By BEN NEARY
NMWF Conservation Director
SANTA FE — A bill to set new protections for members of the New Mexico State Game Commission cleared its second legislative committee on Monday and now heads to the House Floor for consideration.
Rep. Matt McQueen, D-Santa Fe, is sponsoring the measure, HB184. It would end the current practice of allowing the governor to remove game commissioners at will and instead specify that they could only be removed for cause in the New Mexico Supreme Court.
“For a long time, our commission has struggled, and I believe it has struggled because our game commission has struggled,” McQueen told members of the House Government, Elections and Indian Affairs Committee on Monday. “We have had a lot of turnover in the commission. We are currently down to three members, so they don’t have a quorum for a meeting.”
The committee voted 7-to-2 to advance the bill to the House Floor. Republican Reps. Martin R. Zamora and Bill Rehm voted against it.
Former commission chair Deanna Archuleta resigned from the commission last week, saying she needed to devote more time to her job with a Washington, DC, lobbying firm.
Archuleta’s departure from the commission is only the latest in a series of departures that has kept the commission shorthanded over the most of the past four years of Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham’s first term.
Roberta Salazar-Henry of Las Cruces resigned in October. In her resignation letter to the governor, she stated, “Although I am very proud of the trust my fellow commissioners showed in allowing me to take the lead in improving many of the Department of Game and Fish programs and services. I am very disappointed that much needed structural change did not occur during my tenure.”
Two other former commissioners, Joanna Prukop and Jeremy Vesbach, have said that Lujan Grisham forced them out in recent years because they refused to follow the governor’s orders to support a state program that purported to allow private landowners to close public waters to public access. The governor has received campaign contributions from some landowners who had received certificates from the game commission stating that rivers and streams over their property were closed.
Last March, in response to a legal challenge brought by the NMWF and other groups, the New Mexico Supreme Court ruled that the commission’s program of certifying public waters as closed to the public was unconstitutional.
John Crenshaw, board president with the NMWF, told the committee on Monday that the group was involved in creating the state’s game commission system of government early in the last century. “This is very much an improvement,” he said of the bill. “We stand in strong support of it.”
“The commission is one of the most underappreciated and most critical boards in this state,” Crenshaw said. “The Department of Game and Fish is a far more complex operation than most people realize. We need a really good, functioning board with the continuity and professionalism that’s laid out before us.”
Representatives from several other conservation organizations also spoke in favor of the bill.
“We stand in support of this bill,” said Chris Smith, spokesman for WIld Earth Guardians. “We believe the game commission should be better insulated from political whims.”
Kerrie Cox Romero, speaking for the New Mexico Council of Outfitters and Guides, said her group also supports the bill.
“Over my 11 years with the council, I’ve watched the commission become increasingly less efficient,” Romero said. “And I believe, like Rep. McQueen stated, that the reason for this is because the current statute does not require anyone to have any familiarity with game and fish law or wildlife policy. Currently there is not one commissioner on the commission with a background in game department, biology or conservation.”
McQueen’s bill calls for the governor to appoint one commissioner from each of the state’s three congressional districts, of whom not more than two could be of the same political party.
The bill calls for the New Mexico Legislative Council to appoint the four remaining members, specifying that they all have to live in different counties. In addition, they must represent the following fields: hunter/angler, conservationist, farmer/rancher and scientist.