Legislation seeks to raise royalty rates in the high-production areas of the Permian Basin - By Hannah Grover, New Mexico Political Report
Oil and gas royalty rates could increase in premium parcels on state trust lands in the Permian Basin, if state legislation passes.
SB 23, which cleared its first committee on Thursday, would increase the rates oil and gas producers pay to extract oil from the top producing parts of the Permian Basin. This could bring in up to $75 million in revenue for the state’s land grant permanent fund, according to the fiscal impact report.
The legislation cleared the Senate Conservation Committee on a 5-3 vote
The higher royalty rates would only apply to new leases and would not impact existing leases. Because production doesn’t typically begin until a couple years after new leases are signed, the increase in revenue will not be seen until fiscal year 2028, at the earliest.
Under SB 23, the top royalty rates charged on new leases in the top-producing parts of the Permian Basin would be between 20% and 25%.
The legislation is sponsored by Sen. George Muñoz, D-Gallup, Sen. Liz Stefanics, D-Cerillos, and Rep. Matthew McQueen, D-Galisteo. It is also backed by the State Land Office.
Proponents say the increase will bring New Mexico on par with Texas in terms of royalty rates.
Opponents say it will harm New Mexico’s oil and gas industry and could cause producers to move out of state. They say there are other fees New Mexico producers pay that are more burdensome than those in Texas.
“Raising the top royalty rate means more money for our school kids,” Land Commissioner Stephanie Garcia Richard said in a statement. “It’s pretty simple. Legislators have a rare opportunity in front of them to make a significant impact for public education in New Mexico, and they should take it.”
The bill has previously been introduced and Garcia Richard noted in her statement that last year it made it further than prior years.
Muñoz said last year’s legislation would have applied to parcels statewide. This year, SB 23 limits the higher royalty rate just to the most productive oil and gas parcels in New Mexico.
The State Land Office estimates the legislation will impact less than 1% of the prime leasing parcels in the Permian Basin.
Muñoz said the primary purpose of the State Land Office is to make money to support schools and other state institutions and that money from oil and gas leasing on state lands relieves tax burdens on working families in New Mexico.
“It’s money that the legislators and taxpayers don’t have to come up with to fund government services,” he said.
Muñoz said the proposed higher royalty rates better reflect “the true value of the resource being leased” as well as the current market values.
Royalty rates have not been updated since 1970, which Muñoz said was “well before the full economic potential of New Mexico’s oil and gas regions were fully understood.”
“We know that New Mexico has one of the best oil and gas plays in the world,” he said.
Resignation offer from Trump administration could undermine federal services in New Mexico, labor union leader says - Cathy Cook, Albuquerque Journal
Thursday is the deadline for federal employees to accept President Donald Trump’s so-called buyout offer, something open to potentially 20,000 workers in New Mexico.
The Trump administration estimates approximately 1% of the federal workforce has accepted the offer, which comes as part of an effort led by tech mogul Elon Musk and the Department of Government Efficiency to shrink the federal workforce by as much as 10%.
The deferred resignation offer is not necessarily a better deal for a federal employee than a severance package down the line, should the Trump administration follow through on threats of widespread layoffs.
If there is a reduction in workforce, the maximum amount of severance pay for federal employees is a full year’s salary, according to the Office of Personnel Management. A federal employee making $73,619 annually who has worked for the federal government for 18 years could receive an estimated $73,372 in severance pay after a layoff. That same employee would likely get closer to $42,944 if they took the deferred resignation offer.
The resignation offer could also impede already understaffed federal services, like Veterans Affairs and the U.S. Forest Service, according to a labor union president.
“We are dangerously low in wildland firefighters already. ... The VA has hovered around 40, 50, 60,000 vacancies at any one time,” said Randy Erwin, national president of the National Federation of Federal Employees, a labor union with significant membership in New Mexico, including civilian White Sands Missile Range employees and workers at the U.S. Forest Service headquarters in Albuquerque. “We just don’t have the expertise that we need. We don’t have the kinds of doctors that we need. Then the wait time for veterans becomes months and months long.”
New Mexico had at least 22,343 civilian federal employees as of March 2024, according to a Congressional Research Service Report. As of 2017, New Mexico had just over 1% of the nearly 1.9 million federal workers in the category targeted by the resignation offer, according to the U.S. Office of Personnel Management.
