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.

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.

“If [the study called for in his bill] comes back with the result that there aren’t any [local] banks that can handle this, then that’s the result.”

SFR asked how Egolf could have confidence that community banks would behave more responsibly than, say, Bank of America, which holds at least $1.4 billion in state government deposits. Especially given the recent FDIC takeover of Santa Fe-based Charter Bank.

“I have tremendous confidence. Charter Bank got caught in a in a federal regulatory vice grip,” Egolf said. “There’s a lot more to the story about Charter Bank than they just got shut down.”

Alan Hoffman, a businessowner who organized the press conference and rally, says federal regulators’ overreacted in assessing Charter’s loan portfolio. “It’s the pendulum swing,” Hoffman says. “For eight years they regulated nothing.”

Also in attendance: Santa Fe Alliance executive director Vicki Pozzebon and Santa Fe Area Home Builders Association executive officer Kim Shanahan (who’s holding the “State $$ in State Banks” sign, above).

Not surprisingly, Egolf has the support of the Independent Community Bankers Association, whose lobbyist, Domonic Silva stood by his side. State Sen. Tim Keller, D-Bernalillo, cosponsored Egolf’s bill. And Sen. John Arthur Smith, D-Hidalgo, signed on this morning, Egolf said.

Egolf also sent US Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner an email about his proposal, although, he tells SFR, “I don’t know for a fact that he read it.”

Egolf says he knows Geithner from when they both worked under former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers, for whom Geithner served as undersecretary for international affairs.

The bill will go before the House Business and Industry Committee before moving on to House Appropriations, Egolf said.

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

One of the more emphatic speakers at yesterday’s rally was Archie Velarde from Arroyo Seco, who says people who live near White Peak are incensed about the land deal:

After a series of cheers to take back New Mexico’s public land and promises to “tell [Land Commissioner Patrick Lyons] to go home, because this is our home!” the protest fizzled, and Velarde joined Santa Fe County Commissioner hopeful Paul White and State Land Commissioner candidate Ray Powell inside. Though the complaint about the White Peak swap doesn’t seem to have changed much since SFReeper.com covered it in November and December, the upshot is that Velarde and others are finally looking at alternatives to selling the state trust lands to the highest (or only, in this case) bidder.

“What we need for that land is economic development,” Velarde tells SFR. His plan for White Peak includes joint ownership of the land (formerly a patchwork of private ranches and public land used for recreation) by the City of Española and Santa Fe County, with income from said development to establish college scholarships or contribute to education funds. Still, what exactly Velarde means by “development” seems hazy.

White, for his part, wants some of the disputed land to become a community farm that would double as a sort of sustainable-living learning lab—something Powell, who’s been vocal on the White Peak issue, says he worked on when he was Land Commissioner (1993-2002). Reinvesting revenue from public lands into education and stopping the White Peak deal are two of Powell’s campaign promises.

Another consistent voice on the White Peak deal has been Rep. Brian Egolf, D-Santa Fe, who says from the attention Attorney General Gary King is giving to White Peak, a lawsuit from the AG seems “likely.” The main problem, both Egolf and Powell told SFR, is less about how the land is used than it is about the deal’s lack of transparency.

A few more photos from the day:

Creative signage (above), cool snowstorm attire (below).

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.”

White Peak, once a quiet hunt-and-fish district in northeastern New Mexico, has become synonymous with a controversial series of deals in which state trust land is being swapped for private ranch land. State Land Commissioner Pat Lyons has called the deals a way to resolve conflict among ranchers and public land users (hunters, fishermen, etc.), but just before the first deal was sealed in November, conservationists and outdoor-recreation groups cried foul, calling the process closed and corrupt. See SFR’s coverage here.

One problem, Egolf says, is that the person who appraised the land isn’t a state appraiser. To wit:

“Pat Lyons told me, during the committee hearing, that the appraiser was paid by UU Bar and Stanley Ranch, which is really weird. It’d be like me trying to sell you my car, and being like, ‘Hey, my buddy says it’s worth $1 million,’ and you’re like, ‘Oh, OK.’ It’s a totally cooked deal.”

