Daniel Herrera Carbajal
ICT
In March, Gila River took out 10,000 acre-feet of their allotted water from Lake Mead after the Trump administration’s Unleashing American Energy executive order froze money for any program related to the Inflation Reduction Act. The act, which Congress passed during the Biden Administration in 2022, allocated money for tribes and states in exchange for giving up some of their shares of Colorado River water.
The Trump administration later unfroze the Inflation Reduction Act funds that would be used for water conservation projects and to build canals. The act allocated around $4 billion to compensate tribes, states and other organizations to not take water out of the Colorado River to use to generate revenue like crops.
Gila River Governor Stephen Roe Lewis wrote a letter to the Interior Secretary Doug Burgum on Feb. 11 before removing Colorado River water from Lake Mead.
“We have given the department every opportunity to avoid what could be a calamitous break in our longstanding partnership, with terrible consequences for the entire basin,” he said.
If water levels continue dropping, hydroelectric dams on the Colorado River will not be able to generate electricity. But the compensation to not take water out of the river has been seen as a short-term solution by many experts, including Mark Squillace, a professor of law at the University of Colorado Boulder who specializes in natural resource law.
“My concern is that the Biden administration seemed to be focused on short-term buyouts of water consumption,” he said. “I just don’t think that kind of approach is sustainable. What we need on the Colorado River are permanent reductions in consumption, and so spending a lot of money to temporarily buy out the rights of people to use all of their water, right, is just not something that is going to solve the problem.”
Thirty tribes have rights to the Colorado River. The river is a resource, but for the Zuni Pueblo it is the source of life.
“For the Zuni people, the Colorado River is really important because the river and the Grand Canyon are our homeland. That’s where the Zunis emerged,” said Councilman of Zuni Pueblo Edward Wemytewa.
The Colorado River has important cultural significance to each tribe that has water rights to it, but the Colorado River compact that outlined how the river would be divided was not drafted in consultation with tribes.
“Laws were created by the US governments, by the US agencies, and during those times, the federal government, in the name of public interest, they started delineating territories. They start creating laws about water usage, water compacts,” said Wemytewa. “Well, in those earlier years, when the laws were being developed and implemented, the Zuni was not at the table. Many Native peoples weren’t at the table.
“Under federal law, those tribes have the right to take their water, usually in priority over everybody else, because the date of priority for Indian water rights is the date of their reservations, which is typically within the 19th century,” said Squillace. “So those water rights tended to date back before other non-Indian users.
“Those are legal rights that they are entitled to. And so one of the things I’ve suggested in my article is that maybe we should think about closing down the river to new appropriations. Why are we continuing to appropriate new water rights when we have this crisis and we have early water rights from Native American tribes that are currently legal but not being utilized for a number of different reasons?” he said.
The current compact being used was created in 1922, and it divided the river into two basins – upper and lower.
Each basin was allotted no more than 7.5 million acre-feet of water per year, equaling 15 million acre-feet of water each year. Mexico was also allocated 1.5 million acre-feet a year. The amount of water the river produces was vastly overestimated at the time of the compact’s creation.
“At the time that they negotiated the compact, it was thought that there was maybe 18 million acre feet of water on an annual basis in the river, which turned out not to be true,” said Squillace.
Currently, the Colorado River is producing about 12.5 million acre-feet a year. A vast over-allocation of water has led to states battling over water and how to use it.
Squillace proposed a new Colorado River compact. It proposes to update states’ water usage laws and to bring tribal nations into the conversation.
“I’ve suggested that maybe we could come up with a new compact, which would look very different from the current compact, but would basically be an agreement among the states to modernize their water laws,” he said. “Right now we have a number of principles in the various state water laws that I think allow for, I don’t want to call them wasteful, but at least inefficient uses. We could increase our efficiency in terms of the amount of water that we use if we sort of refined what we call beneficial use. There’s a principle in western water law that you only get as much water as can be beneficially used.”
For the Zuni Pueblo, a history of strong-handed negotiations and a lack of knowledge of a government system that is not their own led to signing deals that did not benefit them.
“When there were any land settlements or water settlements, tribes were never provided attorneys.Tribes were never given a heads up, They were never given funding to educate ourselves as Indigenous peoples,” Wemytewa said. “We are stewards of the water. We find the corn seed central. The corn seed is central. In fact, our abstract name is Children of Corn because we’re farmers, we’re agricultural people. What agricultural people would give up their water rights? What agricultural people would give up their watershed? We didn’t have much choice.”
