Bernalillo County prosecutor wants tougher laws for young people. Will New Mexico lawmakers agree? - Austin Fisher, Source New Mexico
Bernalillo County District Attorney Sam Bregman — one of Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham’s top advisors on criminal justice issues — wants New Mexico to focus much of its deterrence efforts on young people.
His plans, if approved, would lead to harsher punishment for children and young adults.
As the lead prosecutor for New Mexico’s population center of Albuquerque, Bregman has outsized influence on the statewide crime agenda. But it’s not clear that fellow Democrats in the Legislature will sign off during the 2025 session on everything he proposed.
“Too many people, too many victims, are killed by juveniles in our community,” Bregman said last week to the House and Senate’s Courts Corrections and Justice Committee. “We need all the treatment we can get for these young people and their families, but at the same time, there has to be a little bit of an ounce of consequence.“
Acts committed by New Mexico children that would be designated as a crime under the law, called “delinquent referrals,” increased slightly between 2021 and 2023 but are down since 2019, according to data published by the Children Youth and Families Department’s Juvenile Justice Services division.
A BROAD LOOK AT CRIME
In the upcoming session, lawmakers will consider a broader crime package that would create a new trust fund to pay for more drug treatment programs, and revisit previous attempts to rewrite the state’s criminal competency laws, Senate President Pro Tem Mimi Stewart (D-Albuquerque) told the Albuquerque Journal.
The crime package is supported by legislative leaders in the Senate as well as the House of Representatives, said Sen. Joseph Cervantes (D-Las Cruces).
Bregman said he supports the idea of getting more money into behavioral health treatment but urged lawmakers to go further.
Bregman is proposing an overhaul of New Mexico’s Delinquency Act, which governs how the state can hold children accountable for behavior that would be considered criminal if they were over 18. He gave lawmakers a document outlining 35 changes he wants.
Taken together, his proposals would make it significantly easier to hold children in juvenile detention centers and to prosecute them as adults.
Bregman said his top priority is to expand the list of conduct for which the state can charge a young person as an adult. The law allows the state to prosecute a child as an adult only if they’re accused of first-degree murder.
His second priority is to allow the state to incarcerate a child who is convicted of some violent crimes until they are 25 years old. The law requires they be let go on their 21st birthday.
Beyond proposals focused on youth, Bregman also wants to increase the penalty for unlawful possession of a gun from a misdemeanor to a felony. He also wants to make it illegal under New Mexico law to convert a semi-automatic firearm into an automatic one using a device usually called a “switch” – something already illegal under federal law.
WHAT DO LAWMAKERS THINK?
Rep. Christine Chandler (D-Los Alamos) told Source New Mexico she can get behind Bregman’s gun violence proposals, but that she needs more time to digest the sprawling pitch on crime committed by young people.
Cervantes questioned what it would accomplish to prohibit switches under state law and suggested a better solution would be to go after the businesses making the devices.
He and Chandler have tried to open up gun manufacturers to liability claims in civil court, and Cervantes said he will probably introduce something similar next year.
“We’re trying to find a way to hold manufacturers of unlawful weapons accountable, and do so civilly,” Cervantes said.
Xiuy Soto, a youth organizer with La Plazita Institute, which advocates for reducing youth incarceration in the South Valley in Bernalillo County, said lawmakers should take a more holistic approach to preventing crime committed by young people in the first place.
If more money was put into employing youth, he said, they wouldn’t get caught up in criminal activity.
“We have this backwards system where the youth has to commit an offense to receive resources and alternatives, while others are overlooked until they do something that makes you see them, and they really feel cared for,” Soto said. “That’s a failure of the state, not our youth.”
Hearing on petition to ban forever chemicals in fracking ends - Hannah Grover, New Mexico Political Report
The Oil Conservation Commission concluded its hearing Friday on a petition to ban the use of PFAS in oil and gas extraction.
The final day of the hearing provided the New Mexico Oil and Gas Association the chance to argue their position, including their opposition, to the proposed regulations that the conservation advocacy group WildEarth Guardians brought to the OCC.
WildEarth Guardians has also pushed to require the industry to disclose exactly what chemicals are being used in downhole operations such as hydraulic fracturing.
Stephen Richardson, an environmental engineer with GSI Environmental Inc., said that when PFAS have been used in hydraulic fracturing, it has been done to reduce the friction. Richardson was one of NMOGA’s witnesses.
