A progressive vision for state trust land
Beginning in the 1800s, trust lands were granted to states upon entrance into the union for the sole purpose of generating income for public institutions, particularly schools. To that end, the lands were managed, leased or sold for a range of uses, including mining, grazing and agriculture, to satisfy their revenue-generating responsibility.
However, antiquated perceptions and laws that govern state trust lands often constrain the ability of trust managers, like New Mexico’s commissioner of public lands, to adapt to new ideas and changing economies.
These challenges create a critical need — and a real opportunity — to explore additional means of generating considerable trust revenues that continue to raise significant funds for our schools and hospitals, while aligning trust activities with a resilient and robust economic model, and at the same time conserving the environmental health of New Mexico’s precious watersheds and landscapes.
Much work needs to be done to create a substantive framework that implements a land and natural resource management model that transitions from one of consumptive use to one of sustainability.
How we leverage the potential of state trust lands is only limited by our imagination, vision and political will. Every future generation of New Mexico’s children are counting on us. Here’s how we do it:
First, we must make massive, game-changing investments into clean energy production on state trust lands. Manufacturers of solar and wind energy must have equal opportunity as extractive industries to generate clean energy on trust lands. Additionally, I will work with the Legislature to create a dedicated clean-energy
funding stream for public schools. With renewables, we can break the boom and bust cycle of public education funding that has held our state back for too long.
New Mexico also must modernize our outdoors and ecotourism industries to take advantage of billions of dollars in international revenue and thousands of jobs that currently go to other states. Locations such as White Peak, the Luera Mountains, Sierra Grande and parts of the Bootheel should be managed and marketed specifically for their recreation and wildlife values.
As commissioner, I will begin an aggressive program to restore these properties for their outdoor recreation, wildlife and cultural values. Along with restoration and infrastructure improvements, I will launch an international marketing campaign aimed at birding, mountain biking, wildlife viewing, horseback riding, hiking, geocaching and rock climbing communities, among others.
Finally, New Mexico’s next land commissioner must be willing to stand up and fight against the devastating environmental policies of President Donald Trump.
I have made this a cornerstone of my effort — from letting Trump know that he’ll have to build his racist border wall “over my dead body” and telling him to keep his hands off our public lands, to promising to use the bully pulpit of the Land Office to push back against eviscerations of protections for clean air, water and endangered species and the gutting of national treasures such as Bears Ears National Monument.
If we don’t fight now, we may lose for good.
I have devoted my career to land, water, wildlife, natural resource planning, policy and advocating for the conservation of these precious public treasures. I have led conservation campaigns focused on water policy initiatives and protection, watershed restoration, threatened and endangered trout reintroduction and protection, and landscape-scale conservation. My unparalleled knowledge of state and federal natural resource policy and planning uniquely positions me to implement paradigm-shifting changes in New Mexico’s land use at a historic moment in a national and global environmental crisis.
I humbly ask for your vote in support of transforming New Mexico’s public lands for the benefit of transformative funding for public education.