Tribes have priority over everyone else when it comes to their water rights pertaining to the Colorado River, which means they must have a voice in the conversation.
“There are 30 Native American tribes with water rights along the Colorado River. And it may be impractical to basically have all 30 tribes represented during negotiations. We’ve got seven states, two countries, 30 tribes. That would be a very difficult kind of negotiation,” he said.
“But you could certainly have some representatives. The reason it’s tricky is that not all tribes agree on the best approach here. And so it’s important that we treat individual Native American tribes as people who can have their own views that might be different from other tribes. And so how do you ensure fair representation of all the tribal views without actually putting all those tribes at the table during negotiation?”
For Wemytewa, a new compact with tribes involved is necessary.
“Today, as a tribal leader, I submit comments to federal agencies, whether it’s the National Park Service or the Bureau of Land Management or (U.S. Geological Survey). We submit our comments trying to provide guidance to the federal agencies that you have to consider that you can’t continue to open up the lands. You cannot continue to give away water, because by doing so, you continue to remove Indigenous peoples from their aboriginal lands to make room for other people, other cultures.”
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After weeks of uncertainty, two tribal colleges have been told they can hire back all employees who were laid off as part of the Trump administration’s deep cuts across the federal workforce in February, part of a judge’s order restoring some federal employees whose positions were terminated.
Haskell Indian Nations University in Kansas and Southwestern Indian Polytechnic Institute, widely known as SIPI, in New Mexico lost about 70 employees in mid-February amid widespread staffing cuts to federal agencies. While most of the nation’s 37 tribal colleges and universities are chartered by American Indian tribes, Haskell and SIPI are not associated with individual tribes and are run by the federal government.
About 55 employees were laid off and 15 accepted offers to resign, according to a lawsuit filed last month by tribes and students. The colleges were forced to cancel or reconfigure a wide range of services, from sports and food service to financial aid and classes. In some cases, instructors were hired by other universities as adjuncts and then sent back to the tribal colleges to keep teaching.
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It was not clear this week when and if the workers would return, whether the employees who resigned would also be offered their jobs back, or if the government would allow colleges to fill vacancies. Both colleges said some employees had turned down the offers.
The Bureau of Indian Education, which runs the colleges, declined to answer questions except to confirm the laid-off workers would be offered jobs with back pay to comply with a judge’s order that the government reverse course on thousands of layoffs of probationary employees. But the agency also noted the jobs would be available “as the White House pursues its appeals process,” indicating possible turmoil if an appeals court reinstates the layoffs.
Both colleges said the bureau also has refused to answer most of their questions.
SIPI leaders were told last week that the positions were being restored, said Adam Begaye, chairman of the SIPI Board of Regents. The 270-student college lost 21 employees, he said, four of whom decided to take early retirement. All but one of the remaining 17 agreed to return, Begaye said.
The chaos has been difficult for those employees, he said, and the college is providing counseling.
“We want to make sure they have an easy adjustment, no matter what they’ve endured,” Begaye said.
Related: How a tribe won a legal battle against the federal Bureau of Indian Education and still lost
The chairman of Haskell’s Board of Regents, Dalton Henry, said he was unsure how many of the 50 lost employees were returning. Like SIPI, Haskell was forced after the layoffs to shift job responsibilities and increase the workload for instructors and others.
Haskell was reviewed by accreditors in December, and Henry said he was worried how the turmoil would affect the process. Colleges and universities must be accredited to offer federal and state financial aid and participate in most other publicly funded programs.
Henry declined to discuss his thoughts on the chaos, saying there was nothing the college could do about it.
“Whatever guidance is provided, that’s what we have to adhere to,” he said. “It’s a concern. But at this point, it’s the federal government’s decision.”
The Bureau of Indian Affairs declined to make the presidents of the two colleges available for interviews.
Tribal colleges and universities were established to comply with treaties and the federal trust responsibility, legally binding agreements in which the United States promised to fund Indigenous education and other needs. But college leaders argue the country has violated those contracts by consistently failing to fund the schools adequately.
In the federal lawsuit claiming the Haskell and SIPI cuts were illegal, students and tribes argued the Bureau of Indian Education has long understaffed the colleges. The agency’s “well-documented and persistent inadequacies in operating its schools range from fiscal mismanagement to failure to provide adequate education to inhospitable buildings,” plaintiffs claimed.
Related: Tribal college campuses are falling apart. The U.S. hasn’t fulfilled its promise to fund the schools
Sen. Jerry Moran and Rep. Tracey Mann, both Kansas Republicans, said before Trump took office that they plan to introduce a bill shifting Haskell from federal control to a congressional charter, which would protect the university from cuts across federal agencies such as the Bureau of Indian Education.