Federal employees with positions related to national security or immigration enforcement are not eligible for the offer, nor are postal or military employees.
Labor unions have urged members not to accept the deferred resignation because of questions about whether the Trump administration would actually pay employees and the vague information about the terms of the offer.
“There is not yet any evidence the administration can or will uphold its end of the bargain, that Congress will go along with this unilateral massive restructuring, or that appropriated funds can be used this way, among other issues that have been raised,” the American Federation of Government Employees, a labor union that represents 800,000 federal and D.C. government workers, said in an email message to members.
The federal budget — and therefore many agency budgets — is still operating on continuing resolutions instead of an annual budget. A continuing resolution temporarily continues funding at the same level as was previously approved by Congress in a past budget. In this case, Congress approved a continuing resolution in December, which will expire on March 14. Labor unions have warned members that the Trump Administration may not be able to guarantee payouts past that deadline.
A sample contract for the offer sent to Environmental Protection Agency employees appeared to acknowledge that funding is not guaranteed after the continuing resolution expires, NPR reported. An Office of Personnel Management guide says employees are entitled to back pay if the government shuts down during congressional budget negotiations.
The email Trump’s budget office sent to workers says that for employees who do not resign, the majority of federal employees will have to work in-person, workplace performance standards will be updated, and the majority of federal agencies will be downsized. There will be “enhanced standards of suitability and conduct ... Employees who engage in unlawful behavior or other misconduct will be prioritized for appropriate investigation and discipline, including termination,” the letter reads.
The letter promises that employees who resign under the deferred resignation program will retain pay and benefits and be exempted from in-person work requirements until Sept. 30. Federal employees, except military personnel and U.S. Postal Service employees, were eligible to accept the deferred resignation until Thursday, Feb. 6.
“It is clear by the fact that they did this that this administration does not care about the critical services that federal employees do for America, because any one agency could have a tremendously high percentage of workers say, ‘We’re out,’” Erwin said.
If federal employees continue in their jobs, they could be impacted by layoffs. The Trump administration has warned it plans reductions in force after the deadline for deferred resignations.
“There is a reduction in force procedure ... It’s realistic that could happen, but we think no matter how it plays out, people would be better off not accepting this deferred resignation offer,” Erwin said.
Lawmaker salaries ballot question clears first committee - Austin Fisher, Source New Mexico
A proposal to open up opportunities for more people to become New Mexico’s state lawmakers by paying them salaries passed through its first committee hearing with bipartisan support.
The Senate Rules Committee on Wednesday morning voted 7-2 on a proposal to ask New Mexicans to vote more than three years from now on whether to provide salaries to state lawmakers.
Senate Joint Resolution 1 would create an independent commission to set and limit salaries for lawmakers. It still needs to go through the Senate Finance Committee before it could go to a full vote in the Senate.
Albuquerque Democratic Senators Katy Duhigg and Natalie Figueroa are sponsoring the resolution, and argued it would make the Legislature more diverse and accessible to their constituents.
Duhigg argued that state government has already professionalized the executive and judicial branches, but not the legislative one, making them “not truly co-equal.”
“This would allow the Legislature to perform the really important oversight function that we are supposed to be performing, that we truly can’t do now,” she said.
The bill would put the question on the ballot for voters in 2028.
This question has been put before voters at least five times in the state’s history, most recently in 1992, Figueroa said.
The Citizen Commission on Legislative Salary would not be made up of lawmakers, “so there would be no self-dealing,” Duhigg said.
“We would not be involved,” she said.
Resolutions are not laws and do not need to be signed into law by the governor.
If a majority of New Mexican voters choose to create the commission, details like the commissioners’ terms, who appoints them and their rules would be worked out in enabling legislation in future sessions, Duhigg said.
A coalition of nearly a dozen organizations, including Common Cause New Mexico, Center for Civic Policy and League of Women Voters, back the proposal, and announced a “day of modernization” at the Roundhouse on Feb. 11 to promote it.
