest figures available from FEMA, the agency had paid $276 million of the $3.95 billion fund. That amounts to about 7% of the total, more than a year after the office was established. Fire victims have grown increasingly frustrated as money slowly trickles out of the fund. Recently, the community of Las Vegas mourned a former police chief who died while trying to return to his home in Rociada, one of the hardest-hit areas by the wildfire.
The claims office, under Gladwell’s leadership, has also faced several lawsuits from law firms who accuse the agency of missing legally required deadlines for payment offers and pushing victims to abandon their attorneys.
Antonia Roybal-Mack, a local lawyer representing hundreds of clients, said she welcomes the change of leadership. She credited ongoing advocacy by lawyers and residents and reporting by Source and ProPublica in bringing about the change, but she’s watching closely to see who takes over the new office.
“I think it’s a step in the right direction,” she said. “People in northern New Mexico – we need to now ask them to put a New Mexican in that position.”
According to law firm Singleton Schreiber, dozens of fire victims have waited longer than 180 days to receive offers of payment from the date the claims office “acknowledged” their claims. The firms also accuse FEMA of illegally waiting to start the clock on payment processing until they formally “acknowledge” claims, rather than from the date a claim is submitted.
Source and ProPublica also recently published an investigation into her office’s decision to not pay claims for the emotional toll of the disaster for fire victims. The claims office maintains that the federal legislation creating the fund allows only payments for financial, business and property loss. That decision is being challenged in court, as well.
Martinez, in her statement Wednesday, said the office will also soon release a “policy and program guide” with details about the types of claims that are being paid and guidance on documentation needed. The agency has recently acknowledged that the paperwork burden is too high for some claimants. It’s common among multi-generational families with long roots in the rural areas burned in the fire not to have clear titles or deeds in the correct names, among other challenges of proving legal ownership.
“The release of the (guide) marks a milestone in implementing compensation authorized by the Fire Assistance Act,” Martinez said. “Additionally, to simplify and expedite the process, the Claims Office will release checklists for the most common types of loss along with the documents needed for each of those losses.”
Activated carbon manufacturer to open up shop in Bloomfield — Hannah Grover, New Mexico Political Report
The governor announced that a manufacturer of air and water purification tools will open a facility in Bloomfield.
Calgon Carbon boasts that it is the largest manufacturer of activated carbon in the world. It is based in Pennsylvania and has a parent company in Japan.
Calgon Carbon acquired two businesses—Benchmark Tank and Bloomfield Machine and Welding—in October and is keeping all 42 employees at those Bloomfield locations. It also plans to hire nine new employees this year and a total of 16 new employees over the upcoming years.
“This is an important project for Northwest New Mexico because it shows we can grow and diversify our economy and still invest in our existing workers,” Scott Bird, interim executive director at 4Corners Economic Development LLC, said in a press release. “We look forward to working with Calgon Carbon to meet their business needs so they can find success in the Four Corners Region of New Mexico.”
The company further plans to invest $94 million into the state over the next decade.
New Mexico will contribute $150,000 from the Local Economic Development (LEDA) job-creation fund to assist in the expansion and the company can further benefit from the Job Training Incentive Program. This program reimburses companies for a portion of the job training and also provides incentives for hiring high-wage workers.
According to a press release from the New Mexico Economic Development Department, the average salary at Calgon Carbon’s Bloomfield location will be between $60,000 and $90,000.
One of the products that the company produces is called Filtrasorb. Calgon Carbon says this Filtrasorb activated carbon can be used to treat PFAS contaminants in water. PFAS contamination has been documented in several parts of New Mexico including near Air Force bases and near Santa Fe.
That is one of the 700 distinct applications of activated carbon that Calgon Carbon’s technologies can be used in. That ranges from removing sulfur from flue gas at coal-fired electric power plants to purifying foods and pharmaceuticals, according to the company’s website.
Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham said the Bloomfield location will support customers across the western and southwestern United States and will bring jobs to rural communities that often gets overlooked.
The facility, which will be located near Mesa Alta Junior High School, will be the primary manufacturer of activated carbon vessels supporting customers in the Western and Southwestern United States, according to the press release.
Bloomfield is located east of Farmington in San Juan County and has struggled with economic diversification for more than a decade. The small city in the northwest part of New Mexico has traditionally relied on the oil and natural gas sector as an economic base.
“We are certainly excited to have Calgon Carbon in our community and look forward to their expansion and stand ready to assist them in any manner we can. Bloomfield has long been a hub for industry in San Juan County and this will encourage other manufacturers to look at our community,” Bloomfield City Manager George Duncan said in a press release.
During the last downturn in the oil and gas sector, the city found itself in tough economic times and had to make some difficult budget decisions, including laying off staff and canceling a contract with the City of Farmington that allowed Bloomfield residents to ride the Red Apple Transit buses from one city to the other.
Bloomfield is also considered a community impacted by the closure of the San Juan Generating Station.
“This investment will expand a skilled workforce and increase wages in a part of the state that has seen a lot of job displacement,” Acting EDD Cabinet Secretary Mark Roper said in a press release. “It also puts Bloomfield at the center of a future-driven technology that helps diversify New Mexico’s economy.”
The Calgon Carbon announcement was one of several businesses Lujan Grisham highlighted. She also spoke about Mesa Film Studios, which is building a production facility in Albuquerque, and Maxeon Solar Technologies, which announced in August that it will be building a solar cell plant in Albuquerque.
“The message is clear, and we are hearing it again and again from companies worldwide:
New Mexico is where businesses want to be,” she said.