Report from Santa Fe; Ray Powell

Thank you. Report from Santa Fe is made possible in part by grants from the members of the National Educational Association of New Mexico, an organization of professionals who believe that investing in public education is an investment in our state's economic future. And by a grant from the Healey Foundation, Tau's New Mexico. Hello, I'm Lorraine Mills, and welcome to report from Santa Fe. Our guest today is the Commissioner of Public Lands for the State of New Mexico, Ray Powell. Lorraine, thank you so much for the opportunity to visit with you and your listeners all across the state and viewers. Well, I love having you back because we have to talk a little about what the land office is and what it does. What I want people to understand that your work and your staff at the land office gather so much money from the state land, you're going to tell us about that, that goes into our permanent funds. And the more money you earn, the less the taxpayers have to pay. And this year, tell us you broke all

records. Thanks to our outstanding public servants that work at the state land office, their hard work and our partners across the state. We set a record year, $653 million. About $130 million more than we've ever earned before on these working trust lands, 13 million acres of land that we hold in trust for 22 beneficiaries. And that amounts to about $1 ,200 per family of four that our families don't have to pay an additional taxes to support our public schools, our universities, our hospitals. Very important institutions like the school for the visually impaired, the school for the deaf, Carried Tingly Hospital, our military institute. These are institutions that really make up the fabric of our state, $653 million from these working lands this year. And to think of it in terms of $1 ,200 for each family, that's in this economy that is such a gift. It is so important and to the families that

benefit from the programs supported by these beneficiaries. I was over visiting with the school for the visually impaired in Albuquerque, the main campus is in Alamogordo. And they treat in Albuquerque, young people aged two to six. And too many of those young people are there because of a condition called shaken baby syndrome. And in the past, these young people would be warehouseed in an institution and have no future whatsoever. Most of the 93 % of the income that supports that institution comes from these working lands. The teachers, the faculty, the staff there are phenomenal. And they bring these young people back and they get them back into families that love them and get them an education and really give them skills so that they have a future. That's one, you know, very salient instance of where these working lands make a

huge difference in our young people's lives. It also supports our public schools, universities and hospitals. I know Carrie Tingley is one of the ones, yeah. Phenomenal work that they do there and the people that just use the skills and the tools that they've acquired over a lifetime to change a young person's life, just phenomenal. It is just such an honor to work on their behalf. Now speaking of the skills and tools that a person has gained over a lifetime, I'd like to talk about your background just for a minute because you're a practicing veterinarian. You were a land commissioner from 1993 to 2002, then you were term limited out. You went from there to be the executive director of the VA's Caldera National Preserve. And then you went from there to be the four corners regional manager, what, or director, for the Jane Goodall Institutes Roots and Shoots Program, which is a program that I absolutely adore. And then with the last election, you got to resume your

work as land commissioner. So thank you. Well, thank you and I've been very, very fortunate and when I'm bright enough to keep my mouth shut. I learned something new every day from just incredible people that like Jane Goodall, who travels over 300 days a year. At age, what? 75 now? She's 78 and she's just phenomenal and again, she's an empowering leader, someone that really is working with young people in 140 countries around the globe doing service learning projects for the kids' communities, for the natural world, and for social justice issues all tied together. Through that work, I really found the opportunity to meet many of the world's leaders in economic development, renewable energy, agriculture, education, and I thought, why can't we use what they're doing around the globe back in New Mexico on our state trust lands? Why reinvent the wheel?

And that really inspired me to run again and take those relationships, take that knowledge and apply them back here in New Mexico. And as a result of our outstanding employees at the land office, they are terrific. We're doing that very, very thing. Well, we're going to jump right to that then because that's so exciting. I want to say one thing about Dr. Goodall, I've interviewed her with your help many, many times. She's so inspiring to think that at her age, she really would like to meet every child on the planet and she somehow transmits her vision to them and evokes their own vision and empowers them. So these are kids like getting shoes for Kenya and restoring habitat and whatever these kids think of, the organization empowers them to actually make a difference. It's quite phenomenal. Absolutely. And you've been very generous. Dr. Jane, the first opportunity she got to have an interview with you, she said, that's one of the best interviews I've ever done with anybody. Lorraine's read my book, she understands

it, she asks me the best questions. And as you know, each time she's been back to New Mexico, she's asked for the opportunity to visit with you. Well, I do anything to help her in her work. But let's go back to this thing called what, talk to me how you're taking this global movement, this international movement, and like you say, not reinventing the wheel, but taking what's been done all over the world and applying it here on our state trust lands. Well, one manifestation of that is there's a program that's working all over the globe and it's called conservation medicine or one medicine and it's a very simple idea. And it's just basically healthy plants, healthy animals, healthy people. And it's when we make decisions, running it through a filter of making sure that we're maintaining the health of the land so that we really support healthy ecosystems, healthy water sheds, really reduces the number of diseases that we're faced with and ensures that our people

