Heinrich’s ‘Good Samaritan’ abandoned mine cleanup bill clears Congress — Nash Jones, KUNM News
New Mexico U.S. Sen. Martin Heinrich has been advocating to make it easier for organizations to clean up polluting, abandoned mines. Tuesday, a bill that makes that possible passed the U.S. House with bipartisan support. It now heads to President Biden for his signature.
Heinrich says “good samaritans” have been disincentivized from rolling up their sleeves at the mines because they could be held responsible for the site’s pollution, even from before their cleanup effort began, under federal regulations.
The bill, co-sponsored by Heinrich and Republican Sen. Jim Risch of Idaho, would waive that liability.
The act would establish a pilot program for 15 “low-risk” cleanup projects that could have a hand in improving water quality. Private “good samaritan” groups could partner with public agencies on the projects with oversight from the Environmental Protection Agency.
The act passed Senate unanimously earlier this year and boasts broad support among conservation, mining and outdoor recreation organizations, along with the National Congress of American Indians.
State announces almost $5M in funding opportunities to fight homelessness — Daniel Montaño, KUNM News
The state’s housing authority announced Tuesday almost $5 million in grant funding for organizations serving people experiencing homelessness.
The money is coming from a program aimed at identifying people without shelter or at risk of losing housing and providing any necessary services to regain stability quickly and permanently, according to the announcement
Applications are now open for $4.7 million in funding available to nonprofits, along with local and tribal government entities, with at least two years of proven experience providing services to the population.
The state’s Chief Housing Officer Donna Maestas-De Vries says she encourages as many eligible service providers as possible to apply because, QUOTE, “it’s imperative we work together to help address homelessness across the state.”
Applications will be accepted until September 30, 2029, or until there is less than $500,000 in funding left.
Housing New Mexico, also known as the Mortgage Finance Authority, was created in the mid-70s by the state Legislature to provide “quality affordable housing opportunities for all New Mexico residents.”
NM Higher Education Department asks for more money to improve state’s dismal adult literacy rate — Nash Jones, KUNM News
As state agencies begin making their cases to lawmakers for bigger slices of the state’s surplus, the New Mexico Higher Education Department released its budget request Tuesday. It seeks to put significantly more resources toward growing the number of adults in New Mexico who can read and write.
New Mexico has the lowest adult literacy rate in the nation, according to World Population Review. Nearly 30% of New Mexicans over the age of 15 have low literacy skills.
Higher Education Department spokesperson Tripp Stelnicki said in a statement that the department is asking lawmakers to help it change that by “dramatically increasing funding” for programs that target the problem.
The agency is seeking $3 million for adult education programs — a nearly 80% bump for the line item, according to the request. It’s also asking for an additional $2 million specifically for new adult literacy initiatives.
The agency’s more than $186 million total request would also maintain funding levels for the Opportunity Scholarship, which allows adults without a college degree to attend New Mexico’s public colleges and universities tuition-free.
Mediation starts in Rio Grande legal fight among New Mexico, Texas and Colorado — Danielle Prokop, Source New Mexico
A new chapter in the decade-long lawsuit in the U.S. Supreme Court over Rio Grande water is set to begin.
After a close, 5-4 ruling from the Supreme Court dashed a proposed deal to end the litigation, the federal government and states of Colorado, New Mexico and Texas have been ordered back to mediation, which begins Tuesday in Washington D.C.
In addition to the parties, there will be attorneys for groups including farming interests, the cities of Albuquerque and Las Cruces, water utilities and irrigation districts, joining the talks.
In 2013, Texas sued New Mexico, alleging that groundwater pumping in southern New Mexico diverted water out of the Rio Grande owed to Texas violating the 86-year old agreement called the Rio Grande Compact. Signed in 1938, the compact divided use of the Rio Grande between Colorado, New Mexico and Texas.
Only the Supreme Court has the power to rule on disputes between states.
A DISPUTE OVER BASELINES FOR GROUNDWATER
One of the core disagreements between the federal government and the three states is determining how much groundwater pumping needs to be cut along the Rio Grande in southern New Mexico. In the arid region, water is crucial for growing crops like chile and pecans, and both groundwater and water from the Rio Grande are used for irrigation.
In the rejected settlement agreement, the states requested a baseline adjusted to more groundwater pumping and drought conditions determined by an equation called the “D2 curve.”
The D2 curve was used as part of a 2008 settlement ending a fight between the irrigation districts and the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation over drought concerns.
Alternately, the federal government has previously asked for the states to adopt restrictions from when the compact was first signed.
The states will continue to argue for the D2 curve baseline, said James Grayson, the chief deputy for the New Mexico Department of Justice.
“In 1938, there was essentially no groundwater being used, and so the United States is essentially advocating to go back to that time and that way of using only surface water,” Grayson said.
