Legislative Session 2025
By Camilla Feibelman,
Rio Grande Chapter Director
Every session begins with high hopes. And most sessions end with a sense of accomplishment.
At the heart of this legislative session is the question of whether we’ll require industry to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions to help curb and slow the gravest impacts of the climate crisis. Or if we’ll pay for alternatives and absorb the costs of the crisis ourselves.
In this session we prioritized a suite of three climate solutions and just economic transition bills led by Senate Pro Temp Mimi Stewart and supported in the House by Reps Ortez and Szczepanski. SB4 the Clear Horizons Act (Stewart / Ortez) would have enshrined the Governor’s greenhouse gas reductions goals into law and required rulemaking at the Environment Department (NMED) to enforce them.
But the oil and gas industry spent hundreds of thousands of dollars to convince key legislators that the bill would have regulated people’s wood burning stoves, which don’t even register on the state greenhouse gas inventory, instead of regulating oil and gas which generates 53% of the state’s emissions. Industry falsely claimed that reducing greenhouse gases would cost regular New Mexicans instead of the Texas oil execs that export billions of dollars of profits from our natural resources, extracted off of our public lands for their own benefit instead of ours. And because of this investment SB 4 did not make it through.
On a happier note though we passed the other two bills in the package SB48 – Community Benefits Act (Stewart / Szczepanski) which funds over $209M in grid modernization, electric school buses, workforce training and more, in addition to SB83 – Innovation in State Government (Stewart / Roybal-Caballero) which provides $13.5M to agencies to help support that work and work creatively on climate solutions.
The following is a host of key bills also passed that we’ve been involved with or supported during the session.
Climate & Energy
HB 128 – NMFA LOCAL SOLAR ACCESS FUND (Szczepanski / Pope) – Creates a fund with $20M to allow local governments to plan and build local solar projects.
HB 93 – ADVANCED GRID TECHNOLOGY PLANS (Ortez / Padilla) – Prioritizes ways of upgrading our transmission system with reduced costs, environmental impacts and efficient technologies like reconductoring, which runs new lines on existing infrastructure.
SB 142 – GRID MODERNIZATION ROADMAP (Muñoz / Dixon) – Requires EMNRD and the PRC to work together to create a Grid Modernization Roadmap and expands the grid modernization grant program to schools.
Wildlife & Lands
SB 5 – GAME COMMISSION REFORM (Campos / Wirth) – Changes the name of the Game and Fish Department to the Wildlife Department, providing it with more funding and affirming its management of all wildlife, modernizing the associated commission to be more representative of the state and interests in wildlife. This bill was already partially vetoed by the Governor eliminating the section of the bill that requires “cause” for removing a commissioner.
HB 284 – FREE-ROAMING HORSES & LIVESTOCK CODE (McQueen / Woods) – Allows the NM Livestock Board to certify qualified experts to work with local jurisdictions to use already approved and best the best scientifically validated methods like contraception and relocation to help manage the state’s free-roaming horses to prevent harm to themselves and to landscapes.
HB 219 – SLOT CANYON RIVERLANDS STATE PARK (Small / Steinborn) – Establishes a new State Park on 783 acres of land owned by the Parks Division and would connect to the proposed Rio Grande Trail.
Water Conservation
SB 21 POLLUTANT DISCHARGE ELIMINATION SYSTEM ACT (Wirth / Ortez) – Creates a state program to permit those waters no longer protected under the Clean Water Act, takes over permitting from the EPA for those waters that still have federal protection, and creates a structure for clean up of neglected groundwater spills. This coupled with $20M in the budget will allow for clean up of neglected contamination sites which could include abandoned uranium mines and dry cleaners fluid spills (JF Hernandez / Steinborn).
SB 37 – STRATEGIC WATER RESERVE FUND (Stefanics / Dixon) – Revises the Strategic Water Reserve to improve its effectiveness by adding a new purpose to support aquifer recharge, allow prioritization of transactions that support supplementary benefits, and create a permanent non-reverting fund to better support transactions.
