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© 2026 NEW MEXICO NEWS SERVICES  6/8/26

Republican candidates need a functioning party behind them

By Sherry Robinson

All She Wrote

     In January the president described New Mexico’s elections as “so corrupt it’s incredible.” He insisted he would “win by a lot” if they were cleaned up.

     Amy Barela, chair of the state’s Republican Party, jumped in, claiming that the Secretary of State “can’t even comply with the most basic federal election integrity laws.”

     Following national discussions throwing shade on election integrity, former Gov. Garrey Carruthers, a Republican, and two fellow members of the nonpartisan Observe New Mexico Elections advisory board wrote: “New Mexico’s elections are consistently recognized as among the most transparent and well-administered in the country… There is no credible evidence suggesting widespread irregularities in our state’s voting processes.”   

     Recent primary elections, by all accounts, were fair and efficient, thanks to the Secretary of State and the county clerks. So much so that when Amy Barela lost her race for Otero County Commission by 46 votes, instead of hollering about corrupt elections she told the Albuquerque Journal, “The people spoke – and that’s the way it works.”

     This primary also anointed Gregg Hull, Rio Rancho’s popular former mayor, as the Republicans’ candidate for governor, giving the party its first serious chance at winning in 10 years.

But Hull will need his party behind him. For months the Republican Party under Barela has been too distracted by internal conflict to even field candidates, much less support them. The party must also come to terms with a candidate in the middle of the ideological spectrum when its current leadership is hard right.

     At the center of the storm, soaking up energy and resources is Barela, a sitting county commissioner.  

     Jonathan Emery, her primary opponent (who won), and candidates Duke Rodriguez and Blair Dunn claimed in a lawsuit that she and other party officials violated the party’s own rules against choosing sides in contested primary races. Barela refused to leave the commission race even though the rules state clearly that when the state’s party chair “files as a candidate for public office and there is another Republican who has filed for the same office, the state officer shall immediately vacate the party office.”

     Barela’s chief apologist is National Committeeman and state Sen. Jim Townsend, of Artesia, who argues, incredibly, that Barela wasn’t running against Emery – he was running against her. 

     Dunn, an unsuccessful candidate for lieutenant governor, said it was important to voters to “hold our own accountable.” Rodriguez, who hoped to be the party’s candidate for governor, said the lawsuit wasn’t about one person but about a small group running the party like a private club. 

     Days before the election a judge ordered Barela to step down as party chairwoman. The party is now appealing, but plaintiffs argue that Barela’s decisions as chair will affect the general election.

     Meanwhile, the Journal reports, county leaders are trying to convene a state central committee meeting to elect a new chair. Robert Aragon, an Albuquerque attorney and central committee member who filed his own lawsuit to remove Barela, has said she doesn’t have the votes to continue. He and 246 other committee members supported a resolution in April saying Barela forfeited her chairmanship by competing in a contested primary.

     Also weighing in, using his platform as a KKOB Radio talk-show host, is Brandon Vogt, who has hammered the party for not fielding candidates for three statewide offices and sliding with just a write-in candidate for the U.S. Senate race. Barela, he says, is an embarrassment. Because the Democrats have chased away their moderates and the Republicans are in disarray, “New Mexico is now being governed by the fringe left,” he recently wrote. “The GOP is in a coma.”

     He’s right that democracy in New Mexico is poorer without two functioning major parties. And it’s more divided. Notice the GOP’s crack along the Albuquerque-southeastern New Mexico divide. 

     Now Gregg Hull enters the picture. His only path to the Roundhouse is to join Republicans with independents and pick up Democrat Sam Bregman’s supporters along with any other Dems who aren’t on Deb Haaland’s progressive bandwagon. 

     Although New Mexico’s Democratic Party is calling Hull the “MAGA mayor,” Hull has steered clear of the label. He says only that he can work with everyone. The Rs can quibble over whether he’s MAGA enough to suit them, but the reality of his campaign is that a Trump endorsement would be the kiss of death. Is the Republican Party’s current leadership equipped for such a campaign? I don’t think so.