“[F]or the last few years the university has been neglected and mismanaged by the Bureau of Indian Education,” Moran said in a written statement in December. “The bureau has failed to protect students, respond to my congressional inquiries or meet the basic infrastructure needs of the school.”
The February cuts brought rare public visibility to tribal colleges, most of which are in remote locations. Trump’s executive orders spurred outrage from Indigenous communities and a flurry of national news attention.
“We’re using this chaos as a blessing in disguise to make sure our family and friends in the community know what SIPI provides,” said Begaye, the SIPI board president.
The uncertainty surrounding the colleges’ funding has left a lasting mark, said Ahniwake Rose, president and CEO of the American Indian Higher Education Consortium, which advocates for tribal colleges. But she added she was proud of how the schools have weathered the cuts.
“Indian country is always one of the most resourceful and creative populations,” she said. “We’ve always made do with less. I think you saw resilience and creativity from Haskell and SIPI.”
Contact editor Christina A. Samuels at 212-678-3635 or samuels@hechingereport.org.
This story about tribal colleges was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the Hechinger newsletter.
The post Tribal colleges win reprieve from federal staff cuts appeared first on The Hechinger Report.
Stewart Huntington
ICT
New Mexico officials are hoping that Native high school students celebrate their identity in upcoming graduation ceremonies under a new law securing their right to wear culturally significant clothing, accessories and objects during school events.
And spread the joy.
“We’re hoping to kind of run a campaign to some extent … to showcase native students,” Josett Monette, the state’s cabinet secretary for the Indian Affairs Department, told ICT. “We’re hoping we get some selfies or photos of students in their regalia as they do their different events towards the end of the year, and that we’re able to kind of highlight those” on official State of New Mexico social media feeds.
On March 19, Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham signed the legislation into law, ensuring students across New Mexico can freely express their cultural identity at school ceremonies.
“This legislation represents our commitment to honoring and respecting the rich cultural heritage of New Mexico’s Native communities,” said Lujan Grisham. “Every student deserves to celebrate their academic achievements in a way that honors their identity and traditions.”
The legislation passed unanimously through both chambers of the Legislature and took effect immediately after the governor signed it. New Mexico joins at least 18 other states that have enacted laws that enshrine Native students’ rights to express their cultural identities sartorially.
Education officials praised the new statute.
“(The bill) SB 163 is a significant step forward in honoring and respecting the cultural heritage of Native American students across New Mexico,” said Sec. Mariana Padilla of the New Mexico Public Education Department. “By ensuring their right to wear traditional regalia at school ceremonies, this bill affirms the importance of identity, culture, and self-expression of the nearly 40,000 Native American students enrolled in a public school across the state. Education should uplift and celebrate the rich traditions that make our communities stronger.”
Monette, a Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa Indians citizen, said the bill was the first one she had initiated in her year as secretary of the Indian Affairs Department that went through to become law – and that seeing it in the formal legal registry gave her a boost.
“Very excited to have gotten the bill through,” she said. “We felt it was appropriate to put this into law to ensure that the right (to wear culturally significant clothing) remained intact, and that there was no question as to whether or not students would be allowed to do that. … I’m hopeful that this just makes one of those steps a little bit easier for students to not have to worry about it.”
Students have often had to worry about it. Across the country and in New Mexico.
Last year in Farmington, New Mexico, a Hunkpapa Lakota student had her graduation cap – that she had adorned with a traditional feather plume – removed by school administrators during her graduation ceremony. The incident, caught on video, prompted outrage and a rebuke from the Navajo Nation Council.
“No student in any school should be prohibited from wearing regalia that signifies their cultural and spiritual beliefs,” the council said. “These actions are belittling, humiliating, and demeaning to the student and her family. There is no place for this type of behavior in our educational systems. The school officials owe an apology to the student and her family.”
The Native American Rights Fund, a leading legal advocacy organization in Indian Country, has made it a priority to fight for students’ rights to wear regalia.
Last year NARF released a help sheet for students and parents – and school administrators – to navigate the issue. “Many Tribal Nations recognize leadership achievements by bestowing the person who earned the honor an eagle feather or plume,” the guidelines state. “While tribal religions and spiritual practices vary from each other, in general, a Native person who wears a plume or eagle feather at a public event has done something amazing to show that they have the maturity to pray and care for themselves and others. … This guide shares steps to help high school graduates successfully wear eagle feathers during their commencement ceremony.”