WHAT IS PFAS?
PFAS, sometimes called forever chemicals, are a group of thousands of substances, many of which are associated with various health impacts including cancers, thyroid disease, low-birth weight and liver toxicity.
Because of these health impacts, advocates say PFAS compounds should not be injected into the Earth’s subsurface where they could possibly come into contact with freshwater aquifers and that the PFAS used in hydraulic fracturing could enter the environment and harm nearby communities if there are produced water spills. Produced water is a byproduct of oil and gas production and generally contains some of the chemicals used in hydraulic fracturing.
Advocates are further pushing for legislation that would prohibit the nonessential use of PFAS chemicals. They have also petitioned Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham to ban the use of PFAS in oil and gas extraction.
NMOGA witness Janet Anderson, a board-certified toxicologist who has studied PFAS, said she supports some type of ban on PFAS chemicals in hydraulic fracturing and that she does think the industry should be required to disclose to the New Mexico Oil Conservation Division the chemicals that are being used in hydraulic fracturing. This coincides with NMOGA’s arguments.
According to the EPA, a common characteristic of PFAS is that “many break down very slowly and can build up in people, animals, and the environment over time.”
The EPA says that current scientific research indicates that people exposed to certain PFAS chemicals may develop adverse health outcomes. However, the agency states, that there is still ongoing research “to determine how different levels of exposure to different PFAS can lead to a variety of health effects.”
While there are thousands of types of PFAS and those chemicals have varying effects and toxicity levels, most studies have focused on a limited number of the substances and primarily focused on those that are better known compounds.
SHOULD THE BAN ONLY INCLUDE INTENTIONALLY ADDED PFAS?
NMOGA has proposed a ban on intentionally added PFAS in downhole operations such as hydraulic fracturing. The key part of that is “intentionally added”. That language does not appear in either the Oil Conservation Division or the WildEarth Guardians proposals.
Richardson said that water is one of the main components of frack fluids and that the source water could be high in PFAS.
TOXICOLOGIST POINTS TO PFAS USE IN PHARMACEUTICALS
Anderson focused on emphasizing that not all PFAS chemicals are the same and she pointed to the limited research into the impacts of certain PFAS compounds.
She did so by arguing that the PFAS definition proposed by WildEarth Guardians would include chemicals that she said are not highly toxic or bioaccumulative and may even play vital roles in society. For example, she said that the WildEarth Guardians’ proposed definition would include Paxlovid, a drug that is used to reduce the severity of COVID-19 in vulnerable populations.
This caught the commission’s attention and one commissioner asked her to provide more information.
Anderson said there are more than 300 drugs on the market that contain compounds that could be considered PFAS under some definitions.
“The reality is most people don’t think about pharmaceuticals when they think about PFAS,” she said.
WITNESS SAYS NOT ALL PFAS CHEMICALS HAVE THE SAME IMPACTS
She further argued that not all PFAS chemicals behave the same way and that one of the chemicals that has been used in hydraulic fracturing—PTFE—is not going to bind to the same receptors that other PFAS chemicals such as PFOA and PFOS do. PFOA and PFOS are the two most widely used and studied PFAS chemicals. The general public probably knows PTFE by its brand name Teflon and Anderson said there are still a lot of things that remain unknown about it. Later, she said that PTFE was fed to rats in one study and no adverse effects were noticed.
“The size of the molecule dictates how it might move through our bodies,” she said.
She said the PFAS molecules have to be not too big and not too small to have high toxicity levels.
At the same time, she acknowledged that everything can be toxic at some level. At one point in the hearing, she gave water toxicity as an example.
In the past, Anderson’s statements regarding PFAS have faced scrutiny. In 2018, a team of scientists warned the Michigan Department of Environmental Quality that Anderson had provided misleading statements about PFAS that they claimed downplayed the health risks associated with the chemicals.
HOW MUCH SHOULD PEOPLE KNOW ABOUT THE CHEMICALS USED IN OIL AND GAS?
WildEarth Guardians hopes to increase the transparency about what chemicals are being used in hydraulic fracturing and other extraction processes. The advocacy group wants to have this information disclosed to nearby residents and other stakeholders who could potentially be exposed to the PFAS chemicals through produced water spills or leaks into underground freshwater aquifers.
