AG’s office presses PNM on ‘unusually high’ customer bills - Justin Horwath, Albuquerque Journal
Attorney General Raúl Torrez’s office hand-delivered a letter to the president and CEO of Public Service Company of New Mexico’s parent company on Wednesday, asking the state’s largest utility to explain its billing practices.
In recent months, with sweltering temperatures causing record-high electricity use across the state, customers have complained on social media, to utility regulators and to PNM that their electric bills have been high.
Mark Hayden, director of the state Department of Justice’s Utilities Unit, said in the letter to TXNM Energy President and CEO Don Tarry that the office has also received several complaints from PNM ratepayers.
The complaints, according to Hayden, follow a pattern: A customer receives an email from PNM stating the utility can’t read a customer’s electric meter, citing “unforeseen circumstances.” The email informs the customer that PNM uses historical electric usage to estimate a reading, and the bill based on those estimates is often “significantly more than previous bills received by the customer,” Hayden wrote.
For more information on this story, visit the Albuquerque Journal website.
Proposed Sandoval County ordinance could criminalize license plate readers without permits - Michaela Helean, Rio Rancho Observer
The placement and use of automated license plate readers in Sandoval County could result in criminal charges if they aren't placed with a permit if an ordinance passes.
Sandoval County commissioners voted on Sept. 9 to post notice that they will consider and vote on a proposed ordinance that would criminalize license plate readers without permits on county land.
Commissioner Jon Herr, who sponsored the ordinance, said he thinks it will bring a level of public input to an ongoing issue.
"Anyone who's been watching the news in the last six months, they know that these systems are incredibly controversial. I personally think that there's places where they potentially violate the Fourth Amendment. They do a lot of mass surveillance on people that have committed no crimes," he said.
He said that he is not looking for an outright ban of the readers and that the approval Wednesday does not mean the ordinance has passed.
For more information on this story, visit the Albuquerque Journal website.
Plans for reclaimed water from Santa Fe to be discharged in Rio Grande – Santa Fe New Mexican, KUNM News
The city of Santa Fe is planning to put treated water from the Paseo Real wastewater treatment plant into the Rio Grande via a proposed 17-mile pipe.
The Santa Fe New Mexican reports, in return, the city would receive a credit for its San Juan-Chama water from the Colorado River basin. That means it wouldn’t have to release as much water from Abiquiú Lake.
That lake, a reservoir managed by the Army Corps of Engineers, was the source of the 650 million gallons of water released last week to replenish the Rio Grande, as reported on KUNM.
Santa Fe’s Interim Public Utilities Director Jesse Roach told the Santa Fe New Mexican that the city is currently seeking an environmental permit, which he hopes to have a draft version available for public comment by the end of the year.
It’s a complicated process, though, because the proposed 17-mile pipe requires permitting from three federal agencies: the U.S. Forest Service, the Bureau of Land Management, and the Bureau of Reclamation.
New Mexico weather shifts match climate warnings - Regina Jarsak, El Defensor Chieftain
New Mexico’s increasingly erratic weather, from intense monsoon bursts to dwindling snowpack and deepening drought, reflects long‑standing climate projections for the Southwest, according to Zeljka Stone, director of the Climate and Weather Consortium at New Mexico Tech.
Stone said climate models have warned for decades that the region would become warmer and drier, and recent conditions show those predictions unfolding across the state.
“For pretty much a couple of decades, we have been warning that this is a scenario that’s going to come to play, and it’s heartbreaking to see it happen,” Stone said in a recent interview.
She noted that climate change must be understood as a long‑term process, not a single wet monsoon or snowy winter. Even strong seasonal precipitation does not reverse the broader warming trend.
For more information on this story, visit the Albuquerque Journal website.
New Mexico AG backs Forward Party’s legal battle for ballot access - Joshua Bowling Source New Mexico
New Mexico Attorney General Raúl Torrez last week backed the state Forward Party’s pending case before a federal appeals court that seeks to get
its candidates on the Nov. 3 general election ballot.New Mexico Forward Party Chair Bob Perls, a former state lawmaker whose campaign to run against incumbent U.S. Sen. Ben Ray Luján didn’t collect enough signatures to make the ballot,sued New Mexico Secretary of State Maggie Toulouse Oliver in federal court in July. He alleged that she was enforcing ballot-access laws that created unfair burdens to minor-party candidates.
Perls’ argument hinged in part on the number of signatures the state requires candidates to collect to make the ballot. Democrats and Republicans must gather about 2,500 and 2,350, respectively. He and another Forward Party candidate seeking statewide office, however, failed to collect the more than 14,000 signatures the state requires.
That disparity is discriminatory, Perls’ attorneysargued before U.S. District Court Judge Margaret Strickland in August. Strickland earlier this monthdenied the Forward Party’s motion to stop the secretary of state from enforcing those ballot laws, writing that aspects of the party’s case are likely moot as several of its local candidates qualified for the ballot. Perls subsequently appealed.