The guidelines further urge parents to seek legal advice should schools balk at allowing cultural displays at school ceremonies – a consideration that the new law in New Mexico aims to render moot.
“There’s at least 18 other states that have a similar law in place,” said Monette. “And so we thought it was time for New Mexico to be part of that as well. I always say that New Mexico should be at the forefront of what’s going on in Indian country, and across the entire country.
“I think it’s going to be really exciting. I hope the students and the parents appreciate it. I’m hoping we see lots of students wearing their regalia for graduation.”
And sending selfies to the secretary of the Department of Indian Affairs.
The 18 other states with similar laws, according to the Native American Rights Fund, are: Alaska, Arizona, California, Colorado, Illinois, Kansas, Minnesota, Mississippi, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, North Carolina, North Dakota, Oklahoma, Oregon, South Dakota, Utah, and Washington.
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The billions of dollars approved by Congress to clean up abandoned oil and gas wells have been frozen as part of President Donald Trump’s sweeping cuts to government spending, creating concerns that the cleanup will be halted just as it’s getting started.
President Trump’s barrage of executive orders included a January directive called “Unleashing American Energy,” which, among other provisions, ordered that federal agencies stop distributing money appropriated by President Joe Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) and the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA).
The Trump administration titled this section of the order “Terminating the Green New Deal.” But in freezing this congressionally approved spending, the administration halted a program that paid for plugging and reclaiming so-called “orphaned” or abandoned oil and gas wells. The order stated that agencies should “immediately pause the disbursement of funds” from those two Biden laws. It set a 90-day deadline, upcoming in April, for agencies to review their spending programs and make sure that they align with the Trump administration’s goal of increasing U.S. energy production.
The orphaned well program, which was modeled on a North Dakota initiative, had been widely used by oil states, including several in the West.
The program — which set aside $4.7 billion, a historically large sum, for plugging wells — was distributed to states via grants from the Department of the Interior. In January, days before Trump took office, New Mexico announced that it would be receiving $5.5 million to clean up abandoned wells in the state. California also received a $9 million grant.
California, Colorado, Montana and New Mexico had each plugged over 100 orphaned wells using the Biden funds, according to an Interior Department report in 2024. Wyoming alone plugged 1,021 wells in just one year using federal grants.
As of last fall, the U.S. government had released over half a billion dollars in grants. Wells have been plugged in the people’s front yards, in national park areas and deep in the remote Alaskan wilderness. More than $3 billion are still left to be distributed, but previously available information about the grants appears to have been removed from the Interior Department’s website.
In response to questions from High Country News, an Interior Department spokesperson said that the grant program is “under review.”
“President Trump’s decisive actions are necessary steps to eliminate bureaucratic waste and refocus our agency on its core mission: serving the American people and managing our nation’s natural resources with integrity and efficiency,” the spokesperson said in a statement. “Orphaned wells negatively impact current and future oil and gas development activities and pose significant risk to national energy security and public safety.”
In addition to supporting jobs that address oil patch pollution, these federal dollars are used on wells that lack any owner to pay for reclamation. Left unplugged, such orphaned oil and gas wells leak huge amounts of methane into the atmosphere and can contaminate local water sources with salty water and benzene.
Now the future of that work is uncertain, in legal limbo alongside many of the Trump administration’s cost-cutting policies. The funding in question had already been appropriated by Congress, making it unclear that the Trump administration can indefinitely cancel it.
On March 20, more than 30 House Democrats sent a letter to Interior Secretary Doug Burgum, asking him to clear up the lingering confusion surrounding orphaned well funding and restart the grant program.
The funding “protects our communities, cleans up our environment, and builds our economy.”
“We have already begun to hear from IIJA funding recipients impacted by this pause who now face an uncertain future after DOI issued a stop work order on their orphaned well remediation projects,” the letter states.
The letter goes on to say that the Interior Department has issued no guidance on the funds’ status.
“We urge you to resume distribution of this Congressionally directed funding immediately,” the letter stated. “It protects our communities, cleans up our environment, and builds our economy.”
ORPHANED WELLS represent the final stage in what ProPublica recently described as the oil industry’s “ playbook”: When oil wells are no longer productive, large companies sell them off to smaller companies and thereby shed their obligation to plug those wells.
The increasingly marginal wells change hands, eventually landing with operators who lack the financial means to plug them. And when these companies go bankrupt, the wells become orphaned, meaning that the plugging costs then fall on American taxpayers.