The City of Las Cruces and the New Mexico Attorney General have urged federal officials in recent months to make a deal with the states before the start of Donald Trump’s presidency in January and compromise on its position to drastically limit groundwater pumping in southern New Mexico.
In a Nov. 14 letter, New Mexico Attorney General Raúl Torrez, a Democrat, appealed to U.S. Department of the Interior Secretary Deb Halaand to drop the objections.
“Time is running out,” Torrez wrote. “And I am pleading with you to resolve this issue for the benefit of all parties, but especially for the people of southern New Mexico, rather than leaving the matter to become a political bargaining chip for the next administration.”
In an October letter to U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland, the City of Las Cruces stated that cutting pumping to a 1938 level would reduce the city’s groundwater use by 93%.
This action “would cripple farmers, families and communities in southern New Mexico,” and would require the state’s second-largest city to find a new source of water, requiring a $1 billion investment and take about 15 years to put into place.
In 2023 testimony before lawmakers, state officials said New Mexico would need to cut groundwater use in southern New Mexico by at least 17,000 acre-feet to meet the deal set by the D2 curve baseline, by reducing pecan and chile fields. If the 1938 standard was required, cuts would need to be in the hundreds of thousands of acre-feet.
HOW WE GOT HERE
The contours of the dispute have changed since the case was first brought in 2013. Drought conditions in the early 2000s sparked a protracted series of water lawsuits in lower courts between the federal government, states, cities and counties and irrigation districts along the Rio Grande.
In 2019, the high court unanimously allowed the U.S. federal government to intervene as a party in the case, arguing that a series of federal dams, irrigation canals and ditches were threatened by New Mexico’s groundwater pumping. That federal infrastructure is used to deliver Rio Grande water to Mexico under a 1906 treaty and also meets agreements with two regional irrigation districts.
While the federal government initially sided with Texas in the lawsuit, a series of compromises eventually put the states in one camp and the federal government (and the regional irrigation districts) in another.
Colorado, New Mexico and Texas came to an eleventh-hour settlement in 2022, but the federal government objected and said that the deal couldn’t be made without their agreement.
In June, the U.S. Supreme Court sided with the federal government’s objections, rejecting the proposed deal.
Earlier this year, justices appointed a new special master, who oversees the progress of the case.
After an October hearing, Judge D. Brooks Smith ordered the parties into mediation, which starts Tuesday and will end Thursday, but could continue to be extended. If mediation talks break down entirely, the parties will resume going to trial.
Biden creates Native American boarding school national monument to mark era of forced assimilation - By Matthew Brown and Marc Levy, Associated Press
President Joe Biden designated a national monument at a former Native American boarding school in Pennsylvania on Monday to honor the resilience of Indigenous tribes whose children were forced to attend the school and hundreds of similar abusive institutions.
The creation of the Carlisle Federal Indian Boarding School National Monument — announced during a tribal leaders summit at the White House — is intended to confront what Biden referred to as a "dark chapter" in the nation's history.
"We're not about erasing history. We're about recognizing history — the good, the bad and the ugly," Biden said. "I don't want people forgetting 10, 20, 30, 50 years from now and pretend it didn't happen."
Thousands of Native children passed through the notorious Carlisle Indian Industrial School between 1879 and 1918, including Olympian Jim Thorpe. They came from dozens of tribes under forced assimilation policies that were meant to erase Native American traditions and "civilize" the children so they would better fit into white society.
It was the first school of its type and became a template for a network of government-backed Native American boarding schools that ultimately expanded to at least 37 states and territories.
"About 7,800 children from more than 140 tribes were sent to Carlisle — stolen from their families, their tribes and their homelands. It was wrong making the Carlisle Indian school a national model," Biden told the White House summit.
Thorpe's great-grandson, James Thorpe Kossakowski, called Biden's designation an important and "historic" step toward broadening Americans' understanding of the federal government's forced assimilation policy.
"It's very emotional for me to walk around, to look at the area where my great-grandfather had gone through school, where he had met my great-grandmother, where they were married, where he stayed in his dorm room, where he worked out and trained," Kossakowski, 54, of Elburn, Illinois, said in an interview.
The children were often taken against the will of their parents, and an estimated 187 Native American and Alaska Native children died at the institution in Carlisle, including from tuberculosis and other diseases.
There are ongoing efforts to return the children's remains, which were buried on the school's grounds, to their homelands.
"They represent 50 tribal nations from Alaska to New Mexico to New York and I think that symbolizes how horrific Carlisle was," said Beth Margaret Wright, a Native American Rights Fund lawyer. She has represented tribes trying to get the Army to return their children's remains and is a member of the Pueblo of Laguna, which has children still buried there.
Carlisle was a model for many other schools that came after it and a huge majority of tribal nations that exist today have stories of their children being sent to Carlisle, Wright said.