© 2026 NEW MEXICO NEWS SERVICES 6/1/26

Data centers can work for local communities

By Sherry Robinson

All She Wrote

     Can we have a rational discussion of data centers?

     I was hoping this could happen in Socorro, where New Mexico Tech agreed to consider participating in Green Data Center. Who better to look at the proposal than a place full of scientists and engineers? 

     What we’ve heard instead is so much hysteria that Tech decided not to involve itself in the project.

Data centers have become flashpoints all over the country. Nobody wants one because of their potential impacts, and yet they “power modern life—from telehealth and digital classrooms to banking, air travel, financial transactions, and online shopping,” said an official of The Data Center Coalition. “This infrastructure is not optional; it is foundational.”

     The industry knows it has a bad track record and must do better. And if you listen through all the shouting, you might have heard companies make offers, besides jobs, that could greatly benefit the state.

     Green Data, a Canadian company, wanted to build a 10,000-acre data center and solar array in partnership with New Mexico Tech. CEO Jason Bak said it would be the world’s largest “renewable-led” data center. Bak unveiled the project in March. Concerns soon erupted over water, energy demands and the environment.

     Recently, locals packed Tech’s Macey Center for a town hall in which opponents repeatedly booed Jason Bak and Tech President Michael Jackson. For his part, Jackson tried to explain that all he did was agree to explore the proposal, according to El Defensor Chieftain, the local newspaper. The process would have examined the issues already raised and a few more.

     Bak candidly acknowledged public concerns and said he wanted to create a “cleaner and smarter” data center than what the industry has built so far, and it involved 10 gigawatts of solar plus storage. Green Data proposed creating water with atmospheric water generation; if that succeeded in Socorro it could have become a global model and position Socorro as a center for commercialization.

     OK, the idea of literally pulling water from desert air threw me, but such a concept is in Tech’s wheelhouse. It’s the kind of big idea that characterizes some of these data center proposals. In Las Cruces the developers of Project Jupiter abandoned natural-gas power in favor of costly fuel cells and promised to use non-potable water from a sod farm. In Gallup Teraplex Data Centers offered to run on wastewater. We shouldn’t dismiss these ideas without study, and we should keep an open mind.

     Here's another important statement from Bak: “I think it’s up to us to convey more information.”

Bingo!

     These are massive projects, and they seemed to come out of nowhere with too little effort to communicate. It scares people. 

     I don’t think the developers are trying to deceive anybody, but there’s a lot of engineer-think here. Engineers, bless them, are wired to tinker and cogitate and calculate and try stuff until they solve a problem. But they’re not the best communicators. 

     I learned this the hard way as an electric utility spokesperson assigned to a promising geothermal project that crashed on poor communications and public opposition. The engineers believed they had a good project and didn’t need to explain it.

     Project Jupiter is also guilty of poor communication, made worse with a dark-money campaign by something called Elevate New Mexico. Colorful mailers pushed recipients to contact county officials in support of the project, according to Source New Mexico. It backfired. 

     Lately, Project Jupiter developers have stepped out with real communications, reports independent journalist Heath Haussamen, who has bird-dogged the project from the beginning (see haussamen.com). Recently, they answered every single one of his questions, and he had many. That type of response goes a long way toward reassuring doubters.

     In his reporting, Heath discloses that he is married to Rep. Sarah Silva, a Las Cruces Democrat who supports the project because it could raise economic boats in southern New Mexico. They must have some interesting conversations at the dinner table. Another supporter is fellow Democratic Rep. Nathan Small, who married Silva and Haussamen. I’ve long considered Silva and Small among the Legislature’s most sensible people on this and other issues. The two are pushing Project Jupiter to be greener and more transparent.

     And that, I think, is the right move. These data centers will be built somewhere because it’s economic suicide to not build them, but we have some leverage.

     Ask yourselves if you want your kids and grandkids to find jobs in New Mexico or keep leaving the state. If we want them here, we will figure out how to make data centers work, for the companies and for us.