The Biden administration’s infrastructure law was the first significant federal attempt to address the growing problem of orphaned wells across the United States, although the funding it provided paled in comparison to the scale of the problem.
The Interior Department estimates that there are about 157,000 documented orphaned oil and gas wells nationwide. This figure is likely a dramatic undercount: The Environmental Protection Agency stated in an April 2021 report that there could be as many as 3.4 million abandoned wells nationally.
“Undocumented orphaned wells may emit nearly 63 million grams of methane per hour into the atmosphere,” according to a November 2024 report, “the equivalent of over 3.6 million gasoline-powered passenger cars driven per year.”
Many state regulators are aware that their financial requirements for oil and gas operators are are aware of this pattern and struggle to prevent it.
Several state oil regulators stated this explicitly in a 2024 survey conducted by the Interstate Oil and Gas Compact Commission (IOGCC), a quasi-governmental body that represents dozens of oil states. The documents were obtained via a records request by Fieldnotes, an industry watchdog, and shared with High Country News.
“Yes, this is the common life of a well,” regulators from Louisiana said, referring to the pattern of marginal wells being passed along to smaller companies.
Utah regulators agreed: “It is definitely a problem when wells are transferred to ‘poor’ operators.”
The plugging program was supposed to address these dysfunctional state programs, primarily by providing money. The Interior Department released its first round of grants in 2023, offering up $658 million to 26 states, including most of the oil states in the West.
The subsequent grants were intended to actually push states to fix their well-plugging programs and require that operators submit more money up front — enough to ensure that the industry and not the public ends up paying for the cost of plugging.
Known as regulatory improvement grants, these pools of funding required that states demonstrate higher financial assurance standards, increase scrutiny on well transfers, improve their plugging standards or show other reforms to their orphaned well regulatory regimes.
These grants essentially became the sole tool for the federal government to incentivize tougher state regulations. But the attempt immediately ran into headwinds: Oil states pushed back on these conditions. Some of this occurred via the IOGCC, which collaborated with the federal government on the rollout of the infrastructure law. This included initiatives to reduce orphaned well numbers, program implementation and data collection. Public documents show the inter-state commission lobbied to keep the federal guidelines as weak as possible.
“Undocumented orphaned wells may emit nearly 63 million grams of methane per hour into the atmosphere.”
In a meeting of the Texas Railroad Commission in May 2022, Commissioner Wayne Christian – also an appointee to the IOGCC – said that he was working to remove the requirements from the federal grants.
“I’m part of the negotiation with IOGCC on the dollars coming down,” Christian said. “The Interior Department kind of have slowed things down, because all of a sudden, surprise, surprise, they decided they wanted to tell us how to do our work. And so we’re kind of fighting back on that.”
Regulatory improvement grants would have made available an additional $40 million per state. Now the future of those grants and the improvement incentives are in jeopardy, though some groups are challenging the legality of Trump’s decision to freeze funds that had already been appropriated by Congress and passed into law.
Several environmental groups and many Democratic states have filed lawsuits against the Trump administration, seeking to release the unspent funds from the Infrastructure and Inflation Reduction acts, the Biden administration’s landmark spending bills.
“The Trump Administration has continued to block funds needed for our domestic energy security, transportation, and infrastructure provided under the IRA and IIJA,” said California Attorney General Rob Bonta in a statement in February, after filing an injunction alongside 23 Democratic attorney generals, attempting to halt the administration’s funding cuts.
Bonta’s statement noted that the administration was blocking funding that “creates well-paying jobs while simultaneously reducing harmful pollution.”
The post Trump halts historic orphaned well-plugging program appeared first on High Country News.
A previous version of this article appeared on Working Class Storytelling, a Substack by the author.
Courtney McCary-Squyres was going a bit stir-crazy. It was the pandemic and she was a mom of four, including newborn twins. She had to get outside.
She set her eyes on container gardening, figuring that she could be out in the New Mexico sunshine and “put some seeds in a pot with the kids.”
What she and her children put into those first pots grew, but so did Courtney’s understanding of food, food systems and politics. Fast forward to today, this is how she and a group of neighbors ended up at New Mexico’s State Capitol building in Santa Fe with folders of policy memos under their arms.
Courtney taught herself about gardening the way many of us now learn things: the internet. She read and researched, and as her front and back yards slowly turned into a small farm, she became familiar with terms like “soil health” and “cultivars.” She documented her progress on Instagram.
As her interest grew, she headed to her local farmer’s market in Alamogordo, a desert town of 31,000 in the Tularosa Basin and the Otero County seat. The Holloman Air Force Base had brought Courtney and her husband here, and the area was so beautiful that they decided to stay.
