Hull Shares Top Priorities for New Mexico
By John Earp
We recently had the opportunity to interview Gregg Hull, Republican candidate for Governor of New Mexico. Hull says his twelve years as mayor of Rio Rancho made him eventually decide to run for governor. He says of his time as mayor, “We just continually experienced headwinds coming out of Santa Fe when it came to trying to accomplish stuff in our community. And really it wasn’t just that. I was the chairman of the New Mexico Mayor’s Caucus for eight years and also president of the New Mexico Municipal League, and I just really didn’t feel that there was a person in Santa Fe that was truly, elected-official wise, that was truly championing for the communities, especially when it came to local autonomy. And Rio Rancho was a home-rule community, and every time something went wrong in Albuquerque, you got these laws that are trying to fix it in the state. And so I just got really fed up with the one size fits all approach. I think the big one was two years ago. There was a big push to eliminate to pull six final communities that had not opted into the Local Election Consolidation Act. There was a big push to pull us in involuntarily because there were only six communities left and it’s, we’ve got, you guys are the standout communities and, you know, this makes things difficult because you’re not part of the rest of the system. But I worked on that original legislation years ago trying to keep the communities out of that legislation to where we would be able to make our own decision. A lot of the communities went ahead and opted in. I continued to fight and fight and fight against it because I didn’t want to opt in. I liked running our own local municipal elections, because Rio Rancho was one of the few communities in the state that did have a local voter ID law. And I wanted to protect that. And so by pulling us into that program, it automatically eliminated that voter ID in our system. So I was continually pressing back to maintain local autonomy and when they were doing this, the chair of the committee said, you know, we were there to test the six communities, and they showed up to testify against being forced into it. And the chair literally refused to allow us, the mayors, to speak. And collectively, we probably represented about 200,000 people. And we were like, hey, everybody else had a choice and now you’re trying to take our choice away. Our choice is we don’t want to be part of this. We want to run our own local elections. And so when she refused to let us be heard, I walked out of the office that day and said, you know what, when the legislative committees won’t even listen to the mayors in the state, I’m running for governor.”
When asked his thoughts regarding the New Mexico Public Education Department’s pressuring local school districts regarding the issue of four-day school weeks over the past few years, Hull said, “That’s something that I talked about in every speech I’ve given is that I want to work with PED to push more autonomy back down to the local school districts so that they can align their curriculum and their processes with the character and culture of the community.”
When asked about what his top three priorities would be as governor, Hull said, “First would be CYFD, it’s got to be the first. It’s in tremendously bad shape. The second one would be working with PED on the education in the state of New Mexico. We have to hit the ground running on that and there’s no time to waste anymore. I think those are going to be the top two and then working with our local communities on some of the issues they’re facing around public safety. Public safety has to be addressed pretty quickly as well. I think if you do that and some of the other stuff we want to work on, like economic development, it starts to fall in place.”
Regarding public safety and the need for more police officers Hull says, “We want to build upon the resources. So what I want to do is go in, work with the local communities to kind of build a strategic plan around public safety, and look at their actual resources that they need, and become a better partner in funding those items from the state level. Not every community has the ability to grow like Rio Rancho did. Now, I’m very proud of the fact that during my tenure as mayor, we more than doubled the police budget. We added more than 15 sworn officers to the force during my term. And that was great, but not every community has the ability to grow their economy in that way. So I want to make sure that some of our law enforcement protection funds and some of the other state funds that support law enforcement throughout the state, that we increase funding to those so that money is available for equipment, and money is available for training resources, money is available to add additional police officers, and that’s going to take a strong partnership with the state.”
Concerning the issue of New Mexico having become a magnet for those seeking abortions from surrounding states, especially Texas, Hull said, “It is a concern, and here’s what I can say, is that when the governor got elected in her 2nd term, the law that she passed invalidated any of those local ordinances, and those even went to the State Supreme Court, the Supreme Court said, we don’t even need to hear this argument because there’s a state law now that eliminates these. And so that is a clear example of an infringement on local autonomy. That’s what I’m talking about when the state comes in and they take sweeping control of a circumstance. Now, the legislature has already spoken on this. But, where I’m at on this is that I am for life, but unless you flip the legislature, there’s really not much you can do about the laws that we have in this state. Now, that being said, I’m not in support of the funding that we come through, so I would be opposed to supporting any funding. That’s about the only avenue that the governor’s going to have. The governor’s not going to have sweeping authority to change the law.”