In September, the remains of three children who died at Carlisle were disinterred and returned to the Fort Belknap Indian Reservation in Montana.
At least 973 Native American children died at government-funded boarding schools that operated for more than 150 years, according to an Interior Department investigation.
During a dozen public listening sessions over the past several years hosted by the Interior Department, survivors of the schools recalled being beaten, forced to cut their hair and punished for using their native languages.
The forced assimilation policy officially ended with the enactment of the Indian Child Welfare Act in 1978. But the government never fully investigated the boarding school system until the Biden administration.
Biden in October apologized on behalf of the U.S. government for the schools and the policies that supported them.
Interior Secretary Deb Haaland, whose grandparents were taken to boarding schools against their families' will, said no single action would adequately address the harms caused by the schools. But she said the administration's efforts have made a difference and the new monument would allow the American people to learn more about the government's harmful policies.
"This trauma is not new to Indigenous people, but it is new for many people in our nation," Haaland said in a statement.
The schools, similar institutions and related assimilation programs were funded by a total of $23.3 billion in inflation-adjusted federal spending, officials determined. Religious and private institutions that ran many of the schools received federal money as partners in the assimilation campaign.
Monday's announcement marks the seventh national monument created by Biden, who has also altered or enlarged several others. In 2021, he restored the boundaries of two monuments, Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante, on land in southern Utah that's sacred to tribes after the monuments were shrunk under former President Donald Trump.
The 25-acre site (10 hectares) in central Pennsylvania will be managed by the National Park Service and the U.S. Army. The site is part of the campus of the U.S. Army War College.
For Wright, one of the most powerful places at the Carlisle school are the imprints of since-removed tracks for trains that delivered children there.
"There's no longer train tracks there, but you can see where they might have been and where their children would have arrived for the first time and seen a place so far away and seen a place so horrific," Wright said.
Native American tribes and conservation groups are pressing for more monument designations before Biden leaves office.
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Brown reported from Billings, Montana.
New Mexico's oil income investments now surpass personal income tax revenue - By Morgan Lee, Associated Press
Efforts by New Mexico to save and invest portions of a financial windfall from local oil production are paying off as state government income on investments surpasses personal income tax collections for the first time, according to a new forecast Monday.
General fund income from the state's two, multibillion-dollar permanent funds and interest on treasury accounts is expected to climb to $2.1 billion for the fiscal year between July 2024 and June 2025, surpassing $2 billion in revenue from personal income taxes.
The investment earnings are designed to ensure that critical programs — ranging from childcare subsidies to tuition-free college and trade school education — endure if oil income falters amid a possible transition to new sources of energy.
At the same time, legislators this year revised personal income tax brackets to lower taxes in the nation's No. 2 state for oil production behind Texas.
"We're not a poor state anymore," said Democratic state Sen. George Muñoz of Gallup. "We've got things that we can win on — free education, childcare ... low taxes for working families, for children. And that's all because we've done a lot of the work to set this up for the future."
The comments came at a legislative panel Monday where economists from four government agencies announced an income estimate for the coming year. The figures are the baseline for budget negotiations when the Democratic-led Legislature convenes in January.
State government income, which is closely linked to oil production in New Mexico, continues to grow, though at a slower pace, as legislators discuss new investments in social programs aimed at curbing crime and homelessness.
Economists estimate the state will bring in a record-setting $13.6 billion in general fund income for the fiscal year that runs from July 2025 to June 2026, a 2.6% increase over the current period.
This year's income bump leaves room for an additional $892 million in state spending in the coming fiscal year, a 7% increase, according to the Legislature's accountability and budgeting office. State income is forecast to exceed current bedrock annual spending obligations by $3.4 billion.
New Mexico legislators are pushing to open new savings accounts.
One proposal would set aside as much as $1 billion in a trust to underwrite spending on mental health and addiction treatment in response to public frustration with crime and homelessness. Legislators also are likely to revisit a stalled proposal to create a trust for Native American education that could expand Indigenous language instruction.
New Mexicans can now use an ID on their phones in some cases - By Nash Jones, KUNM News
Consumers are increasingly opening digital wallets rather than getting out a billfold or plastic at the register. Now, New Mexicans can add their drivers’ license or state ID to the list of physical cards they can add to the wallet on their phones.
In its announcement, the state Motor Vehicle Division clarified that the new “mobile driver’s license” is not a replacement for the physical one. Drivers must still carry their physical licenses, and the mobile version can’t be used everywhere people are asked to show ID, either. At the moment, the list is actually pretty short. It includes a handful of U.S. airports, businesses and venues, according to the MVD.
The Albuquerque International Sunport will soon be added to the list, though, “in the coming weeks.” As will the Lea County Regional Airport.
