Today, Conservation Voters of New Mexico released its annual scorecard of state legislators’ environmentally relevant votes, titled WWSUD—What Would Stewart Udall Do? The Santa Fe delegation (Speaker Ben Luján; Reps. Brian Egolf, Jim Trujillo and Lucky Varela; and Sens. Carlos Cisneros, Phil Griego, Nancy Rodriguez and Peter Wirth—all of whom are Dems) kicked some eco-ass this session, landing an average of 94% pro-environment votes. Click here to for the full pdf report.

A couple dozen people showed up outside the Roundhouse this morning in support of a proposal by state Rep. Brian Egolf, D-Santa Fe, to move public deposits of the giant financial institutions that helped cause the financial crisis and subsequent recession.

Egolf’s proposal, House Bill 66, got some national play in the Huffington Post the other day.

“It’s not going to be Brian Egolf going around giving big bags of cash to [local] banks,” Egolf said, waving his arms as though he were wielding invisible moneybags, and drawing a laugh from the crowd.

Continue reading »

Tea-baggers weren’t the only ones protesting yesterday. The flap over an alleged land swap in the White (or White’s, as some call it) Peak area of northern New Mexico continued most of the day outside the Roundhouse with fiery speeches by stakeholders, politicians and plenty of burly-looking men in hunting fatigues.

Video, more photos and some interesting land-use ideas are after the jump. Continue reading »

Protesters gathered on the steps of the state land office in November.

According to State Rep. Brian Egolf, D-Santa Fe, the White Peak land swap issue is far from over. In what Egolf calls a cooked deal devoid of transparency, New Mexico stands to lose thousands of acres of state trust wildland—and, Egolf says, a cool $170,000 a year. In the midst of a recession and a budget crisis, that doesn’t seem like the best plan.

Here’s Egolf:

“Right now, the Dept of Game and Fish is paying the trust $170,000 a year to [permit] hunters and fishermen to go on the state land. We’re losing that income, and [Land Commissioner Pat] Lyons has not explained how he’s going to make that up.” Continue reading »

Carlos A. Pacheco, who's been hunting on the White Peak land for years, says he came to the news conference to "protest some monkey business."

The conflict over who gets to acquire state trust land in the White Peak hunting area intensified today in anticipation of a Tuesday, Nov 24 deadline for bidding on the 7,000-acre parcel in the northeastern part of the state.

At this morning’s meeting of the Legislative Finance Committee, State Land Commissioner Patrick Lyons came under the prosecutorial gun of State Rep Brian Egolf, D-Santa Fe, who fired a series of rapid questions at Lyons, who began his meeting with the Committee with a request for a $13.9 million budget appropriation in FY 2010.

The problem, according to Joel Gay, the New Mexico Wildlife Federation’s communications director, is that the process of selling off the land hasn’t been public enough.

“This thing has been largely [executed] out of the public eye,” Gay tells SFR. “If the land office wanted the most interest and competition, they would have reached out. We just got the appraisals this morning.” Continue reading »