Santa Fe New Mexican: N.M. senators, Stansbury push for Chaco Canyon protections, highlight job cuts

ALBUQUERQUE — Federal lawmakers held a series of events Friday to highlight how federal layoffs have impacted public lands and urge the Trump administration to reverse course on plans to allow drilling near Chaco Canyon.
“Mr. President, you once said that leadership is measured by what we choose to protect,” Picuris Pueblo Lt. Gov. Craig Quanchello said at a news conference. “Today, we are asking you to protect a place older than the idea of America itself.”
U.S. Sen. Martin Heinrich hosted the Friday morning public lands roundtable, and he was joined at an afternoon news conference on Chaco Canyon by Sen. Ben Ray Luján and Rep. Melanie Stansbury. The three Democrats were joined by pueblo leaders who oppose oil and gas drilling at what they regard as a sacred site where their ancestors lived.
“The pueblos have invited [Interior] Secretary [Doug] Burgum to visit Chaco with us, to see what his predecessors saw, and to understand why these protections matter,” Santa Ana Pueblo Gov. Myron Armijo said at the news conference, which was held at the Indian Pueblo Cultural Center. “We have yet to receive a response.”
The Trump administration earlier this month announced it would initiate formal meetings with Native American tribes in the Southwestern U.S. about the proposal to undo a ban on oil and gas development across a 10-mile zone around Chaco Canyon National Historical Park enacted by Biden administration Interior Secretary Deb Haaland, who is currently running for governor of New Mexico.
During a meeting with pueblo leaders earlier in the day, Heinrich said, he learned there has not been meaningful consultation between them and federal officials. The Bureau of Land Management sent letters to tribal leaders in October stating the bureau would conduct an environmental assessment of the proposal.
“Can you imagine the cruelty?” Stansbury said. “The insensitivity? The stupidity of an administration contacting tribal leaders, as they are trying to figure out how they are going to feed their people and balance their budgets and keep their public safety in order, to tell them that they are going to take away their most sacred lands and open it up for private oil and gas drilling?”
Earlier in the day, Heinrich led a discussion at Rio Grande Nature Center State Park on the impacts of staffing cuts at the U.S. Forest Service and the National Park Service.
As fire season looms in the distance and drought stretches on, the Forest Service is treating roughly half the acreage it has treated in years past, Heinrich said. And though New Mexico is taking as much state funding as it can get to fill the gap, the state’s four national forests — besides Carson National Forest, which is the “most active and most proactive” — are “lagging way behind,” said State Forester Laura McCarthy.
“There’s just not enough people to plan those, to hire contractors, to do all the things that we need to do,” Heinrich said. “We’ve all been through Hermits Peak and Calf Canyon and all these other fires, and we know what we need to do now, but we’ve been hamstrung.”
Reutersreportedin July the Forest Service had lost 15% of its workforce. This has led people who work in other areas — like recreation — to start working on active management, McCarthy said.
At least 10 prescribed pile burns are planned for the Santa Fe National Forest through the winter, according to theForest Service, with burns also planned on the Carson. And the Santa Fe Mountains project — a collaborative effort between the Forest Service and the Greater Santa Fe Fireshed Coalition — is aiming to treat 38,680 acres in the forest over 10 to 15 years.
New Mexico has been utilizing the Good Neighbor Authority — which allows the Forest Service to enter into agreements with state forestry agencies to do forest management work — as much as possible to “basically staff up the state to do the jobs of the federal government,” McCarthy said.
However, over the summer the Trump administrationrescindedwhat’s known as the “roadless rule,” which prohibits road construction and logging on national forest lands without roads, opening up more land to logging.
“The direction from Washington has been ‘cut big trees’ rather than ‘eliminate fuel,’ ” Heinrich said.
Fire mitigation efforts impact the small business community, said Nick Streit, owner of the Taos Fly Shop and executive director of Friends of the Rio Grande del Norte National Monument. Streit said businesses like his will feel the impact of staff cuts that impede fire management next year, noting he worries about a climate change-spurred event posing a threat to his business.
At the National Parks Service — which had lost almost a quarter of its permanent staff as of July, theNew York Timesreported — superintendents in New Mexico now have to oversee multiple parks each, said retired National Parks Service superintendent Dennis Vasquez.
The staffing shortage is the top issue Vasquez has heard about from his colleagues, he said, and it has led to frustration, burnout and people quitting. And recruitment for open jobs has gotten more difficult, he said, in part due to how lack of funding and staffing has impacted the agency’s Youth Conservation Corps Program, which often serves as a pipeline to permanent employment.
“We’ve seen those programs change lives and make a big impact on lives, so for me, sadly, that’s one of the big kind of invisible impacts,” he said.
Wildlife refuges, meanwhile, are still feeling the impact of the government shutdown, which ended Nov. 12 after 43 days. Deb Caldwell, executive director of Friends of Bosque del Apache National Wildlife Refuge, said Bosque del Apache currently has only enough funding to pay salaries and keep the lights on.
Even before the shutdown, the refuge’s budget had dropped from $2 million to between $1.4 million and $1.5 million, Caldwell said.
During the shutdown, the Socorro refugecanceledits annual Festival of the Cranes, citing delayed preparations due to staff furloughs.
“Places like our refuges are super important to the areas in which we live, especially if it’s rural,” Caldwell said. “And it’s not just us that it affects; it affects small businesses and people who have hotels and gift shops and things like that.”