New Mexico US Sen. Heinrich touts bipartisan permitting reform bill amid environmentalist criticism

U.S. Sen. Martin Heinrich (D-N.M.) on Monday held back-to-back meetings in Albuquerque with labor leaders, manufacturers and renewable energy companies to tout his new, bipartisan permitting reform bill, which has drawn criticism from local and national environmental advocacy groups.

Heinrich, who serves as the top Democrat on the U.S. Senate’s Energy and Natural Resources Committee, described the 417-page Bipartisan American Affordability and Jobs Act of 2026 on Monday as a “very fine balancing act” achieved over months of negotiations with Committee Chair U.S. Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah) and other Republican leaders.

“It was not easy,” Heinrich said Monday before a roundtable discussion of renewable energy company leaders. “It took longer than we would like, but everyone was committed to getting there. And I think we’ve come up with a really defensible product that, if we can get it passed, I think will age very well over time.”

The sweeping permitting reform bill aims to greatly reduce the amount of time energy projects, including solar arrays, wind farms or transmission lines, idle while awaiting federal permits. It imposes additional deadlines on parties that seek to litigate once a project is approved, an effort to stop approved projects from being further delayed in the courts. 

Jeremy Turner, the senior director New Mexico development and strategy for the Pattern Energy Group, told Heinrich on Monday that the company’s 500 miles of transmission lines for its wind farms took more than a decade due to lags in the permitting process. 

The company’s New Mexico wind turbines generate more than 1,400 megawatts of power across 800,000 acres of land, according to Turner’s comments Monday and the company’s website. The company has leased an additional 1 million acres of land that could produce as many as 5,000 megawatts of power, Turner said, but only if the approval process proceeds quickly and reliably.

“A reasonable timeframe for review by the federal agencies, and then also a timeframe for when people can actually challenge that decision, is absolutely imperative,” Turner said. “Without those, we’re going to continue to stay stagnant.”

Heinrich’s bill, which he announced alongside three co-sponsors at a news conference on Oct. 1, has received praise from labor unions, as well as both the American Petroleum Institute and the American Clean Power Association. Groups touting bipartisan policy have also lauded it as a step forward on a policy matter that has long frustrated advocates for all types of energy production in the United States. 

But some environmental advocacy groups have sharply criticized Heinrich, whom they say undermined his long record as an advocate for renewable energy and environmental protection by crafting the compromise bill with Republicans. 

And now, because he is a co-sponsor, Heinrich can’t honestly describe the negative impacts of the bill when he goes on a tour “hyping” it, Erik Schlenker-Goodrich, executive director of the Western Environmental Law Center, told Source NM. 

New Mexico U.S. Sen. Heinrich and colleagues announce bipartisan regulatory reform bill

“We feel betrayed by Sen. Heinrich on this bill,” Schlenker-Goodrich said. “We think he has effectively boxed himself into silence about what the harms of this permitting deal are to New Mexico and the people and places we love in this state.”

Schlenker-Goodrick also said he is “perplexed” by Heinrich announcing the bill just weeks before midterm elections, in which Democrats are projected to gain seats and potentially change the dynamics in both chambers. 

Heinrich told Source NM on Monday that he disagrees that waiting for potential Democratic gains once Congress convenes in January would have resulted in a better bill or one with better chances of passing. 

“In the next Congress, we’re still going to have the same White House; we’re going to still have the same need to build a bipartisan coalition, and frankly, we probably won’t have the same chairs and ranking members,” he said. “And some of the secret sauce in this was just the fact that we had four people who were genuinely committed to a balanced package that both sides could support.”

Heinrich also called criticisms that the bill weakens environmental protections “unfounded and misguided,” saying the bill simply ensures federal agencies review projects more quickly, not that they approve them.

“We’re going to get to ‘yes’ faster. We’re also going to get to ‘no’ faster when a project is harmful,” he said. “And we’re going to be able to actually solve the climate crisis. It shouldn’t take 18 years to build a project that actually has value cleaning up the grid.”