As Ruidoso area residents return to their homes – or what’s left of their homes – we’ll be watching FEMA.

For the past two years, since the disastrous Hermit’s Peak-Calf Canyon fires, we’ve heard more about what FEMA hasn’t done than what it has done.

This year the agency began changing its New Mexico operation. Jay Mitchell, the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s new head of New Mexico operations, announced major changes. FEMA Administrator Deanne Criswell stood next to the governor at a recent news conference, promising, “We will be by your side throughout this recovery.”

We’d all like to believe that. It would mean that the agency listened to criticism and responded. Finally.

For months, fire victims, advocates and elected officials complained about Mitchell’s predecessor, Angela Gladwell, director of the Hermit’s Peak/ Calf Canyon Claims office. Gladwell became the face of dysfunctional government and failure to help people in desperate need after the fire in early 2022. The claims office didn’t write a check until April 2023 and by year end had expended just 7% of the $4 billion allocated by Congress. In April 2024 the payout had inched up to 13%.

Maybe Gladwell was the wrong person for the job, but I have to wonder if she was in an impossible situation.

Last year I wrote that “the agency that’s supposed to help victims with housing and reimbursement operates in slow motion, if it operates at all.” In New Mexico and every other state since Hurricane Katrina, FEMA “has done almost nothing, hogtied by its own regulations and bureaucratic inertia.”

From its creation in 1979 to 2003, FEMA was a small, agile, independent agency that responded quickly. After it became a division of the Department of Homeland Security, it became another bureaucratic cog. Decision making, spending and communications bogged down. Gladwell was a 25year denizen of that culture when she came here in late 2022. I couldn’t find anything in her long and impressive resume to indicate she’d ever been on the ground for a real disaster.

When she stepped down in January, a FEMA news release gave the beleaguered director credit for building a compensation program “from the ground up” and hiring a team of New Mexicans. Because funding came directly from Congress through a bill, her office had to create a new compensation program, which suggests FEMA had no template for a basic function. Her office was still trying to get program rules approved even as fire victims were pleading for help.

With Gladwell’s departure, FEMA began consolidating New Mexico recovery operations and gave Jay Mitchell, the new director of the Joint Recovery Office, a new mission “to lead the on-theground long-term recovery efforts” as well as claims. Gladwell has been kicked upstairs.

Mitchell, who once led the state Department of Homeland Security, is a former Air Force colonel and global security consultant, but his most important credential may be that he’s a fifth-generation New Mexican. We need someone who understands us, say critics; don’t send us another FEMA bureaucrat.

In a recent op ed, Mitchell wrote: “I am committed to speeding up the recovery process from this horrific fire. As an experienced emergency management professional, I know recovery never happens fast enough, and that same sad fact is true of the recovery from this disaster. The process needs to go faster… “I understand the frustration and anger people affected by the fire carry about their loss and slow recovery. Bureaucracy is the last thing people want to deal with after losing homes and livelihoods, and the process can, at times, seem complex and daunting.”

Mitchell is off to a fast start but with the Ruidoso fires, his responsibilities just doubled. If the agency empowers him to do what he needs to do, he could turn “FEMA bureaucrat” into a respectable term.

(EDITOR’S NOTE: Sherry Robinson is a syndicated columnist whose work is distributed by New Mexico News Services.)

In the 27-member block of the European Union, conservative candidates identifying with the right won in Germany and France and are polling ahead in Italy and most other nations, with Poland being the exception where the right has ruled for twelve-years and has fading influence. The primary issues responsible for the populace turning on the hereto- fore left-wing governance are immigration, crime and climate control.

Could we learn something from Europe? Europe has been the testing ground for the climate change movement, charging carbon offset taxes for numerous uses of fossil fuels and the elevated cost of energy. Europeans are saying they are tired of higher costs of living while being overrun by immigrants from around the world and an increase in crime, which is often ignored by authorities.

Here in the US, the open border issue is at the top of American’s concerns, with two-thirds of Americans opposing the Biden Administration’s policies. His recent executive order has been rightly called a feckless, pre-election ploy. It is also no secret that Biden’s open border policy has allowed many criminal elements and belligerents to illegally enter our country causing the FBI to issue advisories of future terrorist threats because of politically subversive operatives being unidentified.

