‘Once a New Mexican, always a New Mexican’: How Don Tarry is balancing a Blackstone deal with a deep commitment to home

Working as a paper boy for the Silver City Daily Press when he was a teenager, Don Tarry learned life lessons about how to make customers happy and, when necessary, own up to mistakes.

In a town of about 12,000 at the time, all it took was a call to his mother, a local well-known teacher, and “when I got home from the route, she’d say, ‘You screwed this up, and you need to call the customer and make it right.’

“It was a great lesson by my mom: If customers aren’t happy, you need to make it right. That’s stuck with me throughout my career,” Tarry says.

After moving to Albuquerque with his high school sweetheart and now wife, Tarry worked in public accounting for about a year at a firm that serviced Public Service Company of New Mexico.

“I think, man, there’s some great people over there (at PNM). I think I’ll go try that for a couple of years,” Tarry says. “Just a year or two years turned into 29 years, and it’s been a blast. And what’s kept me here is the people.”

Tarry is now the president and CEO of PNM, and, in July, he started as the president and CEO of TXNM Energy Inc., PNM’s parent company. Next month, the investment management company Blackstone Infrastructure and TXNM Energy are expected to file for regulatory approval so Blackstone can acquire TXNM for $11.5 billion.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

How has the transition been stepping up as CEO and president of TXNM Energy?

It’s been fantastic. I would have never thought when I joined the company in 1996 I’d be the president and CEO, but it’s been a journey of great mentors, great opportunities to connect with stakeholders and, most important, the transition from when I was 14 years old to now, how do you best evolve into meeting the customers’ needs on an ongoing basis.

You’re still at the helm of PNM. How do you balance both entities?

We have PNM, which is the New Mexico utility, and TNMP (Texas-New Mexico Power). We have a president in TNMP who runs that, and we help on that strategy. But, you know, a big focus is PNM and our customer base here. So much of my attention goes to New Mexico. Once a New Mexican, always a New Mexican.

What are some of your goals as president and CEO of TXNM Energy?

One of the key goals — and it’s core to who I am, it’s core to who my team is — is how do we continue to evolve to meet the customers’ needs and customers’ experiences? First and foremost is reliability. We’ve got to continue to look and enhance our reliability on an ongoing basis to meet our customers’ needs. Power is everything. The second element of it is environment. And with our environmental footprint, we’ve made significant changes. In 2018, we are about 35% carbon-free. I’ll happily tell you in 2026, we’ll be 75% carbon-free, which is a huge change in our system. The third piece, which is absolutely important, is affordability. How do we do things in the most reliable way, but also affordably and balancing the environmental footprint?

What challenges or barriers do you want to overcome leading TXNM Energy?

One of the challenges that we have faced is we’re in a growth market in Albuquerque and in New Mexico. And what I mean by that is we’re a small public utility with $5 billion worth of market capital. We went out to the street recently and said, “Hey, we need to raise $1.3 billion.” That’s about 25% of our overall market cap. That’s difficult to do. So it’s really exciting about the Blackstone acquisition because they can bring that kind of capital to the state that I love and to benefit our customers and benefit the overall transition of the grid.

How do you plan to go about this merger differently from the last rejected proposal with Avangrid? Why will this one gain regulatory approval?

The critical element is listening. And Blackstone has been on site and been out with our stakeholders, and what they’re asking is, “Tell us what you think and tell us what’s important to you.” The other element is they’re very focused on local management. They’ll tell you firsthand they’re not operators, that they’re there to help finance the business. And so if there’s a problem at PNM in the future, you don’t call anybody from Blackstone; you go (to PNM).

What do you do in your free time?

Going out with my kids and golfing when I get a minute or two. It’s not as much about the golf as it is just the opportunity to connect. So that part’s fantastic. I’m pretty active in trying to push education and help where I can help on education and the environment. So a lot of my time goes there.

Any pet peeves?

My biggest pet peeve is when we have some type of issue that affects customers, and then we try to make excuses for that. If we’ve affected a customer, you always want to listen because you can always learn. And I always want to listen to stakeholders if they have a different perspective. The way that I was brought up is if you listen to everybody, there’s some middle (ground) that’s probably the best of all the answers. So when we have a challenge or an outage or an impact to a customer, I follow up with a lot of those directly and say, ‘OK, what do we learn? How do we correct it and make it right for the customer? How do we make sure that things don’t happen again?’

What did you want to be growing up?

Well, it changes over time. My dream job when I was about 6 was to be a professional something, right, (like a) professional athlete, because you watch a lot of TV. But as I transitioned, it was an opportunity to participate in business and to add value. When you think about adding value, it’s not just adding value to shareholders. It’s how do you contribute to the state? I’m excited and passionate about New Mexico, and it’s how do you lean in as a business owner or somebody that participates in business to improving the lives of our customers, improving the education system, doing all the different things that we need to do to make New Mexico a great place — which it is.