Bring modern thinking to Land Office
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. 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 governing state trust lands can constrain the ability of trust managers, like N.M.’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.
As a progressive trust land manager, I will respond to these challenges with visionary new strategies and approaches. 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.
We must build a 21st-century land and natural resources management vision that includes economic diversity, social justice, environmental resiliency and cultural frameworks. With specific policy and legislative initiatives, the potential for state trust lands is truly limitless!
How we leverage this potential is only limited by our imagination, vision and political will. Every future generation of N.M.’s children is counting on us. Here’s how:
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 must also 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 Trump.
I have made this a cornerstone of my effort — from letting Trump know he’ll have to build his racist border wall over my dead body and 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 gutting of national treasures such as national monuments.
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 N.M.’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.