House Energy & Natural Resources (HENRC)

The House Energy & Natural Resources Committee (HENRC) has traditionally been a stalwart defender of a safe and enriching environment for all New Mexicans.

Because of recent shifts in the membership of the House, HENRC has changed quite dramatically, and frequently finds itself deadlocked on proposed legislation.  The effect is that, while many pieces of anti-conservation legislation stall there without the votes to move forward, the same is true of measures designed to protect or improve our environment and quality of life.

HENRC is now chaired by Representative Brian Egolf, who is a staunch conservation champion.  Despite his best efforts, and those of his Vice-Chair, Representative Antonio Lujan—also a valued conservation champion—this situation is extremely difficult to contend with.

In several instances, the shift of a single vote made the difference between bills passing out of committee, whether good or bad.  It means that full attendance at these early-morning hearings is crucial, but becomes challenging when members are needed in other committees to present legislation.

In addition to the scorecard votes, HENRC addressed numerous other pieces of critical legislation.  These included:

• the so-called ‘blackmail’ bill (HB111, Lundstrom), which would have forced communities to accept new uranium mining if they want to generate any funds to help clean up the messes left behind from the last wave of uranium industry activity.  Fortunately, the committee recognized the problems with the legislation from a variety of different perspectives, and defeated the bill on a strongly bi-partisan vote of 11 to 1.
• one of the major trends of the 2011 session was the effort to consolidate entire state agencies or significant portions of their functions.  Several of these measures included whole or partial mergers of the Departments of Energy, Minerals & Natural Resources (EMNRD) and Environment (NMED) (HB80, Bandy; HB84, Lundstrom; HB157, Park; HB206, Hall).  With very few exceptions, it is problematic to make the same entity responsible for competing functions—in this case, the conflicting interests of resource development/extraction and environmental protection.  Again, the members of HENRC saw the inherent problems with the proposals and overwhelmingly defeated all of the merger bills presented to the committee.

Chair:  Rep. Brian Egolf
Vice-Chair:  Rep. Antonio Lujan