But Anderson says that could lead to chemophobia, or psychological distress caused by a non-fact based perception of risk. She said the information about risks needs to be given with context. Anderson said giving the public a list of chemicals without context or information about those chemicals can cause unnecessary fear.
“People need to have the right information in the right context,” she said.
Instead, Anderson said that the Oil Conservation Division should be given that information rather than having it distributed to members of the public that may not have the expertise to interpret it.
However, throughout the hearing process, many members of the public urged the commission to adopt the proposed regulations and to increase transparency about what is being used in extraction.
Kayley Shoup is a Permian Basin resident who has been a critic of the oil and gas industry. She is a community organizer with Citizens Caring for the Future.
“Water is precious here and, instead of our groundwater being protected, it is being put at risk constantly,” she said. “Banning PFAS in oil and gas is one way we can buffer my community from the climate impact and environmental impacts we are sure to see in the next four years and beyond.”
During public comments at the end of the hearing, she urged the OCC to adopt the proposed rule, including increasing chemical disclosures.
She said the regulations the OCC is considering can save lives.
Krystal Curley with Indigenous Lifeways also expressed support for the proposed regulation. Curley is Diné and much of the Navajo Nation is within the San Juan Basin, which is one of the two main oil and gas producing regions in the state.
“In a nine year period from 2013 to 2022, over 240 million pounds of trade secret chemicals were injected into wells by the oil and gas industry,” she said. “The irreversible implications of these monstrous acts will forever harm the unborn and future generations.”
City Council to discuss legislative priorities - Elizabeth McCall, City Desk ABQ
With the state’s legislative session set to start in about two months, the Albuquerque City Council is preparing its priorities for state lawmakers and is expected to discuss what will make the cut during Monday’s meeting.
Councilors discussed the resolution for the council’s legislative agenda during the Nov. 4 meeting but deferred it for further review.
Among the council’s list of around 20 proposed legislative priorities focusing on public safety, behavioral health and homelessness, are requests for stricter penalties for certain criminal offenses, rent stabilization programs and low-income utility rates assistance. One priority calls for behavioral health and addiction services to be an “alternative to jail for some non-violent offenders.”
Councilor Brook Bassan, a cosponsor of the resolution, said she hopes councilors can work together Monday night to simplify the lengthy list.
“The legislators have a lot to do, and so for us to sit there and tell them, ‘Go ahead and read this endless list of dreams,’ seems to me a little tedious, so I think that we’re trying to change that up a little bit,” Bassan said. “I think we also agree that we don’t want to get in the way of other councilors if they would like all of that on there.”
The proposed council resolution also includes Mayor Tim Keller’s administration’s legislative agenda with an extensive list of crime and homelessness initiatives. Some of the policy priorities include:
· Establish medical check protocols between the University of New Mexico Hospital and the Metropolitan Detention Center
· Require parole/probation officers to notify police and victims when offenders are released
· Implement “Duke City Stats” to other jurisdictions in crime strategy and tracking
· Establish vacant and dilapidated building policies
Staci Drangmeister, a spokesperson for Keller’s office, said the mayor and administration engaged with residents to hear their concerns and hopes for the city — notably during a series of meetings the mayor’s office hosts called Constructive Conversations.
“It’s not surprising the things that we hear the most are folks are concerned about crime and homelessness and housing,” Drangmeister said. “So our priorities reflect what we hear from the community generally in those bucket areas.”
According to Drangmeister, the crime initiatives are based on what the administration sees as the challenges law enforcement officers and criminal justice system employees experience daily and how the city can improve collaboration by sharing crime statistics across the state.
OTHER AGENDA ITEMS
Two proposals to require more accountability from Keller’s administration that did not make it on the agenda for the council’s last meeting are also expected to be considered during Monday’s meeting.
Read more about the bills here.
HOW TO PARTICIPATE:
WHEN: 5 p.m. Nov. 18
WHERE: Vincent E. Griego Chambers in the Albuquerque Government Center, 1 Civic Plaza NW
VIRTUAL: GOV-TV or on the city’s YouTube channel
New Mexico housing agency to again ask for $500 million from Legislature to address housing crisis — Patrick Lohmann, Source New Mexico
Members of the state Legislature will again ask for half a billion dollars for New Mexico’s housing agency this upcoming legislative session, re-upping a big request that the agency says is vital to stem the housing affordability crisis here.