The farmer’s market was “smaller than expected, and consisted of more craft than food vendors,” says Courtney. She began to wonder why, in this rural area, it was so hard to find fresh, locally grown food. The next time she visited the market, she brought five bundles of bok choy from her garden to share.
Alamogordo is a working-class town. Because of its proximity to three military bases, lots of veterans live here. Like many places in New Mexico, housing costs have skyrocketed and rent is taking up a bigger portion of locals’ paychecks, making family’s food purchases—and particularly the quality of food—dwindle. As a result, 16.5% of Otero County’s population is food insecure, higher than both the state and national averages. In the county, 19% of residents live below the poverty line, including 28% of those under age 18 and 13% of those 65 or older.
Food is often the first thing a family skimps on when facing tough budgets; you can’t pay half the light bill, but you can cut back on groceries.
Courtney also saw that Alamogordo neighborhoods had a lot of empty lots. “I think a lot of people bought here when things were less expensive, and just left the houses when they moved away. Or maybe they left houses to family members who didn’t end up utilizing them,” she says, pointing out that houses frequently catch fire or fall into disrepair, leaving the city to bulldoze them.
Seeing the blight and witnessing the food insecurity around her, Courtney thought: Is there anything more our local government could do to address these needs?
Courtney set out to get the Alamogordo city government to respond. In late 2022, she created a petition asking the city to dedicate empty land for fresh food production and help foot the bill. She started with her friends, asking them to sign on, and then asked her growing Facebook following to do so as well. She tackled the petition drive systematically, the way you might lay out a garden bed.
“We set a goal of 500 signatures, because that feels big and representative in a small town,” she says. “I asked my friends to share it, then they asked theirs. We formed a committee and started knocking on doors and going to local events to get signatures.”
They called themselves With Many Hands and they called the campaign Public Land for Food. They set up meetings with the local government and asked for commitments to the project. By October 2023, petition in hand, she and the team were ready to ask the Alamogordo Parks & Recreation department to provide the land.
With Many Hands formed a leadership committee of people closest to the problem: Working-class people who live in the neighborhoods that were food deserts. Courtney knew from growing a garden at home that food production—like community organizing—wasn’t something she could do alone. So she began calling the people who had signed the petition, asking them to volunteer, attend meetings and get involved.
“Through the petition, a lot of meetings, and persistent emails, we got our garden,” Courtney says. “We got our public land.”
The first garden is now growing on Maryland Avenue in the Chihuahuita neighborhood—an under-resourced, historically Black and Brown neighborhood just south of downtown Alamogordo. In January 2024, With Many Hands celebrated a ribbon cutting ceremony at the site, and a few weeks later hosted their first community planting day.
Importantly, the group secured a Memorandum of Understanding with the city, allowing them to share expenses like the water bill and other infrastructure needs. They host regular community workdays and open meetings to organize and plan. “We are not a budget line in the parks and recreation budget yet, but hopefully soon,” says Courtney. (Full disclosure: the author is employed by Addition Collective Action Fund, which supports community organizing efforts across the country, including With Many Hands.)
The project has rapidly expanded since. A church offered up an additional lot. Alamogordo MainStreet, a local downtown economic development nonprofit, contributed raised beds to garden in a downtown alleyway. They even secured a corner of a public park in Tularosa, 15 miles up U.S. Route 54. Today, they have developed three community gardens in Alamogordo and one in Tularosa, with about 100 volunteers participating in some way throughout the year.
The group refuses to lock the gardens or have limitations on who or how much someone can harvest. Volunteers also deliver produce to the homes of people unable to access the gardens. “Sometimes people ask me if they can harvest vegetables even if they haven’t volunteered,” says Courtney, “And I tell them that harvesting is volunteering, because it’s all a cycle and all the parts matter. If we don’t pick the fruit, the plant will die.”
“People say: I thought you all were gardening,” says Courtney, laughing, “And I say: We are!”
But tending a garden meant to address food insecurity takes more than just weeding and watering. In Alamogordo, it means organizing people and power, too.
“I never imagined myself getting involved in political work,” Courtney says. “I was really jaded, like a lot of Americans.”
In just five years, her journey from wanting to learn how to garden to drive three and a half hours to the state capital to meet with her representatives has been a whirlwind.
On February 21, with her family and other With Many Hands volunteers, Courtney joined about 150 hunger advocates from across the state for Hunger Action Day at the Roundhouse (the nickname for the state capitol building).