have good food, good water, good air, and a quality place to live. So when we make decisions at the land office, we make sure that we make them based on generational decisions. Is this a good decision for future generations versus just doing something that might make us a few more dollars on the short term, but short changes future generations from having the same quality of life and what it also does ensures that we earn a lot more money over time because if that land remains healthy and productive, it's going to continue to support our families. If we mistreat that land, it won't support us, you know, just the basic contract, contract with the land. When we take care of the land, the land takes care of us. That's just the premise for everything we do. Well, it's such a Native American concept, you know, it's really good to, like you say, not reinvent the wheel, but go back to the original earth and how they treated the land. It's with respect

and love and consideration. And it really gets down to the way we need to treat each other, just the golden rule. Because we're leaving this as a legacy. We're here for such a short period of time that it's thinking about those next generations. How are they going to be able to live on this incredible place we call planet earth? Give us an example of using it because the negative example that comes from mine for me is the fate of God in the Atlantic Ocean. The oceans are so overfished. They're not even leaving enough to reproduce and to carry the species on, and yet hundreds of thousands of people depend on this species for food, and yet they're almost gone. Well, we have a strange situation here in New Mexico where we have a feral pig dish. And this was a species originally native to Siberia. These are

big animals. This is not a havelina. No, this is a pharaoh pig. Thousand pound animals. And somebody got the bright idea to bring them into the United States to use them on their property to get other people to pay them to hunt them. Well, the problem is anybody that's raised pigs and I did as a kid and treated them as a veterinarian. They're incredibly intelligent and incredibly adaptive. So somebody brought them into New Mexico. They escaped very quickly about eight, nine years ago. And they're now in 17 of our 33 counties. They are on a over a million acres of state trust land. And what they do is they go in areas where they're water and they really burrow into the ground, destroy the natural habitat. But they also act as vacuum cleaners on a necropsy of one of these animals recently. They found to 47 spade toads, lizards, snakes, ground nesting birds, small mammals. They eat them. They just go through and eat everything that's there.

They are very adaptive. They can live. It appears in virtually every life zone. And they carry, this is the serious thing. They carry 27 infectious diseases that can be transmitted to wildlife. That can be transmitted to domesticated animals. And that can be transmitted to us. And so what we're talking about is a real threat to our wildlife into Mexico. I know many of our your viewers love to hunt and fish. There's a real threat to that, real threat to our agricultural industry. And it's a threat to the public health. So we're working very closely with the environment department, the health department, the livestock board, a game and fish department to figure out how we take these, and they're wonderful creatures. They're just in the wrong place. They should not have been introduced here. And how we remove them from the Mexico before it's irreparable. How? Well, I know you're working on it, but I'm now really concerned. It's really difficult because they are so bright that if you

put a lot of stress on them and you hunt them, they travel in family units. If you kill the wrong one, the leader of the group, then they splinter into subgroups. And when they are stressed, their reproductive rate goes up, so they produce more. When they're stressed, they become nocturnal, so you can't find them. They are so bright, traveling these family units that they've been observed when they put a trap out, a very sophisticated trap to capture them. They'll sit and watch the trap for two or three day days. Then they'll send the lowest member of the family order there into the trap. Well, watch for a day or two to make sure that they're okay. And if they're okay, they then proceed in because it's usually food that's the bait. So we're talking about incredibly intelligent, adaptive creatures that unfortunately, members of our species weren't bright enough to leave them alone in Siberia that decided to bring them to New Mexico for their own self -interest. And it's a real problem. So we're

working with these other agencies trying to figure out how we work together to remove them from New Mexico. And so what is the name of this program that looks at, again, healthy plants, healthy animals, and healthy people? And it's going great, guns all over the rest of the globe just getting started in the United States. It's called One Health or Conservation Medicine. And what it is Elaine, Lorraine, excuse me, I've only known you for decades. It's a program that brings human medical doctors, veterinarians, epidemiologists, engineers, hydrologists together to work as one unit, one medicine, conservation medicine. And so we're working with all of our team members here in New Mexico to try and do just that. Now we're speaking today for our audience. I just want to run it. We're speaking with Ray Powell, who is our New Mexico land commissioner. I've got one more critter question for you because I love the Prairie

Chicken and they've been threatened and almost on the endangered species list. And then the land office has for years tried to shore up the species so that they're not endangered. These are the most incredible looking creatures. They do this mating dance where they've got big air bladders and feathered like horns that come up and they dance at these places called Lex. What is the state of our Prairie Chicken? Lorraine, we've been blessed with these incredible creatures, Prairie Chickens, and also adjoining that area, sand dune lizards to another amazing creature. What we've found is if we work with the oil and gas industry and with our agricultural communities that are utilizing this land, that we can figure out ways to continue to use it while we protect very specific and important areas where these animals need to reproduce and not only survive, but to flourish. So with the help of the Bureau of Land Management, one of our federal partners in the U .S. Fish and Wildlife Service, we set aside

