By BEN NEARY
NMWF Conservation Director
Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham has appointed a Lea County oilman as the newest member of the New Mexico State Game Commission.
Republican Gregg Fulfer, founder of Fulfer Oil and Cattle Co., in Jal, replaces former Commissioner Gail Cramer of Mayhill, N.M. , who resigned in June 2021..
Fulfer appeared remotely, via the Zoom platform at the commission meeting held Friday, June 18, in Santa Fe. Attempts to reach Fulfer after the meeting were unsuccessful.
“I look forward to working with everyone,” Fulfer said at Friday’s meeting. He said his family homesteaded in the Jal area in 1912.
“We ranch here in Jal, raising beef cattle and we’re in the oil and gas business,” Fulfer said. He said he’s been involved in recycling produced water for the oil and gas industry.
“We have a fishing lodge up in Colorado just north of Chama, New Mexico,” Fulfer said. “That’s kind of my hideout, to get up there in the mountains where the phones don’t work, and enjoy fly fishing up there.”
Fulfer, a former Lea County commissioner, served in the New Mexico State Senate from 2018-2020 representing Lea and Eddy counties. He was appointed to succeed retiring Sen. Carrol Leavell but failed to win re-election, losing to David Garcia, R-Eunice, in the 2020 Republican primary.
According to information from the New Mexico Republican Party, Fulfer Grew up in Jal, NM and attended NMSU, graduating 1984 with a degree in electrical engineering. He has been in the oil and gas business for nearly four decades and has worked in the electrical contracting business.
Fulfer served as a Lea County Commissioner for 10 years including six years as chairman. Former Gov. Susana Martinez appointed him to the New Mexico Environmental Improvement Board, where he served for eight years.
Fulfer has been involved in developing processes for the treatment of water used in the fracking process for recovering oil and natural gas.
Game Commission Chair Sharon Salazar Hickey welcomed Fulfer to the commission at Friday’s meeting, mentioning that he has developed a patented produced water recycling system.
Gov. Lujan Grisham earlier this year named Deanna Archuleta, a lobbyist for ExxonMobil, to the game commission. She filled the vacancy left last year by the death of former Commissioner David Soules of Las Cruces who held the statewide seat to represent conservation interests.
Speaking at Friday’s meeting, Vice Chair Archuleta said she was very pleased to have Fulfer on the commission. She noted that he’s served as a county commissioner and as a state senator. She said she’s worked with him in the past, calling him a “delightful individual” who gets things done.
Fulfer voted against two landmark pieces of wildlife conservation legislation during his time at the Legislature.
Fulfer voted against the Wildlife Corridors Act of 2019 even though it received bipartisan support among lawmakers. The act directed the New Mexico Department of Game and Fish and the New Mexico Department of Transportation to identify and address the most critical areas in the state highway system where motorists have been hitting wildlife.
As a game commissioner, Fulfer will be responsible for overseeing operations of the game department.
Fulfer also voted against the Wildlife Trafficking Act, which also received bi-partisan support and prohibited the sale of endangered species or parts. The game department is largely responsible for enforcing the act.
Fulfer served just a single term in the state senate, but in that time racked up the lowest “lifetime” conservation voting record of any state senator, according to Conservation Voters of New Mexico. Conservation Voters of New Mexico in 2020 gave Fulfer a 17 percent lifetime rating. He was not re-elected to another term.
The Albuquerque Journal mentioned Fulfer in a story this March that explained how many small oil and gas operators are leaving the business.
The article quotes Fulfer as saying he operated about 190 small marginal wells, but he recently sold off one-third of them, and plans to sell another third over the next six months.
“I can’t keep up with all the state requirements,” Fulfer told the Journal.
Fulfer was in the news in 2019, when the newspaper he owns in Jal, the Jal Record, agreed to settle a lawsuit against the city government there that had charged the city with violating the state’s Inspection of Public Records Act. The city agreed to pay the newspaper $400,000 in the case.
According to reporting in The Santa Fe New Mexican, the Jal Record had requested documents from the Jal city government concerning complaints that a water injection well on Fulfer’s ranch possibly could affect an aquifer the city had planned to use for drinking water. The city paid to settle the newspaper’s claims that it had withheld documents.
The game commission is supposed to have seven members, but Fulfer’s appointment brings the membership up to only five.
The governor in January removed former Vice Chair Jeremy Vesbach, a career conservationist. Vesbach led the commission last summer in its vote to reject five applications from private landowners who had sought commission approval to close public rivers or streams that crossed their lands to public access.
The New Mexico Supreme Court in March sided with the New Mexico Wildlife Federation and other groups that had challenged the constitutionality of the game commission’s “non-navigable rule.”
The rule, which took effect in 2018, purports to allow landowners to petition the game commission to certify that rivers and streams that cross their property are non-navigable. Under the rule, such a finding results in the waters being closed to public access.
Lujan Grisham two years ago removed Joanna Prukop as chair of the commission after the commission under Prukop’s leadership imposed a moratorium on acting on pending non-navigable permit applications.
Prukop, a career officer and administrator with the New Mexico Department of Game who went on to work as an administrator in state government and elsewhere, has said Lujan Grisham removed her from the commission because of the stream-access issue.
Lujan Grisham has accepted campaign contributions from out-of-state landowners who had applied to close rivers and streams under the non-navigable rule.
Jesse Deubel, executive director of the New Mexico Wildlife Federation, said that the federation believes it’s critical that the governor appoint dedicated, independent conservationists to fill the remaining two commission vacancies.
“The New Mexico Wildlife Federation was instrumental in creating the commission to take the politics out of wildlife management in New Mexico a century ago,” Deubel said. “Our state deserves to see independent commissioners who put the interests of our wildlife and natural resources first.”
Deubel noted that hunters and anglers are one of the last set of voters regularly willing to cross party lines in order to support the best candidate for wildlife conservation.
“Wildlife conservation is one of the last bastions where you will find bi-partisanship and it’s why most elected officials try to pay attention to hunters and anglers,” Deubel said. “But I think New Mexico hunters and anglers are getting increasingly frustrated with the lack of progress on increasing resident opportunity or placing and retaining people with wildlife conservation credentials on the game commission.”