Q&A: Senator talks water and local education

Staff photo: David Stevens

Sen. Martin Heinrich Heinrich visited the Clovis News Journal on Friday.

Editor’s note: Sen. Martin Heinrich is in his first term as the junior senator for New Mexico. The former representative won the seat vacated by the 2012 retirement of Jeff Bingaman.

Heinrich visited the Clovis News Journal for an approximate 25-minute conversation on Friday.

The conversation has been edited for length and clarity, and split into two sections.

This section covers local education and water issues. The second part, scheduled to publish Tuesday, will cover the Supreme Court, the election season and various policy.

Question: We haven’t had many opportunities to speak with you, so we always like to know a person’s familiarity with the area.

Heinrich: I’ve spent a fair amount of time here in Clovis, also in Portales and Tucumcari — both since being elected senator and previously as a natural resources trustee. So I did some work out here based on a settlement we had with the railroad for cleanup done in town.

How is this area different from what, for lack of better words, we’ll call the Albuquerque-Santa Fe corridor?

It’s completely different. Really with the whole state, one of the unique things about New Mexico is that every corner of the state has its own issues.

When you get out to eastern New Mexico, it even looks different from everywhere else in the state. The architecture is different, the culture is different, the employer base is different.

You really have to address each part of the state with a very different approach because unlike other states, it’s not homogenous.

What’s the same?

I think, just pride in what we do for the rest of the nation. Our military, in particular, that’s something ubiquitous throughout the state and Clovis is no different.

Everybody is incredibly proud of Cannon Air Force Base and proud to host the Melrose range as well.

During your visit you’ve touted a college affordability tour. What are you seeing so far on that tour?

(There are) a couple of things I’m focused on. One is that New Mexico has actually done a very good job, including Clovis and Mesalands (community college in Tucumcari), at keeping college costs down. We can learn, and the rest of the country can learn, a few things from that.

They’re also focusing on career paths that have a built-in career at the end of that two-year college degree.

That’s something we haven’t always done well within community colleges nationwide. I think in recent years there has been less focus on technical paths that get you to a career.

Yesterday (Thursday), when I was at Clovis for example, you look at their rad-techs, their physical therapists, the folks working in the wind program and industrial program. Those are career paths where you know where you’re going to work, basically, and you can find a job, as opposed to just getting a generalized two-year degree where maybe you go on to a four-year degree and maybe you don’t. I think that’s a really important approach to the community college issue, and something we can learn from nationwide as well.

The same applies to what they’re doing at Mesalands with the wind program, the farrier program, what they’re doing with silversmithing — those guys are in high demand. I think we should be approaching education on a broader scale within our community college infrastructure across the country.

Do you see issues with colleges getting too big, either in infrastructure or in administrative positions with long titles where none of the words are “instructor?”

I think there are a lot of public universities that have too much overhead and try to be all things for all people instead of focusing on a particular niche. That’s part of what, on a gross level, has really driven up tuition and fees for students across the country.

While New Mexico has done a pretty good job holding tuition down, there are a lot of public institutions that now have enormous tuition and fee burdens on their students. Those students graduate with student debt that is unmanageable.

There was a recent court case, albeit unrelated to New Mexico, where a lady unsuccessfully sued her law school because she couldn’t find a legal career after graduation. She claimed the college advertised high job placement rates, then failed to mention those jobs included pool cleaners and restaurant servers who had nothing to do with the legal field. I’m not saying she deserved to win, but did the suit raise a fair point?

I think if there’s not a level of transparency and honesty with the students, there’s a problem. I think that’s a challenge, particularly with some of the for-profit colleges.

Do you see inroads on the Ute Water Project in the next decade?

Yeah. I think it’s one of those projects where we continue to chip away at it.

We’ve been able to get small appropriations to move it forward a few million dollars at a time. The level of commitment is higher than it’s ever been. The level of cooperation is higher than it’s ever been.

I’m very bullish on the Ute Water Project. I fully believe we’re going to get that built.

I would say, when it comes to eastern New Mexico and Clovis in particular, the two things I track on a constant basis are how can we move forward on the Ute Water Project and what is the status of investment in Cannon Air Force Base and Melrose Bombing Range?

Is it hard to convince senators nowhere near New Mexico it’s best to use $500 million to connect entities to a lake 100 miles away?

No, because it’s really about water security, including water security for Cannon Air Force Base, which is something all of my colleagues can understand.

Many of them have similar challenges with water management in their regions.

The hardest part was getting that project sort of in the queue and on the radar screen. Once you’re in the queue and you have a history of appropriations it becomes easier and easier to go down that path. It’s getting over the hump of initially getting people to buy in to a project that is the hardest.

Clovis Mayor David Lansford, who’s on the Eastern New Mexico Water Utility Authority, said Thursday he’s completely on board with Chairman (Gayla) Brumfield going after federal dollars for the pipeline. But he thinks just as much energy should be devoted to a 40-year water supply plan, because it’s tough to economically develop an area when you can’t give a straight answer on water supply. He wants a multi-pronged approach where you compensate farmers for water rights, encourage municipal conservation and create stormwater management plans. How much could you help from Washington toward that?

I don’t know if there are any authorizations for that, but it’s really about marrying those two approaches together. Those are things that you can do at the local level.

As somebody who used to be the chair of a water authority, those are exactly the things we would pursue when I was on the Bernalillo County Water Authority and marry it to the infrastructure. I don’t see how what the mayor said is in any way incongruous to the work to complete the Ute Pipeline.

What did you do on the Bernalillo authority that you think the ENM authority could replicate? Granted, they are two very different authorities.

But it’s the same principle. It’s about making sure the federal government can work together with local government, because there aren’t enough spare resources to go around to solve these problems without cooperation.

Anywhere in this country, anywhere in this state, solutions are about local, state and federal government working together. The solutions are going to be different regionally, but the principle is the same.

When you have Republicans and Democrats, people at the county commission level, the city level and the federal level all working together on an agreed-upon goal, it’s easier to get to the level of fruition to get a project done.

What would you like to do with the two-plus years remaining in this term?

We’re going to continue to focus on New Mexico’s military bases and our national labs. There are a lot of opportunities there.

I focus on an annual basis on military construction. We’re always looking for additional missions that we can bring to the state of New Mexico. That is something we work on year in and year out.

On energy and natural resources, which is another committee I sit on, it has been a relatively bipartisan committee. I hope we get an energy bill on the floor here in the next few weeks that would include the Sportsmen’s Act that I have co-sponsored with Lisa Murkowski of Alaska. That would be the regular-order package that would come out of the committee the way it used to, and it would include legislation I think people from both rural and suburban areas of the state would really benefit from.

— Compiled by Managing Editor Kevin Wilson