When asked about other primary concerns, Hull said, “The other primary concerns are, our state has, over the past couple of years, communities and counties across the state have received over $100 million in opioid settlement dollars. I want to work with our communities to put together a plan on how those dollars can be deployed, because right now, the state, various communities and counties are sitting on over $90,000,000 in funds that are not being put to use to help solve or correct the opioid epidemic that swept our state. And so we want to make sure that we work together to really get those dollars deployed into our communities so we can start putting people on a path to recovery.”
Regarding the border with Mexico, Hull answered, I know it’s been a huge issue with President Trump, really pushing hard to basically make our country secure once again, if at all possible. It seems like Governor Grisham has not really, to say the least, has not been in favor of any of those things. And so, look, I’m going to work with any administration when it comes to border security. If become governor, President Trump’s only going to be president for two more years. We don’t know what the next administration’s going to look like, but I’m going to continue to work to make sure that the southern border of New Mexico is secure, so that it protects our southern residents. Actually statewide. It’s not just for southern residents, but they feel the impact more, it’s more in their face right there.”
When asked about the fentanyl and other drug trafficking from across the border, Hull said, “That’s the other issue that you’re really going to have to talk about, along with the opioid crisis, is, ‘How do we expand the services from the opioid addiction problem to also solving the fentanyl problem? The difference between opioid and fentanyl, is fentanyl is an illegally trafficked drug, and opioids for the most part were prescribed as pharmaceuticals. They were created in different ways. But I think they kind of go hand in hand because people are just transferred from one addiction to another. This also impacts CYFD. All of these issues really kind of go hand in hand.”
Speaking on attending a desalinization conference in Midland, Texas recently, Hull said, “So there are absolute relevant items that are going on at this water conference, and I wanted to be a part of it because water is going to be a huge part of my administration in developing strategic approaches to making sure that we preserve our water systems here in New Mexico. That plays a huge role in what I want to see going forward. That being said, because we were coming to this water conference, we went ahead and went down to the Orla, Texas desalinization plant that they just opened up on Monday. We were there for the grand opening of that desalinization plant down there, which is just an impressive feat of engineering. That facility needed to be built in New Mexico because, a lot of the research that was done on it and the technologies that were developed were developed out of NMSU, but now it’s being built in Texas, because New Mexico considers produced water as wastewater. It’s waste to be disposed of. You can’t really develop that technology in the state of New Mexico until the state acknowledges that produced water is a new source of water and that we can work with private industry to accomplish the goals that we’re looking for. It needs to be viewed no longer as a byproduct, but it needs to be viewed now as a commodity. And what we need is a forward-thinking governor that’s actually had to experience this. In Rio Rancho, we were the first city in the state to bring aquifer recharge online. We got all those processes done through the state engineer’s office, got all the permitting done to where we turned our wastewater, which was a byproduct, into a commodity that actually added beneficial value to the community. And we used some of it for irrigation. We use some of it to put directly back into the river, and we’ve used some of it to recharge our aquifer to protect our long-term sustainability. We need to work with communities across the state to invest in these things and the south[ern part of the state] is a major component of that. We’ve got to do something with it. Why do we just leave it sitting to evaporate or reinject it into the ground? Why can’t we clean it up? I know you would have to do desalinization to really get a drink to where you could use it very well, but hopefully the technology is coming online to where that’ll be scalable and affordable. Because produced water, while it’s part of what comes up from the naturally occurring water that’s underground, which is laden with a lot of heavy minerals, you also have your fracking fluid that’s been introduced to it as well. Then it comes up along with all of those fluids. So you have a pretty toxic blend there. But I think this fractional freezing facility really has figured out how to separate those two things out, so you can take the clean fresh water out, and it leaves behind all of the heavy contaminants. That’s what they’re working toward over there. So I think from what they were saying, they got it cleaned up to where they now have permits to discharge into the waters of the United States, which is probably one of the biggest obstacles to overcome when you’re dealing with discharge water. Because you’re talking about all of your discharge permits that allow you to actually discharge into waterways. Whether those are arroyos, creeks, rivers, streams, you name it, waters of the United States typically covers that. And so to be able to discharge that under that permit was a huge leap forward. To my knowledge, whereas it deals with produced water, it was the technology and everything was worked on in New Mexico. We put New Mexico resources into a facility in Texas. We’re not going to get the benefit of it because our laws are not set up in a way that allow us to actually acknowledge it as a commodity to be basically cleaned up and used.”
When asked if he thought Santa Fe wishes the oil industry would just go away, Hull responded, “I think that they’re saying, why spend the money in the technology to solve this issue when we can solve the issue just by killing an entire industry?” When asked what percentage of the entire state revenue comes from oil and gas, Hull said that it’s probably pushing closer to 60 percent.