The bidding on the first piece of land closed on Nov. 24, and to almost no one’s surprise, the only bid entered was one by Stanley Ranch. In the meantime, Egolf says he’s planning to send a letter to State Auditor Hector Balderas this week in hopes that he’ll investigate the land deals. And New Mexico’s money problems grow steadily uglier.

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.”

Those appraisals were just as maddening to Egolf, who spent some time this morning hammering Lyons on why and how he got the land appraised before—technically—he had any idea which exact parcels the state would be selling, or who the buyer would be.

“Why did you do those appraisals if you didn’t know the content of the bid?” Egolf asked Lyons, pointedly. “Why did you appraise it?”

Lyons, clad in a leather vest and seated before the Legislative Finance Committee, softly replied that appraisals are common practice for land that’s going to be sold.

“Who paid for the appraisal?” Egolf asked.

“Stanley Ranch and UU Bar,” Lyons replied. (He later clarified that while they paid for the appraisals, neither Stanley Ranch nor UU Bar actually performed them; an outside party was contracted by the state.) So far, Stanley Ranch is the only bidder on the first chunk of public land, for which bidding ends next Tuesday. Stanley has offered 3,336 acres of its land, valued at $6.4 million, for 7,205 acres of state trust land valued for slightly less, and the net loss of 3,800 acres of state trust land is part of what has land advocates in a frenzy.

Jeremy Vesbach (left) and Edward Olona of the New Mexico Wildlife Federation

That, and the fact that even people like Joel Gay, who generally stays on top of this sort of thing, had to wade through public records requests in order to find out even basic details about the proposed deal.

Then there’s the question of the quality of the land itself, a topic Egolf pursued in somewhat esoteric references to groundwater and subsurface value, to which Lyons responded in equally esoteric terms.

“[In] the first trade, the public stands to lose nearly 3,800 acres of some of the most beautiful lands in New Mexico,” Jeremy Vesbach, the director of the New Mexico Wildlife Federation, told a handful of reporters during a press conference on the steps of the State Land Office this afternoon. “[In] the second proposed trade, 80 percent of what the public would get is just pastureland near a highway. This is not an equitable trade,” Vesbach continued, “and [it] seems to have happened very much behind the scenes.”

Sandy Buffett, vice-chair of the New Mexico State Game Commission, noted that selling White Peak would diminish the state’s hunting and recreational resources.

“If this is such a great deal,” Buffett asked, “Why hasn’t there been meaningful public outreach?”

Gov Bill Richardson even weighed in with a press release earlier today, calling the process of negotiating the trades “a behind-the scenes deal with virtually no public input or notification, sealed bids, and inadequate opportunity for examination.”

“Until such time as the concerns expressed above are adequately addressed, neither I nor my departments and commissions can support this ill-conceived deal,” Richardson’s press release concludes. Be that as it may…we’ll see you Tuesday.

Nevertheless, we had to ask him anyway. Here’s the

SFR: It’s going around that you might challenge Egolf in 2010. Any truth to that? Any thoughts on running for office again in 2010?

JG: Definitely on my list of priorities…right after getting a “natural” root canal, learning to crochet and climbing Everest barefooted.  Politics is a game for the rich.  I have two mortgage payments (until and if my SF house ever sells) that I struggle to make and I am starting my law career from scratch in Albuquerque.  I also promised my wife that if I ever ran again (after giving her 24 hours to file the divorce papers) that it would be for an office that had a salary. I have been asked to run for a couple of different things, but haven’t committed to anything.  I think politics is stale in New Mexico.  It is the same old hacks (or their kids) playing the same old game with the same old scum buying and selling them.  Now after Richardson gets indicted…

Rep. Brian Egolf Jr., Santa Fe’s newest Democratic lawmaker, recorded this little video with us in between votes.