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© 2025 NEW MEXICO NEWS SERVICES  11/17/25

Fire hazard mounts as FEMA, Forest Service shrink

By Sherry Robinson

All She Wrote

     A woman from Mora County told me recently: “We always said we were land rich and cash poor. Since the fire, we don’t even have the land.” Besides fire and flood damage to family property, a road washed out, and nobody has rebuilt it.

     U.S. Rep. Teresa Leger Fernández, D-NM, joined by U.S. Sens. Martin Heinrich and Ben Ray Lujan, have chided FEMA’s New Mexico Joint Recovery Office for its sluggish payout of claims for damages caused by the massive Calf Canyon-Hermit’s Peak blaze three years ago. In their recent letter they said the claims office had yet to compensate many people who lost everything. And it refused to reopen claims for cascading events, such as floods caused by the fires.

     It’s odd because this disaster has its own pot of money. The fires were the government’s fault, so Congress created a $5.45 million fund to fully compensate victims. So far, the office has paid $3.2 billion.

     The claims office could have been more responsive and more efficient, but I think we should look at the mother ship. 

     In August, 182 FEMA employees informed Congress that one third of full-time staff, some 2,000 employees including some of the agency’s most experienced, have left this year. In addition, the administration has cut funding and failed to appoint a qualified administrator as required by law. They warned that it’s becoming impossible for FEMA to help Americans survive natural disasters.

     With no knowledgeable person running FEMA, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem has involved herself in FEMA operations and set new spending rules that delayed contracts and obstructed the agency’s response, according media reports. The president himself has no use for FEMA and wants states to shoulder disaster response. 

     So is it any surprise that New Mexico has seen slow or no response and funding cuts?

     This month the state’s Department of Homeland Security and Emergency Management said FEMA denied disaster prevention funding for the Ruidoso area, reported Patrick Lohmann of Source NM. The decision “puts lives and property at risk unnecessarily during new or cascading life-threatening flooding events,” said Deputy Secretary Ali Rye, in the state’s appeal. 

     Many people may not know that one of FEMA’s most important programs provides hazard mitigation grants to help communities plan and rebuild to avoid future disasters. We all watched clips of houses floating away during Ruidoso’s fire-related floods this year. It’s foolish to think this can’t happen again.

     FEMA officials reportedly said the state hasn’t fully spent the money it’s received in previous disasters, but Rye argues that FEMA has only provided about $20 million of the $120 million promised to New Mexico for multiple recent disasters.

     In September Lohmann reported that FEMA cut $14 million of nearly $30 million promised for the aftermath of Ruidoso’s fires, even though Democratic attorneys general were already suing the Trump administration for refusing to spend mitigation grants approved by Congress. 

     FEMA abruptly ended a related program, Building Resilient Infrastructure and Communities, in April that would have provided $4 million. Among other projects was Acoma Pueblo’s plan to reduce flooding risk. New Mexico is the one of 21 states in the lawsuit to suffer cuts to both programs. 

     All this is happening as wildfire mitigation in the state – prescribed burns and hazardous fuel treatments – plunged by 53% since January, according to a report by Grassroots Wildland Firefighters, an advocacy group. 

     “The reason we want to thin and prescribe burn and do the pile burning is because we want a healthy forest, and we want to keep it safe so when there’s a fire, we don’t lose the entire forest,” Bobbie Scopa, executive secretary of the group, told KUNM. Scopa was a firefighter for 45 years.

     While the Forest Service blames “operational challenges,” Scopa cited the administration’s downsizing of agencies, budget cuts and the government shutdown. The agency hasn’t disclosed an official number, but in a letter co-signed by Heinrich in March, the USFS had lost 3,000 workers and was set to lose 7,000 more. Many were holders of red cards that certify their training as firefighters.

     The Forest Service had an 80 million-acre backlog of projects even before the job losses. The responsibilities for the reduced workforce are endangering their lives and health.

     Now weather experts say we could see a dry winter. 

     Pray for rain.

