Santa Fe New Mexican: Heinrich presses top Forest Service officials for meeting on Pecos protections

The yard signs and bumper stickers in western San Miguel County show the anxiety mining will someday return remains red-hot months after the Trump administration’s rollback of protections for the Upper Pecos watershed.
Recently, U.S. Sen. Martin Heinrich announced he secured a commitment from a top U.S. Forest Service official during a committee meeting to host a public forum meeting in the Pecos area on the issue. However, it is unclear when such a meeting could occur.
A 165,000-acre area in the Upper Pecos watershed was temporarily closed to mining by former Biden administration Interior Secretary Deb Haaland while the Forest Service considered a longer, 20-year withdrawal. But the agency, which manages the majority of the land in question, alerted the Bureau of Land Management earlier this year it wanted to cancel that withdrawal application, according to a BLM New Mexico spokesperson. A public meeting to discuss the withdrawal was canceled.
Terrero, about 10 miles north of Pecos, was a major mining center in the early 20th century, and concerns have long simmered in the Pecos area over the potential environmental impact if mining were to return. Mining in the Pecos Valley has been contentious for decades, especially after contamination from abandoned mines got into the water, killing fish downstream from the spill, in the 1990s. Signs and bumper stickers with the words “Terrero Mine” in bold, a red line slashing across it signaling opposition, are a frequent sight in the area.
Local and federal officials have also expressed opposition to renewed mining. Members of New Mexico’s congressional delegation have reintroduced the Pecos Watershed Protection Act this year to permanently withdraw the Upper Pecos watershed from mining, but the bill has not advanced in the Republican-controlled Congress.
During a U.S. Senate Energy and Natural Resources subcommittee hearing on Dec. 2, Heinrich, a New Mexico Democrat, pressed U.S. Forest Service Acting Associate Chief Christopher French on the matter. French did appear to commit to a community meeting in the Pecos Valley.
“Your agency even canceled a public forum that would have allowed for discussion ... of the withdrawal and given the community a chance to share their views with the Forest Service,” Heinrich said. “Would you commit to coming out to the Pecos Valley and meeting with that community and having a public meeting?”
“Of course, and we’ll have a conversation around any of those issues,” French said.
“We know that the comments that we received on the withdrawal itself overwhelmingly supported the withdrawal, but across the agency, the administration’s policy is to preserve the spaces we have right now for future development until such time that we understand what our current mineral development is across the agency,” French added.
In 2019, filing dozens of mining claims, Comexico LLC, the Colorado subsidiary of Australian mining company New World Resources, announced plans to do exploratory drilling in the Pecos watershed, near Terrero, looking for gold, copper, zinc, lead and silver.
A representative of Comexico toldThe New Mexicanin April the company has not actively worked on the project for several years.
Past community meetingshave drawn high attendance and featured strong opposition. Ralph Lopez, Pecos’ mayor-elect, said the Trump administration’s decision to cancel the protections for watershed mining caused concern in the community.
“We don’t want any mining. We were born and raised here,” Lopez said. “We’ll fight tooth and nail to keep anything like that from happening, and I’m pretty much sure I speak for pretty much all of the people of Pecos and the surrounding areas.”
The U.S. Department of Agriculture, which includes the Forest Service, did not respond to an inquiry Friday about a potential public forum on the matter.