Businesses that check IDs can opt-in to accepting mobile driver’s licenses by downloading an app that verifies them. On iOS, that includes the “NM Verifier” app, which the MVD is partnering with the state’s Regulation and Licensing Department to offer for free.
The state IDs can be added to both Apple Wallet and Google Wallet.
New Mexico GOP elects new leadership - Santa Fe New Mexican, KUNM News
The New Mexico Republican Party has new leadership following an internal election over the weekend.
The Santa Fe New Mexican reports Otero County Commissioner Amy Barela swept the five-way race to become the party’s next chair, receiving more votes than the other four candidates combined.
She replaces former Congressman and state Representative Steve Pearce, who has held the post since 2018 after an unsuccessful run for governor.
Barela told the New Mexican she plans to build on Pearce’s momentum. While Republicans are far outnumbered in both chambers of the New Mexico Legislature, the party did pick up one seat in the House and one in the Senate in last month’s election.
Barela was previously the state GOP’s 1st vice chair. She’ll be replaced in that role by Roswell City Attorney Hessel Yntema.
St. John's to offer free tuition to in-state students with low incomes - Santa Fe New Mexican, KUNM News
The only private liberal arts college in New Mexico is taking a step to make its campus more affordable for residents.
The Santa Fe New Mexican reports St. John’s College is offering free tuition to local students from families that make less than $75,000 a year.
The offer does not help with room and board, but can be stacked with other need-based scholarships and grants that do cover those costs.
This opportunity is financed by $326 million the college raised through “Freeing Minds: A Campaign for St. John’s College,” according to Benjamin Baum, the vice president of enrollment, which launched in 2018.
It’s not the college’s first attempt at making its private education more accessible. In 2019, it decreased tuition from $55,000 to $35,000. The next year, it began matching students’ federal Pell Grants and capped tuition at $25,000 for New Mexico residents.
Baum says the college is working to reach New Mexico high school students to let them know that St. John’s is not only a local option with small class sizes, but an affordable one.
Military pauses Osprey flights again after more metal failures are found in near crash in November - By Tara Copp, Associated Press
The Pentagon is temporarily pausing flights again of its fleet of V-22 Ospreys after weakened metal components possibly played a role in another near crash, the latest setback for an embattled aircraft whose safety problems have grown.
The pause was recommended last week "out of an abundance of caution" by Vice Adm. Carl Chebi, the head of Naval Air Systems Command, which runs the Osprey program for the military, said command spokeswoman Marcia Hart.
The Marine Corps, Navy and Air Force are adhering to the recommended pause, each said in a statement to The Associated Press. The Marines said its pause began on Friday and would run at least through Monday. The other services are expected to maintain their pauses longer as they look at the cause of the metal failures.
An in-depth investigation into the Osprey by The AP published last month found that safety issues have increased in the past five years, parts are wearing out faster than expected and that the design of the aircraft itself is directly contributing to many of the accidents. The Osprey can fly both like a helicopter and an airplane.
Following that report, lawmakers sent a letter to Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin asking him to reground the Osprey fleet until solutions can be put in place to address safety and design issues identified by the AP.
The latest near crash, at Cannon Air Force Base in New Mexico on Nov. 20, had similarities to a crash off the coast of Japan in November of last year that killed eight Air Force Special Operations Command service members.
In the Japan crash, inclusions — or weakened spots — in the metal used for critical gears inside the Osprey's transmission led to the gearing falling apart inflight and a cascading catastrophic failure of the aircraft. At the time the crew did not realize the seriousness of the failure and did not immediately land.
Lessons from that fatal Japan crash may have saved lives in the latest emergency. While the investigation is not complete, the crew in the Cannon flight received similar warnings shortly after takeoff and lost an engine but was able to quickly put the Osprey back on the ground and survive.
An initial review of the part that broke apart at Cannon has found that similar metal weaknesses may have played a role, but in a different part than what failed in the Japan crash.
Based on NAVAIR's recommendations, Lt. Gen Michael Conley, AFSOC commander, directed a pause for all Osprey training flights, "which allows time and space for us to understand what happened," Lt. Col. Becky Heyse, command spokeswoman, said in a statement.
The metal in question is called X-53 VIMVAR. In the Japan crash investigators found that the metal gear that failed had multiple inclusions, or microscopic weak spots in the metal caused by foreign substances getting mixed in during the manufacturing process. Those weak spots can lead to fatigue cracking.
After the Japan crash, investigators reported that there have been seven previous cracking incidents in gears that were likely caused by the same metal weakness.
Since then, the military and Bell Flight, which builds the transmission system and assembles the Osprey at its factory in Amarillo, Texas, have pressed for ways to make that metal stronger.
Since the military started flying the aircraft three decades ago, 64 personnel have been killed and 93 injured in crashes. Japan's military briefly grounded its fleet again in October after an Osprey tilted violently during takeoff and struck the ground.