It was their moment to make their case to state representatives about passing H.B.229—the New Mexico Grown Approved Supplier Program—which would provide $430,000 in state funds to help working-class households in New Mexico become small-scale food producers—even allowing them to sell their harvests to the Alamogordo Public Schools or at the local farmer’s market. She wasn’t able to get meetings with her lawmakers, but she did manage to track them down in the halls of the Roundhouse. “I told them about how small-scale farmers in Otero County could be the key to reducing food insecurity and increasing fresh, local food, but that we need their help.”
Courtney has learned that all soil can be regenerated with a little work and everything needs cultivation. She started off seeing a community problem and dug around to find other people who also cared, planting the seeds for how their local government could help.
Through this organizing she has experienced both the limitations—the red tape, the bureaucracy—and the possibilities of government. Turning those blighted properties into thriving green community spaces has made her even more sure that, with persistence and elbow grease, regular people could get the government to work for them.
Last fall, With Many Hands held a Food and Housing Summit to get working-class people together to talk about food, housing and other local every-day-people needs.
The group made endorsements of candidates running for local office and U.S. Congress, and then canvassed for these candidates across their communities. Their support helped push Rep. Gabe Vasquez (D-02) and State Rep. Sarah Silva (D-53) to victories in narrow-margin races.
“We had learned that we need to have people in office who are going to support what we need and help us with the solutions,” says Courtney. She and her fellow gardeners felt that they needed to help set the agenda for what they want their elected officials to address, otherwise “they’ll never talk about food or food systems.”
When met with skepticism about mixing politics with gardening, she reminds her neighbors of the successful petition drive they held to leverage their people power and show their ability to their local government—and how they now have four overflowing gardens. “We’ve shown that with enough people, enough pressure, things can get done.”
Cucumbers, zucchini, basil, figs and nectarines. It just takes a group of people and a bit of work. Many hands.
The post The New Mexico Mom Growing Political Power From a Community Garden appeared first on Barn Raiser.
A product of the New Deal, Kit Carson was founded in 1944 to bring electricity to rural northern New Mexico. Today, there are 832 rural distribution co-ops nationwide.
In general, rural co-ops rely more on coal and have moved more slowly toward decarbonization than large investor-owned utilities. But that’s changing, with Kit Carson leading the charge. Co-op members worried about climate change are leveraging the distinctly democratic governing structures of rural distribution co-ops to encourage decarbonization. Robin Lunt, chief commercial officer at Guzman Energy, Kit Carson’s current energy supplier, called co-ops “a great bellwether” for shifting public opinion.
“They’re much closer to their communities,” she said, “and to their customers, because their customers are their owners.”
But democracy is messy, and change can take years. Lunt praised Reyes’ patience and persistence at Kit Carson, while Reyes credits the committed, vocal co-op members who pushed it to be “good stewards … of the land and water.” Still, the job is far from done, as the co-op continues its struggle to phase out fossil fuels entirely.
REYES WAS RAISED IN TAOS, in a home powered by Kit Carson. He was with his mother one day when she paid her bill at the co-op office. A manager offered Reyes a job, which he took after graduating from New Mexico State in 1984 with a degree in electrical engineering. A decade later, he became CEO.
The early 2000s found the co-op trying to expand its offerings in rural areas and launch internet services. Tri-State was also trying to grow, and, in 2006, it announced plans to build a large coal plant in Kansas. It also wanted Kit Carson to extend its contract until 2050, adding another decade. It was around this time, Reyes said, that some members started asking “some pretty tough questions,” wondering why the co-op wasn’t investing more in renewables and whether it should extend its Tri-State contract.
Bobby Ortega, a retired community banker who was elected to the board in 2005, said that some board members, himself included, were hesitant to move away from fossil fuels. “When I got on this board, I was more leaning towards coal,” he said. “We were all raised on that kind of mentality (about) how our energy would be derived.”
Kit Carson’s long struggle paved the way for other co-ops to leave Tri-State. “That (trend) literally wouldn’t have happened, because nobody else would have had the guts to do it.”
Most of the board members had open minds, though, Ortega said, and Kit Carson refused to consent to an extension of the contract. The co-op wanted to end its relationship with Tri-State. But legally, the contract was still in force, and Kit Carson needed to find another energy provider before it could leave Tri-State.
In the following years, the co-op convened a committee of its members to discuss increasing solar energy usage. Tri-State, however, had set a 5% cap on locally generated electricity. In 2012, a group of Taoseños who shared an interest in renewable energy formed a nonprofit, Renewable Taos, and set a goal of 100% renewable energy for the area — a goal that was blocked by the Tri-State cap.