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© 2025 NEW MEXICO NEWS SERVICES  11/10/25

Steve Pearce can bring his best self to BLM appointment

By Sherry Robinson

All She Wrote

     During the Vietnam War former congressman Steve Pearce flew C-130 transport planes when the enemy was trying hard to shoot them down. As the president’s newly appointed director of the U.S. Bureau of Land Management, Pearce may feel like he’s still in the cockpit.

     He’s got a great deal of relevant experience for the job – “at least he’s not a Fox News host,” grouses one BLM retiree I know – but the environmental community is already warming its legal engines.

     The BLM oversees about half of all federal land in New Mexico and some 245 million acres of public lands nationally. 

     Pearce steps back into the spotlight just as the Trump administration has begun to repeal the BLM’s Public Lands Rule and Navajo activists protested the BLM’s possible revocation of the 10-mile buffer around Chaco Culture National Historical Park.

     Let’s begin with relevant experience. 

     He served seven terms in Congress representing the Second District. Pearce has consistently pushed to open more land to oil exploration, but he’s also said the nation should promote all kinds of energy including renewable.

     In 2008, during his primary campaign for Senate against moderate Heather Wilson, he admitted, “I’m pretty conservative… but I’m not limited.” As the Great Recession deepened, he supported the spaceport then spearheaded by Gov. Bill Richardson, a Democrat. He won the primary but lost the race to Tom Udall.

     In 2011 he was unanimously elected to chair the House Western Caucus, and he served twice on the House Committee on Natural Resources. After the Western Caucus in 2017 asked President-elect Trump to appoint more westerners to key positions, Pearce wrote that too many Obama appointees ignored local input. Their regulations, he said, “disenfranchised and harmed westerners.” 

     Pearce has always been a staunch conservative, and he’s been loyal to President Trump, but in 2017 Pearce and the Freedom Caucus, which he helped found in 2015, torpedoed the Republicans’ replacement bill for Obamacare. And he’s opposed Trump’s border wall. In 2018 he said: “The wall isn’t the magic answer. … You’re going to spend billions of dollars and find that it didn’t really secure the border.”

     Environmentalists note that he has no use for climate science, wolf reintroduction, or wilderness study areas, but he’s all for selling public lands.

Topping their list of offenses is his longstanding campaign against the Organ Mountains-Desert Peaks National Monument. 

     In a 2014 op ed, Pearce said he had worked with local officials, ranchers and conservationists on a solution to protect the Organ Mountains. He introduced a bill that had the blessings of soil and water conservation districts, law enforcement, chambers of commerce, and Gov. Susana Martinez, a Republican. The monument would have been 60,000 acres. 

     But that year President Obama approved a 500,000-acre monument, “the largest land grab nationwide of his presidency” Pearce wrote. “This is not how representative government works.”

     Or maybe it is. Pearce doesn’t accept that blue, blue Las Cruces, the state’s second largest city, likes its big monument and has risen to its defense with every mention of downsizing. And yet, there’s a lot of room between 60,000 and 500,000 acres. Clearly, neither side tried too hard to compromise.

     Pearce also angered Democrats and environmentalists for being the only member of the state’s congressional delegation to vote repeatedly against the Land and Water Conservation Fund. He explained in 2018, when he ran unsuccessfully for governor, that he supported the original intent of the bill, which called for at least 60 percent of funding to support recreation and conservation, but over time, a majority of funding went to land acquisition. 

     However, a spokesperson for the House Committee on Natural Resources said funding that year was evenly divided between recreational planning, acquiring land and water, and developing outdoor recreational facilities. The Albuquerque Journal editorialized that Pearce had a long record of working to undermine the fund.

     At 78, Pearce is capping a long, eventful career. He has a better sense than most people of what western lands can deliver. As a New Mexican he must have some appreciation for Chaco Canyon and, we hope, respect for the people who consider it a sacred place. 

     Democrats and environmentalists are expecting the worst. Pearce has at times attacked anyone with different views, but in a 2018 interview he talked about angry political rhetoric. “It’s time for us to take a look in the mirror and throttle down,” he said.

     We hope this is the Steve Pearce who steps up to lead the agency and manage the land for everyone.