New Mexico & El Paso
The 2024 New Mexico legislative session is upon us, and as ever, our air, climate, land, water, wildlife, families and communities require our action. You have been an important grassroots environmental lobbyist and we so appreciate your participation, work and support. Please take some time to fill out the survey to indicate where and how you’d like to participate during the session and the lead up to it.
On April 7, Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham vetoed every remaining significant climate-protecting measure the Legislature passed in 2023: HB412/SB22, HB32, SB173, SB45, and HB67.
It is no secret that New Mexico is in a water crisis. In fact, the whole Southwest is in the driest two decades it has seen in at least 1,200 years. And the hard truth is climate projections tell us conditions will only get more challenging from here. We can expect temperatures to increase 5-7 °F over the next 50 years, with a 25% decrease in our overall water supply, increasing demand and competition across the state for this precious resource even as it slips through our fingers. The Water Policy and Infrastructure Task Force is tackling these challenges head on. Established by Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham over the summer and led by New Mexico’s State Engineer, the Task Force has brought together a diverse array of members to identify solutions that have broad consensus to some of our toughest water challenges.
This year is a “long” 60-day legislative session starting January 17, and there will be many exciting opportunities for Sierra Club members to provide input and participate (sometimes late into the night!) in the process. Here are a few of the bills we are expecting and will be advocating for or against in the coming session.
This is a complex moment for legislative transformation. On the one hand, New Mexicans are clearly communicating their desire for big, bold change. We demonstrated that in the elections, creating a progressive state Senate to go with our progressive House.
If there’s any good news about the Trump administration, it must be that they were massively incompetent in pursuing the dismantlement of environmental regulation. Environmental lawyers have stopped many of these efforts, or held them up in courts, so that the new Administration can now reverse the legal positions of the Trump/Barr lawyers. Each of Trump’s actions has to be approached carefully, especially with a Supreme Court that we can presume to be hostile to environmental regulation.
New Mexico has put itself into a box with its heavy reliance on oil and gas revenues — now approximately one-third of the state’s budget, a percentage that increased significantly after tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations were passed in 2003 and 2013. To be clear, the state’s economy is far broader than oil and gas, but we have failed to build a tax structure that is fair and resilient. In order to diversify our economy and build a just and equitable New Mexico we must hold Big Oil accountable. Revenues from oil and gas should be invested and used for limited projects rather than being put in the general fund.
The New Mexico State Legislature will meet on June 18th for a special session. A coalition of environmental groups drafted the following letter to legislators asking them to ensure environmental group agency budgets especially in support of their mission to protect public health.
As most of you know by now, it was an extraordinarily successful election season for the Sierra Club here in New Mexico.
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