New Mexico sues feds over refusing to reimburse state for $61M in wildfire costs - Patrick Lohmann, Source New Mexico
New Mexico Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham on Tuesday announced that her office had sued the Federal Emergency Management Agency for failing to reimburse the New Mexico National Guard for at least $61 million in costs it incurred fighting a 2022 wildfire that the federal government inadvertently ignited.
The 2022 Hermits Peak-Calf Canyon Fire burned a roughly 534-square-mile area in northern New Mexico after two federal prescribed burns escaped containment lines and merged into the state’s biggest-ever wildfire.
Congress later that year approved a multi-billion-dollar compensation program for families, businesses and government agencies that suffered losses or incurred costs while responding to the blaze. They also tasked FEMA with overseeing the compensation fund.
But New Mexico, which has filed a claim for damages from the fire, has not received reimbursement for costs related to the National Guard, which deployed to the area in 2022 to help people safely flee the fire, remove debris and prevent flood damage. The FEMA Hermits Peak-Calf Canyon Fire Claims Office, which is tasked with distributing the $5.5 billion compensation fund, has instead twice denied the state’s claims for the National Guard, the governor’s office said Tuesday.
“It’s unconscionable that FEMA refuses to pay for a National Guard response that must continue for many years due to federal negligence,” Lujan Grisham said in a statement Tuesday.
Spokespersons for FEMA or the claims office did not immediately respond to SourceNM’s request for comment late Tuesday. The lawsuit itself was also not immediately available in a federal court record system.
In addition to the $61 million in National Guard costs, the state has 22 other claims pending before the FEMA office. In total, the state is seeking $128 million in compensation from the claims office, according to the governor’s office.
As of Aug. 31, the office had distributed roughly $3.8 billion from the fund, according to the latest figures from FEMA.
Hungry black bears are running into trouble in the Rocky Mountains - By Brittany Peterson and Mead Gruver, Associated Press
Patrick Sullivan was sure it was a "crazy neighbor" honking a car horn nonstop while Sullivan was up feeding his infant son at 3 a.m. one night this summer.
It was a neighbor all right, but not a human one. A black bear had opened the door of a Toyota SUV and was trapped inside the vehicle in Gold Hill, Colorado, northwest of Denver.
In one of hundreds of examples of bears getting into more trouble than usual in the parched Rocky Mountains this summer, the animal kept bumping the horn as it ripped apart the Toyota's interior, desperately trying to escape.
"It's totaled. It's unfit to drive," Sullivan said of the car.
Millions of people live in or near bear habitat across the Rockies, where widespread drought has reduced supplies of nuts, berries and plants that bears eat. That's prompting the animals to roam far and wide for food.
Sullivan's brother-in-law eventually freed the bear trapped in the Toyota. But such encounters can be deadly for bears. One recently stuck in a car in Colorado Springs died from the heat, and wildlife officials have killed dozens of others that could endanger people.
Hungry bears are on the move
Colorado officials report twice as many bear sightings and conflicts with humans this year compared with the average, including bears roaming where they aren't normally found. Wildlife managers in New Mexico and Utah report record numbers of hungry bears have lost their natural hesitancy to raid homes, cars and campgrounds.
A black bear up a tree in central Denver recently was tranquilized and relocated. At Colorado State University in Fort Collins, a bear had to be caught and released elsewhere during the fall semester move-in. In Utah, authorities moved four bears from the town of Moab where they had been feasting in orchards.
"Bears aren't necessarily behaving any differently but they are definitely increasing their activity in the places that they're looking for food," said Travis Sauder, a state wildlife officer in southeastern Colorado.
Black bears usually stick to Colorado's mountains and foothills. This year, they've been spotted on the plains more than an hour's drive east of Colorado Springs.
"When they get that far east, there's just zero natural food sources that they would be looking for, like oaks or chokecherries," Sauder said.
'A fed bear is a dead bear'
There are plenty of temptations for hungry bears around homes: pet food in open garages, bird feeders and grease traps under barbecue grills. And then there's trash in unsecured bins, by far the biggest attractant behind this year's surge in bear activity, according to Colorado Parks and Wildlife data.
Many bears that visit populated areas are tranquilized and moved out of town. If they start associating food with people, however, they can be euthanized.
"A fed bear is a dead bear," is the mantra of wildlife officials. They urge people to stash away anything a bear might even think of eating.
Black bears typically avoid people and are less dangerous than the larger grizzly bears of the Northern Rockies. Black bear run-ins with people are far more often destructive than violent.
But black bears can be aggressive toward humans: In June, a black bear followed and then attacked and scratched a hiker in Golden, Colorado.