© 2026 NEW MEXICO NEWS SERVICES  5/25/26

New Mexico reckons with economic impact of federal job cuts

By Sherry Robinson

All She Wrote

     A recent headline tells us that New Mexico lost 2,700 federal jobs between March 2025 and March 2026. It’s actually worse than that.

     Late last year the number of unemployed federal employees hit 2,900 and stayed at that level for months, pushing up our unemployment rate. 

     I spent years at newspapers where we reported – and lamented – the loss of even 100 jobs in this state. These numbers are breathtaking on a lot of levels. 

     First, about one in 20 jobs in New Mexico is, or was, in the federal government. A dollar spent by a federal employee has the same economic impact as a dollar spent by anybody else. But we now have thousands of newly unemployed who are not eating out, not buying furniture, who struggle to make their house payment. Second, the kinds of jobs we lost should give everyone pause. And third, the government refuses to say how many workers it’s fired.

     Let’s take a closer look. Beginning in February 2025, 800 federal workers were out of work here. That rose to 1,000 in March and April and increased steadily through September to 1,600. In October there was no jobs report from the state Department of Workforce Solutions because federal funding was suspended. When the report returned in November, the number had soared to 2,900, a 9.8% cut in the federal workforce over the previous year. The totals stayed high through January and February of this year and stood at 2,500 in April.

     More than half the losses were in Albuquerque, but Rio Rancho, Las Cruces, Alamogordo, Clovis, Carlsbad and Farmington also took hits.

     Who did we lose? Forest rangers, park rangers, fire fighters, scientists, land managers, wildlife refuge managers, fish biologists, weather forecasters, and nuclear safety managers, to name a few. 

     A lot of jobs disappeared from land agencies like the National Park Service, which protects the crown jewels of the tourist industry. Some of the chaotic and haphazard firings of the so-called Department of Government Efficiency were reversed in court, and some agencies, finding themselves too thinly staffed, did some rehiring. But thousands of jobs went away.

     Last year, Carlsbad Caverns National Park (visitation: 400,000) lost more than 20% of its employees, according to media reports and members of Congress. That led to the abrupt cancellation of guided cavern tours and after-school programs, as well as reduced hours at the visitor center. 

     The U.S. Forest Service lost a quarter of its employees last year, many of them red-card holders, which means they’re certified for firefighting. We know that Gila National Forest, Sacramento Ranger District and Cibola National Forest lost trail and campground maintenance crews.

     Wrote Justin Schatz, of Silver City: “Those recently terminated were not the ‘fat’ or ‘excess’ that the administration says it is targeting. We were the boots on the ground, the ones sweating and toiling under the New Mexico sun, with many of us getting paid just enough to make ends meet.”

The Deseret News wrote this month that New Mexico lost 855 public lands jobs; of those, 481 were in the Forest Service. The Bureau of Land Management is down 108 people, and the Fish and Wildlife Service, 78. Most affected: wildlife management.

     We are without these people going into tourist season and as natural disasters get worse each year because of climate change. Those who stay are stretched and demoralized. A friend who spent his career in the Forest Service said he saw tears day after day. Another friend emails from Lincoln County that the mountain air was smoky, and she could smell smoke. Who is protecting her and her neighbors?

     The situation is similar at Social Security, IRS and Veterans Affairs offices. Heavy layoffs lit up phone lines in congressional offices, as wait times grew longer and constituents couldn’t get services. Sen. Ben Ray Lujan and Rep. Gabe Vasquez warned that the Veterans Affairs Department was decimated. Many who lost jobs were themselves veterans.

     Elon Musk promised that his DOGE would eliminate $2 trillion in fraud and waste but then whittled that number to $175 billion, offering little proof. Recent analysis indicates that DOGE will cost money. Just two of many reasons: It gutted the IRS, all but encouraging tax evasion, and hamstrung the revenue-generating national parks. Agencies had to replace some fired workers at a higher cost and couldn’t replace those with high-demand skills. Then there’s the higher risks of wildfire managed by a skeletal Forest Service.

     Finally, there are the wasted skills of former employees who show up as statistics in unemployment reports.