If the last session is any indication, it’s unlikely the Legislature will fund the request at that amount when lawmakers meet in January.
An interim committee overseeing Housing New Mexico, which until recently was known as the New Mexico Mortgage Finance Authority, unanimously endorsed proposed legislation at its meeting Thursday.
The state lacks at least 32,000 affordable homes statewide, and about 20,000 people experience homelessness in the state over the course of a year, according to recent estimates.
The $500 million would go to the agency’s Housing Affordability Trust Fund, which pays for a variety of programs, including down payment assistance for first-time homebuyers, plus housing development and rehabilitation.
The request will come after the Legislature made its biggest one-time investment in housing in state history earlier this year. Lawmakers approved about $200 million, including $125 million in loans for workforce housing development and affordable housing infrastructure, $50 million for the trust fund, $20 million for anti-homelessness initiatives and a couple other small programs.
Sen. Nancy Rodriguez (D-Santa Fe), a longtime housing advocate who is retiring at the end of this year after 28 years in the Senate, made the first legislative request for $500 million for Housing New Mexico during the session earlier this year.
She’s introduced bills to bolster the trust fund since as far back as at least 2007, with limited success. The agency got about $21 million combined for the fund between 2005 and 2021.
While Rodriguez acknowledged Thursday that “we don’t always get” the full amount, she requests, she touted the fund as necessary for a range of housing services, and she said it has a return on investment of 17-to-1. That’s because it leverages federal and private funding and generates revenue.
Last year, lawmakers ultimately approved $50 million for the agency, which is on top of about $38 million the agency has received annually from severance tax bonds since last year.
Lawmakers arrived at $50 million as they built a record budget last year. There were dueling requests from Rodriguez, the governor’s office and the Legislative Finance Committee, which recommended $50 million. The governor’s office also sought funding and authority for its own housing agency, which lawmakers ultimately denied.
In the last 16 months, Housing New Mexico has received a little more than $122 million from the Legislature, according to a presentation from director Isidoro “Izzy” Hernandez. Of that money, it has awarded 73% and spent 21% of it. That includes about $15 million in down payment assistance.
If the Legislature funds the full request, which Rodriguez acknowledged “we don’t always get,” Hernandez said the agency would be able to help 10,500 more people on top of the 20,000 the agency already serves.
One difference with the half-billion-dollar ask this time around is that the 10% of it would be set aside for local governments. That dedicated funding could serve as an incentive for local governments to change their local zoning ordinances to increase affordable housing density and development, Hernandez said.
New Mexico’s congressional delegation asks feds to wrap up Rio Grande lawsuit - Austin Fisher, Source New Mexico
All five members of New Mexico’s congressional delegation are urging the federal government to “quickly resolve” a decade-old lawsuit from Texas over water rights from the Rio Grande.
“In times of worsening drought and precipitation out of line with historical patterns, it is imperative that our communities, municipalities, farmers, ranchers, and businesses have as much clarity about their future water supplies as possible,” they wrote in a letter dated Thursday. They asked for the case to get across the finish line before the end of the year.
U.S. Sens. Martin Heinrich and Ben Ray Luján and Reps. Melanie Stansbury, Gabe Vasquez and Teresa Leger Fernández, all Democrats, addressed the one-page letter to Interior Secretary Deb Haaland and Attorney General Merrick Garland.
Texas sued New Mexico in 2013, accusing farmers in the southern part of the state of pulling groundwater meant for Texas under the 1938 Rio Grande Compact between those two states plus Colorado, where the river starts in the Rocky Mountains. Colorado agreed to ensure enough water would reach New Mexico, which in turn agreed to pass along enough to Texas.
The states in 2022 struck a proposed settlement agreement but the federal government opposed it. The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in June the case could not be settled without the federal government’s go-ahead. A special master overseeing the case has ordered them to resolve the dispute through mediation by Dec. 16.
As of Nov. 7, most of New Mexico was experiencing drought or abnormally dry conditions, and nearly every part of the state had experienced a period of drought in the previous year, the lawmakers wrote.
About 13 million people in the U.S. and Mexico rely on the river and its tributaries for drinking water, while an estimated 1.8 million acres of crops and pastures are irrigated by it, they wrote.
Delaying the lawsuit’s end any further “imperils the ability of water users to prepare for more common and more extreme droughts in the Rio Grande Basin,” New Mexico’s delegation wrote.