New Mexico land commissioner announces uranium mining ban on state trust lands

New Mexico Commissioner of Public Lands Stephanie Garcia Richard on Friday signed an executive order that bans all new uranium mining projects on the more than 13 million acres of state trust lands she oversees.

Garcia Richard, a Democrat who has roughly four months left in her term and is running for lieutenant governor, said at a news conference Friday on the front steps of her office’s Santa Fe headquarters that the longlasting environmental and public health impacts of uranium contamination outweigh any potential revenues to state coffers uranium mining could provide.

She said the executive order is needed now, in particular, amid a recent uptick in uranium extraction proposals statewide, including in the Grants Mineral Belt, Canjilon and Pie Town areas. She attributed the renewed interest to President Donald Trump’s administration, which has sought to fast-track federal permits for uranium mining and identified two such proposals on Cibola National Forest land near Mount Taylor as “priority projects.” 

“New Mexicans have been overlooked by the uranium industry and the federal government for far too long, and now the Trump administration is once again completely ignoring these communities and pushing for aggressive uranium development nationwide, despite the fact that there still remain thousands of sites that are abandoned and need to be remediated,” she said. 

While there are no pending uranium proposals before the State Land Office, Garcia Richard noted that approximately 50 abandoned sites are on state trust lands, vestiges of the decades in the 20th century in which New Mexico produced most of the nation’s uranium ore. Those sites still risk contaminating nearby ground and surface water, she said.

Her executive order directs the State Land Office to prioritize cleaning up those legacy sites, in addition to “not making the problem worse through new project authorizations.”

The state Legislature this year approved the second round of $20 million in funding dedicated to remediating abandoned uranium mine sites, approximately 350 of which dot the New Mexico landscape. Previous funding has gone to clean up four abandoned mines on state trust land in McKinley County.

Garcia Richard acknowledged during the news conference that she is at the end of her second term as land commissioner and that her successor has discretion to overturn her executive order.

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“We are putting this out there so that if a future land commissioner wants to mine uranium, they’re going to have to overturn this, and we will be asking them why they did not uphold this document,” she said.

Democrat Juan de Jesus Sanchez III is running against Republican Michael Jack Perry in the Nov. 3 general election to replace Garcia Richard as land commissioner. 

Sanchez stood in the small crowd gathered for the news conference Friday. He told Source NM after the news conference that he intends to keep the executive order in place if he’s elected. 

Perry did not respond to Source NM’s request for comment Friday on whether he, too, would uphold the ban.