In an amicus brief filed Thursday, Torrez and other New Mexico Department of Justice officials backed the Forward Party’s argument before the appellate court.
“Major party candidates, minor party candidates, and independents should compete on a level playing field in New Mexico’s elections. Today, they do not,” they wrote in the filing. “New Mexico requires all candidates to earn their place on the ballot. But major party candidates can stroll onto the ballot while independent and minor party candidates must forge a more difficult path.”
The brief says that New Mexicans “deserve real competition at the polls” and requested that the federal appeals court order that the Forward Party candidates be placed on the ballot.
Lindsey Bachman, the secretary of state’s communications, legislative and executive affairs director, in a statement to Source NM noted that Toulouse Oliver, as the state’s chief election officer, “represents the interests of every voter in our state.”
“She maintains that the federal court made the correct determination and will continue to defend New Mexico’s election laws in this case,” Bachman said.
Perls has previously pointed tothe race for Luján’s seat in the U.S. Senate as a prime example. The Republican Party of New Mexico failed to field a candidate ahead of the June primary election, creating a relatively easy path for Larry Marker of Roswell, a write-in candidate whose name did not appear on the ballot, to become the party’s nominee.
Perls told Source NM on Friday that he did not know ahead of time that Torrez’s office was going to support his effort.
“Good for the attorney general for standing up for the voters and not taking a partisan approach,” he said. “Any person on the street would say that the signature requirements are unfair. You don’t have to be a lawyer to figure that out.”
Land grant appeals radio tower case to NM Supreme Court - Taos News
In Taos, a local nonprofit radio station and the Cristobal De La Serna Land Grant continue to be engaged in a legal struggle.
KCEI-FM is branded as “Cultural Energy.” The station has a transmitter in Red River and a translator in El Prado. The Taos News reports that Robin Collier, president of Cultural Energy, wants to build a radio tower on U.S. Hill in the Sangre de Cristo mountains south of Taos. The land is within the Cristobal de la Serna Land Grant.
Building on the property would require what’s called a “quiet title” action, which resolves competing ownership claims to establish clear title. Last month, a New Mexico Court of Appeals opinion said that land grants are not immune from quiet title claims.
The Taos News reports that the Cristobal De La Serna Land Grant filed an appeal Tuesday in the New Mexico Supreme Court. The appeal asks the state’s high court to review the opinion published in August by the New Mexico Court of Appeals.
Transportation officials urge state lawmakers to fund deteriorating roads as federal funding expires - Matthew Mindschein, Source New Mexico
National transportation analysts, joined by a state transportation department official and contractors, told lawmakers last week that while they have identified improvements for the state’s substandard roads, they lack sufficient funding to make the repairs.
According to a 2026 report by TRIP, a national transportation research nonprofit, 56% of all major locally and state-maintained roads in New Mexico are in “poor or mediocre condition.” Driving on rough roads costs the average New Mexico driver $1,043 annually in additional vehicle operating costs — a total of $1.6 billion statewide, according to the report.
National analysts told state lawmakers during the Legislature’s interim Transportation Infrastructure Revenue Subcommittee on Thursday that the New Mexico Department of Transportation identified $7.5 billion in needed projects to address the problem.
“These are projects that have been scoped out. There has been some planning undertaken, but quite simply, the funding is not there,” TRIP Director of Policy and Research Rocky Moretti said.
In June, NMDOT officials dished out hundreds of millions of dollars through bond sales for state transportation infrastructure repair, as part of a bill signed into law by Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham in February.
But the current funding gap remains nearly six times higher than in 2017, when NMDOT identified $1.3 billion in needed but unfunded projects, according to the report.
Sen. Larry Scott (R-Hobbs) asked the transportation panel if the failures listed in the report were “sudden, catastrophic and unanticipated,” or if they were due to lawmakers not “anticipating the need for repair” as New Mexico’s roads continued to get worse.
“It was definitely the latter,” Jim Garcia, the executive director of Associated Contractors of New Mexico, answered.
While lack of funding for New Mexico’s road infrastructure has been ongoing, costs are projected to increase while some key funding already in place is set to expire. The Infrastructure and Jobs Act, signed into law in 2021, provided $2.5 billion in federal dollars to New Mexico over five years for road and bridge investments. The funding expires Sep. 30.
And due to inflation, more funding covers less work. From 2022 to 2025, the Federal Highway Administration’s highway construction cost index increased by 45%.
Transportation officials noted that long-term transportation funding modelled after Texas and Arizona would also help. Arizona passed a five-year plan in 2026 that set aside $11 billion for road, bridge and airport investment.
Garcia told lawmakers that the “ideal path” would be for New Mexico to make a similar long-term funding plan, indexed to the Consumer Price Index to account for inflation.
Another benefit of long-term funding plans, Garcia noted, is that NMDOT and the contractor community are able to anticipate and accommodate projects years in advance.
“We need the money to do this. We have the capacity and money to build it. We just need the path to make it happen,” Garcia said.
