Former state Rep. Stephanie Garcia Richard of Los Alamos was elected as the New Mexico’s Commissioner of Public Lands in 2018, becoming the first woman and first Latina to manage the office responsible for stewardship of state trust lands and maximizing revenue through leases on those holdings. This includes, and by no means is limited to, leases for production of petroleum energy on state-owned land. The revenue primarily benefits K-12 public education throughout the state.
In 2019, for the first time, the State Land Office reached the $1 billion mark in revenue from New Mexico land, and the yield has grown since then, reporting $2.75 billion in revenue during the 2023 fiscal year.
Born in Tucumcari and raised in Silver City, Garcia Richard, a Democrat, was an educator prior to joining the House in 2013. In 2022, she was reelected for her second and final four-year term.
Q. What drove you to seek this office in 2018?
SGR. Initially, it was the money for the schools, because I am a former school teacher; and remember, I was six years in the legislature, really into transformative government, wanting to push the boundaries and be bold about what we could do here.
What drew me to this office was the money we make for public schools. My argument was, who better than a school teacher? Who better than a school teacher to understand the value of a dollar in a classroom? Everything we do here has a mind towards bringing in as much revenue as possible, while not harming the long-term health of the resource.
Q. Tell us about the land the office manages. It’s not all contiguous – how spread out is it?
SGR. We call it a checkerboard. It’s about 13 million acres, about a fifth of the state. That checkerboard nature lends itself to certain things. We can part of landscape-level land management, because we’re so spread out. We’ve got partnerships with other land managers, or we can actually come into communities to help solve whatever challenges communities are having. Housing is a very good example is something we're doing recently, particularly in the Las Cruces area. Renewable energy development lends itself to vast landscapes. Conserving a particular area, like Organ Mountains-Desert Peaks, lends itself to having a more vast portfolio. We have about 2 million acres of oil and gas development in the southeast part of the state, out of that 13 million.
We have trust land in every single county of New Mexico. We have a dozen field offices spread throughout the state, the concentration of them actually being in the north or the southeast.
Q. What are some uses of public lands besides oil and gas leases?
SGR. With the uncertainty of the future of oil and gas, we are looking to diversify how we use our state lands. In particular, in the Las Cruces/Doña Ana area, we already have some pretty lucrative renewable energy development there. We also have housing developments that we are proposing for state trust land in the Mesa Vista area (of Las Cruces). We are really wanting the development of that area to be incredibly intentional. We are talking with developers about making it all electric, having a significant portion of both affordable housing and attainable housing, and being very intentional about how we develop that area.
Because we make so much money for the public institutions, we estimate it's a savings to tax-paying households of about $1,700 a year in taxes they don’t have to pay.
Q. The state relies heavily on oil and gas for its budget even as it prepares for a transition away from that dependence. How quickly is that transition moving and how does your office facilitate it?
SGR. You see varying projections. I would say probably within the next decade, we will see significant either plateauing or a downturn in the production. We look at that two different ways. We diversify our activity on state land to ensure we always have revenue coming in. We'll never be able to have an industry that gives billions of dollars like the oil and gas industry does. It’s necessarily going to have to be kind of a network of various diversification efforts.
Second, we want to ensure that we're not left holding the bag when oil and gas finally does bottom out. I'm talking about things like paying for infrastructure, paying for cleanup, paying to remove equipment and things from from our public resource. We're trying to ensure that we have a whole enforcement and accountability program, where we're making sure bad actors on state land are being held accountable. We are increasing bonding amounts. This (year) will be the sixth or seventh time we’ll try to raise the royalty rate that we're getting from oil and gas companies while they're drilling on state land, so we're capturing a little bit more of that revenue. We’re doing all of that in anticipation of this transition off of such a heavy reliance on fossil fuels.
We can make money while at the same time solving community issues. Communities that have experienced a heavy reliance on fossil fuel extraction might want to transition to, say, manufacturing. If they need state land to do it, we can draw revenue from those leases while helping them have land in their community to diversify.
We have had to get creative about how we use state land. The Netflix studio in Albuquerque is on state land. I think in the past, people would never have thought of state land in that way.