On the environmental front, the office of West Virginia Senator Shelly Moore reports the Biden Administration is taking huge sums of tax-payer money from the Inflation reduction Act (IRA) which was earmarked for the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and funneling it to “climate justice” groups under a “national grant program.” Among those receiving $3 billion in grants is the Climate Justice Alliance, which is a network of 90 affiliates who will distribute the tax-payer funds to community-based organizations (CBO’s) which address health and justice issues.

Last November, the Climate Justice Alliance sponsored a “Free Palestine” march in our nation’s capital. To validify their mandate for “climate justice,” banners read “Free Palestine is a Climate Justice Issue,” “Our Government Funds Palestine Genocide” and “Only Socialist Revolution Can Stop World War III.”

According to a Wall Street Journal article, they have called for the abolition of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). Their website claims $3 billion will flow through their organization from the IRA to grassroots organizations whose time has come to assume governance over the direction of these monies.

It is unclear whether the Biden Administration is at odds with or has not properly vetted these organizations or if it supports their causes for social revolution. Either way, they are receiving our taxpayer funded dollars.

Working with liberal blue-state governments, climate justice organizations are promoting the use of permitting roadblocks, lawsuits, higher taxes and shareholder activism against the oil, gas and coal energy sector. The activist organization, Climate Analytics has alleged CO2 damages done to the climate by 25 major fossil fuel companies between “1985 and 2018 to be about $20 trillion.”

Last month, Vermont passed a law that requires oil companies to pay for damages caused by “extreme weather events” over the last 30 years. Vermont will tally the cost of damages. Companies who have released an estimated 1 billion metric tons of CO2 between 1995 and 2024 will be forced to pay their share of damages to a climate superfund.

Major oil companies are currently defending lawsuits from seven states, Washington, DC and numerous cities. These legal actions are mostly ideologically driven, with the goal of driving the companies out of business. The problem is, adequate alternative energy supply is decades off and if the companies go out of business, then the world goes dark, and transportation becomes still. The more realistic outcome is higher energy prices for all of us.

Climate activists are not just chasing fossil fuel companies, they are also suing food companies. In February, New York Attorney General Letitia James sued JBS USA Food Co., who is a subsidiary of …

… the world’s largest meat processor. Ms. James claims they misled the public about its environmental impact in that “beef production emits the most greenhouse gasses of any major food commodity.”

You may be getting the idea that climate lawyers see the “climate litigation industry” to become quite lucrative in the future, with massive fines and settlements like what happened to the tobacco industry who now make annual payments to the states in perpetuity.

In 2018, the Environmental Law Institute formed the Climate Judiciary Project to educate judges on the impact of greenhouse gasses and climate change. Never mind that there is a growing corps of scientists who disagree with environmental studies and their futuristic models depicting world-wide disasters. The catastrophe predicting segment of environmental science is being driven by the forces of profit, which are being funded by our tax dollars and the tax-paying citizens in Europe and in countries around the globe.

Theirs is a for-profit industry, driven by socialist-minded profit takers who have long tentacles in education, politics and the justice systems. Create a story of catastrophic events, repeat it continually, disregard opposing scientific views, place enforcement in the hands of government, fund it by taxpayers and make the world pay.

It is time for Americans to wise-up to the politician’s scheme and throw the bums out, like Europe is now doing. The climate litigation industry is a growing monster who can only be stopped at the polls by un-electing politicians who are funded by and favor the movement.

One such legislator up for reelection is Senator Martin Heinrich who is a self-proclaimed environmentalist, having served as executive director of the Cottonwood Gulch Foundation, a New Mexico nonprofit dedicated to educating young people on the environment.

Nella Domenici is hoping to defeat Heinrich and regain her father’s old Senate seat. Nella is outspoken on the causes of inflation, crime and border security. She presents herself as an independent thinker who has worked her way to the top of and understands the financial world and the importance of the oil and gas industry to New Mexico. Nella deserves a good look for the job.

(EDITOR’S NOTE: Tom Wright is a columnist who lives in Santa Fe. He is an investor in El Rito Media, LLC, which owns the Artesia Daily Press.)