City Council blasts mayor’s office for new process of addressing constituent’s emails - Elizabeth McCall, City Desk ABQ
Albuquerque City Councilors criticized Mayor Tim Keller’s office Monday night for the administration’s new process for addressing constituents’ emailed concerns, which some councilors said is superfluous and inefficient. The city, however, says it’s the most efficient way to track those emails.
Councilor Renée Grout said during the meeting that when she has forwarded constituent complaints and concerns to the administration, she gets a reply stating email has been forwarded to government affairs instead of the issue being addressed directly by a specific department.
“I am sad for people that are waiting for answers and it’s not that we’re not trying to help them, we’re waiting for the admin to reply,” Grout said. “I want everybody to know that we’re waiting on replies from the administration.”
One resident forwarded one such reply to City Desk ABQ, which reads, “I will forward this to the govaffairs@cabq.gov email address to ensure that our team gets an appropriate and timely response to your inquiry.”
“I know that if I’m getting 50 to 100 emails a day, everybody else is, I can only imagine how many emails that gov affairs is getting a day,” Grout said. “I just don’t think this is efficient. It’s not good customer service for the constituents. It’s not smart. I think there’s a lot of micromanaging in this policy. I understand what you’re trying to accomplish, but I don’t think it’s working.”
Chief Administrative Officer (CAO) Samantha Sengel told the council that the administration appreciates “the importance of timeliness” and is working to improve efficiency. Sengel said the governmental affairs team is “expediting any constituent relation or constituent inquiry so that it doesn’t get mixed up with other types of inquiries.”
Staci Drangmeister, a Keller spokesperson, told City Desk ABQ that the process is, in a way, a response to a bill the council passed in November that requires the administration to answer some questions in writing during the administration question-and-answer period during council meetings.
“Including the government affairs email on an inquiry is just one small way that the CAO can ensure that she’s getting answers to councilors and respecting their requests that she’s more responsive,” Drangmeister said.
During the meeting, Councilor Dan Lewis argued that questions from councilors on behalf of constituents should go directly to a specific city department since the governmental affairs team are not experts on the issues being addressed.
Lewis recounted a recent incident when his policy analyst contacted the Department of Municipal Development (DMD) about an “unsightly utility box” in his district, but the department responded with a similar email, saying they would forward the message to the governmental affairs team.
“It seems like what happened is it went to government affairs, then government affairs confirmed back, and probably got the answer back from DMD, the person that we wrote the email to,” Lewis said. “I would think that sending that email to government affairs and waiting on a response from them to be able to get back with us, to get back to the constituent, is just really pretty silly.”
Senegal said routing those emails through government affairs is the administration’s way of logging and tracking questions.
“It takes us just a few days to be responsive to any inquiry that is related to a constituent that’s asking a question about their neighborhood, their issue, their property, their needs…when something is going to take longer, and when I speak about reports or generating information, our goal is to also continue to let you all know when it will take longer,” Senegal said.
The only reason the responses are taking longer, Lewis said, is because the emails are being sent to governmental affairs which is keeping the city department employees from “doing their job.”
“It’s just an absolute waste of an email…I would ask you to rethink that. You might be thinking you’re solving a problem, but I think you’re creating a lot more issues,” Lewis said.
Drangmeister told City Desk ABQ that this process creates a record of questions for the administration and Sengel and it’s “not to gatekeep or to keep departments and subject matter experts from answering, but to really have a record and make sure that she’s able to say ‘yes, we answered this.’
Santa Fe County Commission approves controversial solar project – Santa Fe New Mexican
The Santa Fe County Planning Commission approved a controversial solar project Tuesday after more than 12 hours of public testimony over two days.
The Santa Fe New Mexican reports commissioners also held a closed-door discussion, then voted 6-1 to approve a conditional use permit for the Rancho Viejo Solar project.
The massive solar power and battery storage facility has faced intense opposition. Residents in the area have argued the facility poses a fire risk and would affect their property values. There have been problematic fires at other such sites, like Moss Landing in California.
Officials with developer AES says newer technology reduces fire risk from these kinds of facilities, which use lithium-ion batteries.
AES says the project would generate 96 megawatts of power and about 45 megawatts of battery storage. Supporters say the solar farm would help the state meet its clean energy goals.
One group opposing the project said it will appeal. There’s a 30-day window to appeal the decision to the County Commission.