Dec. 25—New Mexico’s senior senator expects to fight for public lands and to focus on national labs and permitting reform in the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee in the coming congressional session.
Sen. Martin Heinrich will be the top Democrat on the Energy and Natural Resources Committee, leading the minority party opposite the committee’s Republican Chair Sen. Mike Lee of Utah. The pair have a history of working together on bills like the recently passed Good Samaritan law to make abandoned mine cleanup easier. But the senators will be on opposite sides of a brewing fight over public lands.
“I will use my position as ranking member to fight to keep public lands in public hands,” Heinrich said.
The committee works on legislation related to land and water stewardship, as well as energy and mineral resources. Heinrich’s election as ranking member was announced last week, followed by an announcement from the senator that Jasmine Dimitriou will serve as committee staff director for the minority.
Permitting reform, workforce development and supporting the country’s national labs will be priorities for Heinrich.
Heinrich is also considering pursuing another leadership role: a run for New Mexico governor in 2026, according to previous Journal reporting.
Permitting reform and public lands
The committee has been trying to land a permitting bill to make it easier for solar energy and geothermal energy projects to get permits, and Heinrich expects they will put a lot of effort into permitting reform in the next session.
“If you just take the example of Sun Zia, we got to yes, but it took 18 years. That should have been a five-year process, not an 18-year process,” Heinrich said.
Sun Zia is an interstate transmission line being built to transport wind energy from New Mexico west.
It is also easier to get permission to drill an oil and gas well on public lands than a geothermal well with the same depth profile, Heinrich said — a discrepancy he would like to eliminate.
“That’s a place where (Lee’s) got projects in Utah that are really cutting edge, and so we’ve been able to work together to sort of levelize the playing field for geothermal development and wells,” Heinrich said.
One place the pair will diverge is in a push to give states’ ownership of federal public lands. The state of Utah filed a lawsuit in August challenging federal government control of some public lands, which Heinrich describes as “a dangerous land grab.”
If the lawsuit fails, the issue could rear its head in the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee. Taking federal public lands out of federal control has failed before in Congress, most recently in 2017 when former Utah Rep. Jason Chaffetz, a Republican, withdrew a bill that would have directed the Bureau of Land Management to sell millions of acres of federally owned land after significant backlash.
“In the end, it always proves incredibly unpopular, and it’s also just not workable, right? You take 18 million acres and transfer them to the state of Utah, they have no capacity to fight fires on a landscape of that scale,” Heinrich said.
Lee believes much of the federal public land in Utah should be transferred to the state, according to his Senate website.
“As Utah’s population grows, access to the land will become even more urgent and necessary,” Lee’s site reads. The land could be used to build housing and roads, for mining or for outdoor recreation, according to his website.
Lee’s office did not respond to interview requests.
Supporting Los Alamos and Sandia national labs
Although President-elect Donald Trump has talked about cutting federal jobs or turning some into political appointments, Heinrich believes growing the lab mission is “widely supported, and Republicans and Democrats alike understand that our national labs are really one of the most important pillars for our national security and for international competitiveness,” he said.
“Our labs are particularly important in making sure that we maximize the benefits of artificial intelligence and minimize the risks,” he said.
AI models can speed up the development of new technologies, materials and therapeutics, Heinrich said. But the ascent of AI technology is also creating the first significant growth in electric load since the air conditioning boom of the 1980s. Figuring out how to meet the increased demand with clean energy and without saddling average utility customers with the increased cost instead of the data cloud and AI processing centers driving the increase will take a lot of creativity, Heinrich said.
Race for committee leadership in the House
Another member of New Mexico’s congressional delegation was attempting to win a leadership role on the House Natural Resources Committee. Rep. Melanie Stansbury, D-N.M., withdrew from the race for ranking member of the committee last week, when it became clear she did not have the votes to win.
Stansbury said there was no ill will toward Rep. Jared Huffman, D-Calif., who will take the position.
“At the end of the day, the importance of this race and helping to chip away at the glass ceiling of women ascending to leadership in the House is, in and of itself, a win,” Stansbury said.