Renewable Taos reached out to Reyes to discuss the issue. As a co-op, Kit Carson needed buy-in across its service area — Taos and the Taos and Picuris pueblos, along with parts of Colfax and Rio Arriba counties — in order to make large-scale changes. But the co-op’s membership was hardly a monolith. “You had the liberals,” Reyes recalled, and the Renewable Taos members worried about climate change. But there had been an influx of “very wealthy but very conservative folks” in the Angel Fire ski area, and some of them were actively skeptical of renewables. Other Kit Carson members, notably those without much disposable income, feared that renewables would increase their monthly expenses.
Renewable Taos began attending Kit Carson’s board meetings with a new goal in mind: moving the entire service area to 100% renewable energy if the Tri-State contract was broken. “We didn’t align at all,” Reyes recalled. The board thought Renewable Taos, some of whose members were well-to-do retired scientists, were “kind of telling us dummies what to do,” he said, with a chuckle.
But Reyes and the board found a way to address that tension. “At the end of our first meeting (with Renewable Taos), I suggested to the board, well, if these guys are really going to help us and be critical, let’s give ’em some homework,” he said. The board asked Renewable Taos to visit every municipality Kit Carson served to build support for a joint resolution declaring that all co-op members were committed to fighting climate change.
Jay Levine, one of the original Renewable Taos members, still wonders if that was an attempt to put them off politely. Even so, the group accepted Reyes’ challenge, visiting every municipality in Kit Carson’s service area and answering questions about renewables and energy costs. “We talked to a lot of folks, and I think everywhere we went, they signed on,” he said. The process was aided by the falling cost of solar energy, which began reaching price parity with coal in the mid-2010s.
By 2014, every community in Kit Carson’s service area had signed on to Renewable Taos’ clean energy resolution. Two years later, after the co-op board finally found an alternate energy supplier, it broke its Tri-State contract for $37 million. Thanks to increased control over its power sources, Kit Carson reached an important goal in 2022: Renewable energy now provides 100% of the year-round daytime electrical needs of its more than 30,000 members.
Now, other co-ops, notably Delta-Montrose in western Colorado, are following Kit Carson’s lead and leaving Tri-State in the name of clean energy.
Levine, the Renewable Taos member, said that Kit Carson’s long struggle paved the way for other co-ops to leave Tri-State. “That (trend) literally wouldn’t have happened,” he said, “because nobody else would have had the guts to do it.”
THE CO-OP’S ACHIEVEMENT — hitting the 100% daytime clean energy milestone — is clearly significant, but it also needs to meet a New Mexico mandate that rural co-ops transition entirely to carbon-neutral electricity by 2050. One potential pathway involves a green hydrogen plant that the co-op has explored with the National Renewable Energy Lab, other government partners and the small village of Questa.
Conventional hydrogen production, which uses fossil fuels, contributes to climate change, but so-called green hydrogen can be produced by splitting water atoms with an electrolyzer powered by renewable energy. Proponents think widespread green hydrogen could reduce U.S. carbon dioxide emissions by 16% by mid-century. Despite all the investment and hype, however, few green hydrogen projects have broken ground. Still, Kit Carson has beaten the odds before; Reyes recalled that many people doubted that the co-op would ever reach its goal of meeting daytime energy needs with 100% renewables.
Kit Carson reached an important goal in 2022: Renewable energy now provides 100% of the year-round daytime electrical needs of its more than 30,000 members.
The Questa plant would be built at a shuttered molybdenum mine, which operated from the 1920s until 2014 and was a major source of both jobs and pollution. In 2005, a Chevron subsidiary, Chevron Mining, acquired Unocal, the mine’s parent company. Today, Chevron manages the remediation of what is now a Superfund site.
At a series of local meetings, water was the top concern for Kit Carson members. A variety of sources could be used to power the proposed plant, including water that Chevron is already pulling from the underground mine, treating, and sending to the Red River as part of its Superfund mitigation. Reyes is optimistic about the hydrogen project, describing it as the next phase of Kit Carson’s clean energy journey. But he noted that the future of the project, and of the co-op as a whole, ultimately lies in the hands of the co-op’s members. “They have been part of that equation the whole time,” he said.
Mary Catherine O’Connor is an award-winning reporter whose beats include climate change, energy, waste and recreation. Her work has appeared in Outside, The Guardian and NPR. She helps produce The Big Switch podcast.