250 ,000 acres of state trust land to facilitate the utilization of our natural resources in very specific and sensitive ways that allow us to maintain close attention to these species health while we use these natural resources that as we talked about earlier, support our public schools, universities, and hospitals. This is the largest effort of its kind in the United States to date, and it's because everybody got together from our environmental community to our oil and gas industry, to the agricultural community, state government, local communities, and said these species are important. We need to not only help them survive, but thrive, and we can do it if we do it intelligently so we can use the natural resources at the same time. So getting away from the circular firing squad approach and really saying, hey, let's think this out. That's a perfect example of

one medicine conservation medicine. Great, great. Now, one of the reasons I'm going to shift gears here, one of the reasons I had here, this week you're having a ribbon cutting, there's two things I want to talk about, I want to talk about Sumitomo coming here, and also the joint planning agreement that you did with Las Cruces, because everyone knows it's the economy stupid, and our, you know, our state needs whatever boosts the economy can get, and you are doing some really fascinating things. Tell us first about Sumitomo. Well, and if I could take one step back, because it fits into Sumitomo, our excellent employees at the land office, when we were at the land office before, worked with the local communities and developed the Sandia Science and Tech Park, and Innovation Park at our Mesa del Sol development, the largest infill project in North America, between those two projects, there are an additional 5 ,000 jobs that are paying significantly more than is paid in the rest of the community. Sumitomo is the next step.

One of our first tenets at the Sandia Science and Tech Park was a company that was generated and came from the intelligent folks at Sandia National Labs, a technology for photovoltaics in space. They were going to New Jersey, but thanks to our great staff, we kept them, they were our first tenets at the Sandia Science and Tech Park, the company is called Mcore, one of the best in the country. Well, Mcore has teamed with Sumitomo, a Fortune 500 company out of Japan that is in 30 countries around the globe, has 190 ,000 employees, produced some of the best products in the world, and they working with Mcore will be producing these wonderful products in Albuquerque, New Mexico, in the Science and Tech Park on state trust lands, paying a fair rate of return to our school kids, and we're going to be celebrating

that with the elder statesmen of that company from Japan in a couple of days and with our great scientists from Mcore. And representatives of the governors office will be there and Mayor Barry will be there. We've invited the land office. It's just wonderful. This is really something to celebrate. It is something and we've invited the governor's office and the mayor and our city councilors and our county commissioners because everybody's played a role in this. And what we're doing is sending a signal that this isn't partisan. Here in New Mexico, we're open for business. We want our citizens to have the best jobs that we can create and we want to earn as much money as we can for our school kids. And we're determined to make sure that the land office helps lead with our other governmental agencies the effort to become the best in the world using our intellectual capital to restore the health of the world. Why not send our kids around the globe to solve and heal the problems but have the checks come back to companies in New Mexico supporting our

tax base, supporting our education. That's what we're working so hard to do. And Silicon Valley isn't going to be anything compared to what we have by working with all our partners here in New Mexico to restore the health of the world using these technologies. So how long ago did you set up Mesa del Sol on St. Trust lands? When we were at the land office before, the largest infill project in North America, 13 ,000 acres. And it took us 10 years to find master developers to do that. And the innovation park is going and blowing. Those 5 ,000 jobs in between those two projects. And the science and tech park and innovation park at Mesa del Sol is the equivalent of intel. But what makes it and we love intel being here. But what makes it even stronger is if they pull the plug on intel, which hopefully never happens, all those 5 ,000 jobs go. But with the diversification of many, many companies in between these two places, one may may not make it. But the

rest flourish and it protects the diversity of employment here in New Mexico. And then we build on that. And that's what we're so passionate about. Well, and you're even inviting, for example, Las Cruces and other communities to look at doing the same thing. So what is this joint planning agreement you have about future development on St. Trust lands in the Las Cruces area? Well, when I was land commissioner before, we traded lands out of wilderness study areas, national parks, national monuments, tribal lands, where we couldn't earn money and where we shouldn't earn money in very sensitive places and built up a series of lands around our urban environments, where we'd be positioned for 5 years, 10 years, 20 years, 30 years out. And one of St. Trust lands. And that almost was lost in the past. Yeah, would give us an update on that