Colorado has had at least four more attacks, including a bear outside an apartment building near Vail that scratched a man on Aug. 17 as he left a laundry room.
Five days later, a bear tackled and bit a fisherman in the mountains southwest of Denver. The young bear was tracked down and killed.
On Aug. 20, on the Navajo Nation in northwestern New Mexico, a black bear attacked a man who later died. Police shot and wounded the bear, which fled but was later found and killed.
A dry winter persists into summer
In Utah, over three dozen bears have been killed this year. That's more than the past three years combined, according to the Utah Division of Wildlife Resources.
The number killed by wildlife officials and authorized property owners in New Mexico is already up to 187, the most since 2011.
Across the Upper Colorado River Basin spanning Wyoming, Colorado, Utah and New Mexico, this year's snowpack was the worst on record. Scientists say human-caused global warming made that far more likely.
"Human-animal conflicts in the context of climate change haven't really been fully researched yet. And we're still starting to kind of tease out what this means for us and what this means for all the species that we share the ecosystem with," said Samantha Miller, senior carnivore campaigner at the Center for Biological Diversity.
Add in vast areas of bear habitat scorched by record wildfires and it's a recipe for problems.
It's not always an unhappy ending for bears or people
A few bear-trouble stories are heartwarming, like orphaned cubs successfully released into the wild after time in a rescue facility, where they learned to live on their own without raiding.
"We've got to rescue a lot of bear cubs out of trees, including standing on some pretty shaky ladders to pull a bear cub that's sleeping in a tree," said Sauder.
While working on a deck in Steamboat Springs, Colorado, this summer, Andy Kerrigan found a cub that climbed into his truck through a window. He banged on the truck to scare it off.
"But it had found my lunch in the seat. And it was like, 'I'm not going anywhere,'" said Kerrigan, who eventually chased it away with a piece of wood trim.
In Gold Hill, Sullivan's brother-in-law solved the bear-in-Toyota problem by tugging a rope tied to a door handle. The bear bolted for the woods through the open door.
"It was just sitting there waiting for someone to help him, basically," Sullivan said. "So I'm glad we could have done that for him."
BCSO turns to new surveillance provider after parting ways with Flock - Nakayla McClelland, Albuquerque Journal
The Bernalillo County Sheriff’s Office has a new automatic license plate reader partnership with public safety technology company Axon less than two weeks after terminating an agreement with a controversial surveillance company.
BCSO hopes to implement the system before the end of the year, depending on when deputies have tested and trained with the technology, Sheriff John Allen said in a Tuesday news release. The sheriff was not available for comment.
Axon already provides body cameras, digital evidence systems and license plate reader cameras for BCSO patrol vehicles. The company created the Taser but has since expanded into other public safety technology, according to the Axon website.
The move comes after Allen criticized Flock Safety — which previously provided license plate reader cameras to the agency — for what he said was a lack of safeguards in the collected data and diminishing trust in the company.
For more information on this story, visit the Albuquerque Journal website.
New Mexico tribe and pueblos wrap up case that Kalshi sports betting hurts their sovereignty — Patrick Lohmann, Source New Mexico
Three New Mexico pueblos and one tribe on Friday wrapped up their closing arguments that a federal judge should step in to prohibit the online prediction market Kalshi from enabling what the plaintiffs allege amounts to illegal sports gambling on sovereign tribal land.
In May, the plaintiffs — the Mescalero Apache Tribe, as well as the Pojoaque, Sandia and Isleta Pueblos —alleged in federal courtthat Kalshi violates tribal gaming compacts and federal law by providing anyone over age A18 access to sports gambling in New Mexico.
Under existing state gaming compacts and federal law, only people aged 21 and over in New Mexico can place bets on sports in person at tribally owned casinos. The plaintiffs argue that Kalshi is causing irreparable harm to tribal governments, which rely on gambling revenues to fund schools and other services.
Tribes and state attorneys general have filed similar lawsuits against Kalshi across the country. New Mexico Attorney General Raúl Torrez also sued the company in state court in June, alleging the company is breaking state laws and creating a “public nuisance” by contributing to compulsive and addictive betting in a state that already has nearly four times the national rate of problem gambling.
The Friday filing marks the plaintiffs’ final written arguments seeking a preliminary injunction from U.S. District Court Judge Margaret Strickland. The 19-page argument contends that the plaintiffs meet all the criteria to justify an order forcing Kalshi to immediately stop operating within tribal boundaries.
To avoid a ban, the company is relying on a “rash of red herrings via many material misstatements about this case and the law,” the plaintiffs wrote Friday. “None of that improves Kalshi’s odds.”