SB 7 – STORM WATER SERVICE AS MUNICIPAL UTILITY (Sharer) – Allows municipalities to create utilities to better address stormwater management and could provide opportunities to fund and implement green infrastructure.
Environmental Quality
HB 140 – “HAZARDOUS WASTE CONSTITUENT” DEFINITION (Chandler / Steinborn) – Allows the state to regulate certain forever chemicals that are not deemed hazardous waste by the federal government.
HB 212 – PER- & POLY-FLOUROALKYL PROTECTION ACT (Joanne J. Ferrary) – Prohibits the use of certain PFAS in some consumer products. There’s more to do in the future to ensure all forever chemicals are covered in more products.
HB 291 – RECYCLING & STATE’S CIRCULAR ECONOMY (Romero / Steinborn) – Encourages manufacturers to rethink their product design, brings the staff needed to support these efforts and allows the RAID fund to be used for local recycling infrastructure.
Fairness
HB 91 – PUBLIC UTILITY RATE STRUCTURES (Ortez / Roybal Caballero) – allows utilities to do rate making to help low-income families paying a huge percentage of their income on their utility bills.
SB 23 – OIL & GAS ROYALTY RATE CHANGES (Muñoz / Stefanics) – allows the State Land Office to charge as much as 25% royalties on high producing oil and gas lands in the Permian Basin, bringing the rate up to par with Texas and ensuring a fair income for SLO beneficiaries.
Disaster Mitigation
SB 33 – WILDFIRE PREPARED ACT (Wirth, Stefanics / Gonzales, Vincent) – Provides $10M in grant money to fund fuel removal within 5 feet of fire prone structures, helping to increase the likelihood of insurability of buildings, especially homes.
HB 175 – FOREST & WATERSHED BUFFER PROJECTS (Vincent / Ortez) – Helps protect our communities that interface with forests while also preserving the essence of communities that live alongside nature.
SB 31 – ZERO-INTEREST NATURAL DISASTER LOANS (Campos / Sanchez) – provides loans to local jurisdictions and co-ops for federally declared disaster recovery until it can be paid back with FEMA money.
*SB 383 – FLOOD RECOVERY BONDS & GROSS RECEIPTS (Ezzell) – This bill allows municipalities to generate funds to pay for flood recovery through bonds and gross receipts taxes.
HB 191 – WILDFIRE SUPPRESSION & PREPAREDNESS FUNDS (Small) – Creates fund for wildlife prevention and recovery.
The budget
Sometimes the policy we build doesn’t require additional funding. But so often it does, so you can’t just pass a bill, you need to make sure that there’s money in HB2, the budget bill. This year was a very successful budget year for our climate initiatives. In this year’s budget alone there are close to $300M in climate solutions and economic transition investments alone not including agency base budgets and funds for lands, water and wildlife.
This year’s tax bill was one to watch. Each year the finance and tax committees reserve capacity in the budget for tax credits, which they usually pay for with tax income. This year Chair Nathan Small of House Appropriations realized that oil and gas industries pay different tax rates, and that by equalizing those rates there’d be enough money in the budget to provide a total personal income tax break for individuals earning less that $72K a year which could be transformational for working families who struggle to pay for childcare, health expenses, food and utilities. But once again the oil and gas industry flooded the airwaves with protest. How dare we charge anything more on this struggling industry (read irony)! And the Senate removed this source of income from the bill and instead worked in a conference committee to take the needed funds from the next fiscal year budget.
That’s a wrap for now and we didn’t even tell you about important work of our partners in the indigenous community (allowing tribal regalia in graduations as well as language immersion in tribal compact schools, both of wich passed), in the immigrant community (keeping MVD from selling private information to ICE which passed, and an attempt to keep state prisons from serving as deportation camps which didn’t) and in the democracy community (another attempt to pay legislators a salary which failed and ban pocket vetos, which now goes to the voters)…just some of the thousand and a little more bills passed this session.
This legislation is the result of the work of dozens of partner organizations, bill sponsors, community-based advocates and coalition and team work that is only implied in this article. Thanks to each person who worked to bring this legislation forward!
Top: Climate activist at the March 6 Climate Crisis Day rally. Photo by David McGahey.
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