Land Office to set aside approved land swap
Commissioner says candidate for his post will not honor deal
SANTA FE — State Land Commissioner Aubrey Dunn says he’s suspending efforts to go forward on an already approved land swap between his office and the Bureau of Land Management, citing a lack of commitment by one of the candidates running to succeed him as land commissioner.
Because he cannot encumber his successor with future payments that would be part of the deal, he says, he’s calling off a deal that would transfer 43,000 acres of state-owned land within the Rio Grande del Norte National Monument and Sabinoso Wilderness in exchange for 78,000 acres of federal land in 13 New Mexico counties.
In a letter sent to Aden Seidlitz, the BLM’s acting state director, on Wednesday, Dunn doesn’t mention candidate Stephanie Garcia Richard by name, but he does in a news release. He blames the Trump administration’s bureaucracy for delays with land appraisals and required environmental studies. But he also points a finger at Garcia Richard, a White Rock Democrat currently representing District 43 in the state House of Representatives.
“Stephanie Garcia Richard indicated that she will not go forward with this exchange if she becomes the next Commis-
sioner of Public Lands,” Dunn, who is forgoing a re-election bid to run against U.S. Sen. Martin Heinrich as a Libertarian candidate, said in the news release. “This is a win-win exchange; unfortunately, convincing her otherwise has been a fruitless endeavor.”
Garcia Richard said in a phone interview Thursday that she opposes the land swap for several reasons, including what she called a lack of transparency by the Land Office.
“In my mind, if there is going to be a decision that is going to have that kind of impact, you need to have more people involved in the decision-making process,” she said, adding that no one outside the Land Office seemed to know about the deal until it was reported in newspapers. “That’s symptomatic of this administration making decisions behind closed doors.”
Garcia Richard said she never spoke with Dunn directly about her position on the land swap, only his staffers.
“The fact that he is basing such a substantial decision on private meetings with me — at this point a private individual — is astonishing,” she said.
Garcia Richard is running against former land commissioner and current Public Regulation Commissioner Pat Lyons for land commissioner in the November general election.