last, how long ago was that? That was about five years ago. It got traded away in the dead and night with a competitive bid process started and then halfway through it, it was ended and somebody was awarded the bid. If there's any silver lining in the misery we faced with this economic downturn, is these lands for the most part have come back to the trust. So we're starting over again, the joint planning agreement is saying we need as much transparency, we need as much accountability as possible. So we are committed to work with all of our 104 communities around the state to say when we have trust land in your community, you'll be the first to know when we have a proposed project. And we'll make sure does that meet your community's vision? And if it does, we'll not only meet and beat your local planning, we'll work with you through the entire process because what's so strange about this office of the land commissioner is the land commissioner can sell the land, lease the land, or trade the land, Lorraine without anybody else's

approval. And we don't need to meet any zoning or planning requirements. Well, that's crazy. So we've determined through these joint planning agreements that we're going to really work with the communities from the beginning of the project. It takes more time, takes more energy, it's messier, but at the end you have a much better project that the entire community is, understands it's theirs, and we don't have lawsuits at the other end. It's just send right. So no more shady debt of the night deals because we started Lorraine with 13 million acres of land. The best four million acres have been sold off. We still have 13 million acres of mineral state. When you sell the surface, you have to maintain the minerals. But the best four million acres are gone. And in my opinion, too often it wasn't to the benefit of the taxpayers or our beneficiaries. By doing joint planning agreements, by welcoming sunshine, we keep that from happening again. I need an update on white peaks. Oh, white peak is, is, have you ever been to white peak? I think, I think I've been in the area. Where is it? It's up

in between Moora and Colfax County, one of the most beautiful places in the state. An enormous economic engine, people come from all over the country, some from other countries, to recreate hunt and fish up there on state trust land. And that disappeared a few years ago through a land exchange, which was reversed by the Supreme Court. And we canceled for other land exchanges. The first day I was back in office to say, this is an area that attracts people to buy gasoline, to buy food, to stay in motels, to eat in restaurants, to go outside and hunt and to fish, leave a light footprint, and then go home. And boy, the community has used this land. I had many elders in that community say to me, my grandparents took me out there. And now I'm taking my own grandchildren out there. This is a sacred place that earns a lot of money for our school kids, but is an integral part of the fabric of

us being New Mexicans. In Texas, they have no public lands. You have to be rich in order to go out and enjoy the public. To go outside, in New Mexico, we've made sure that if you're a hunter or a fisher, you can go out and use these lands, you don't have to be rich in order to love New Mexico and walk on New Mexico. And I'm absolutely determined that we're not going to have any more land thefts in New Mexico. So we just have a minute left. Can you tell us a couple of other things that you're working on? What we should look for it? And also if people want to know more about the One Health program. Let me give you one example. We're teaming up with Hobbes. And what a community, a dynamo community down there. We at least 1 ,400 acres for a business park. One of the first tenants uses water that's salt water from oil and gas. Usually it's a product that they have to pay to dispose of. They're using a patented algae to convert that salt water into

diesel fuel. Talk about a win, win, win. Those are the types of projects and it's the first of its kind that's going to lead the rest of the world and how you do this. That's what we're doing on state trust lands by working with our local communities in an open and transparent manner. We want our kids to be able to work in New Mexico, live in New Mexico and grow old in New Mexico while helping the rest of the world. So what percentage of the revenue is from oil and gas and from renewables? And I guess we put this diesel, algae, brine transformation as renewable. That's exactly right. Well, we're blessed with an incredible portfolio of non -renewable energy. The vast majority of the revenues coming into the land office right now comes from oil and gas. But the great news through the renewable energy program will be able to match that over time. The key is to start now, do it right, work with the local communities so that we're positioned well. And what we're adding to that is getting the companies like M -Core that

produce the solar panels, that produce the windmills on state trust land. So when somebody comes into wants to do, we're going to have the state's largest solar array located on state trust land in the next couple of months that they have an opportunity to buy the panels produced in New Mexico, buy new Mexicans with companies that are paying taxes in New Mexico. So it's all tied together and we can't do this if we try and do it one agency at a time. That's why we're really reaching out to the rest of state government and our communities and saying, come on folks, let's do it together. Well, you really represent that impulse to make the world a better place and to do it together. So I'm just so glad we have to do this more often because I'm always so amazed at all the things that the land office is doing. I want to thank you for being here today. Our guest is Ray Powell, the Commissioner of Public Lands for the State of New Mexico. Lorraine, thank you so much and you've got one of the best programs being aired

in the country and I look forward to when it's national because you interview some of the best people across the country and I'm very, very honored to be included in your program. Well, it's a pleasure to have you and come back soon. Thank you. And I'd like to thank our audience for being with us today. This is Report from Santa Fe. I'm Lorraine Mills. We'll see you next week. Past archival programs of Report from Santa Fe are available at the website reportfromsatafe .com. If you have questions or comments, please email info at reportfromsatafe .com. Report from Santa Fe is made possible in part by grants from the members of the National Education Association of New Mexico, an organization of professionals who believe that investing in public education is an investment in our state's economic future. And by a grant from the Healey Foundation, Taos, New Mexico.