Kalshi’s lawyers have countered that the federal Commodities Exchange Act trumps the federal Indian Gaming Regulatory Act, as well as state gaming compacts, and that regulating the platform is under the sole discretion of the Commodities Futures Trading Commission, the federal agency that oversees prediction markets.
In a response in late August, the company also said that a law forcing the app not to operate on tribal lands would “cause significant operational and commercial harm.”
Officials from Kalshi did not respond to Source NM’s request for additional comment Tuesday.
The New Mexico plaintiffs’ filing also cites an Aug. 28 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruling in a similar case that upheld a lower court’s decision allowing Nevada regulators to bar Kalshi from offering trades — known as “swaps” — on sporting events.
A coalition of 24 federally recognized tribes — including Mescalero, as well as the Sandia Pueblo and the Acoma Pueblo in New Mexico — filed a brief urging the federal appeals court to allow Nevada officials to regulate Kalshi.
Federal court records do not specify when Strickland may rule on the tribal plaintiffs’ request for a preliminary injunction.
New Mexico lawmakers suggest expanding farm programs statewide to help address at-risk youth— Joshua Bowling, Source New Mexico
New Mexico lawmakers meeting in Las Cruces Tuesday morning said they’d like to replicate an agricultural program that offers jobs to at-risk youth to the communities that need it most across the state. Representatives from the Anthony Youth Farm addressed state lawmakers on the interim Economic and Rural Development and Policy Committee about how they serve southern New Mexico’s children.
Leaders at the 25-acre farm train 20 to 25 young farmers annually and harvest more than 500 pounds of vegetables per week, they said. Those veggies fed nearly 38,000 students in the Las Cruces Public Schools and Gadsden Independent School District.
The presentation came as state leaders continue evaluating solutions to a statewide problem. About 32,000 New Mexicans between the ages of 16 and 24 neither work nor go to school, according to an April Legislative Finance Committee report. The report found that more than half of the state’s “disconnected youth” reside in Bernalillo, Doña Ana or McKinley counties, and largely attributed their unemployment to housing instability, a lack of skills or training and low wages.
Since that report first published, lawmakers throughout the summer have consistently focused on the issue.
Monique Hernandez, the farm’s program manager, told state lawmakers that she believes programs like hers can offer a lifeline to those young New Mexicans who aren’t employed or attending school.
“I started as an in-trouble youth myself,” Hernandez said at Tuesday’s hearing. “I was hanging out with the wrong crowd and my mom was like, ‘You know what? You’re not going to stay home, so get to work,’ and she sent me to Anthony Youth Farm. I loved it there and created my whole career out of it.”
State lawmakers on the interim committee were enthused about the financial support they’ve directed to the program. The state Legislature earlier this year allocated $200,000 toward well construction at Anthony Youth Farm in its annual capital outlay package.
House Minority Whip Alan Martinez (R-Rio Rancho) said he would like to see programs like this established in other communities statewide, particularly Albuquerque’s South Valley, Rio Rancho, Santa Fe and Española.
“I love that idea because it has a buy-in for the whole state,” he said.
Rep. Doreen Gallegos (D-Las Cruces), who serves as chair of the interim committee, recalled approving state funding for the farm in one of her first votes as a state lawmaker after taking office in 2013.
“When we first did the ribbon cutting, it was just this piece of dirt,” she said. “I’m always very proud to see the work that you’ve done. When you see the kids out there planting and it’s 103 degrees out there, it’s very, very hard work.”
‘Work is coming’: Film industry leaders see signs of a New Mexico rebound — Kylie Garcia, Albuquerque Journal
After several lean years, New Mexico’s film industry could see a boon in productions this fall.
The Albuquerque Journal’s Kylie Garcia reports that’s what industry leaders told film professionals from across the state who gathered in Albuquerque for a film and media conference last week.
Netflix co-CEO Ted Sarandos told attendees by video that the company is working on a major production announcement for New Mexico. Although he said he couldn’t provide details just yet, he assured the audience that, “something big is coming, and we’re thrilled about it.”
Union officials at the conference also predicted more work is on the way this fall.
That would be welcome news for an industry that has struggled since production peaked 4-to-5 years ago, with production spending falling to just 60% of its 2022 level last year.
But there’s optimism that could change, in part because President Trump is backing a proposed national film production incentive.
Industry advocates say a federal incentive could help U.S. productions compete with countries offering cheaper labor and other incentives.
The Albuquerque Journal reports the proposal is still in its early stages, and legislation would need congressional approval.
For more information on this story, visit the Albuquerque Journal website.
