FEMA official overseeing NM fire victims fund received six-figure payout, documents show

The federal official in charge of a multi-billion-dollar fund to compensate victims of New Mexico’s biggest-ever wildfire received a six-figure payment for smoke damage at his Angel Fire home far from where the fire burned, according to documents obtained by Source New Mexico and New Mexico PBS.

Internal records reveal that Jay Mitchell, who runs the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s Hermits Peak-Calf Canyon Fire Claims Office, received roughly $266,000 in compensation last July for smoke and ash cleaning costs for his home and adjacent casita in Angel Fire, a ski resort town more than an hour’s drive from the hardest-hit areas of the 2022 wildfire. 

Mitchell’s wife Lisa, a licensed real estate broker selling property in the Angel Fire area, received additional payments totaling more than $250,000 last August for business-related losses she said she incurred during the fire, according to the documents.

Because the U.S. Forest Service accidentally ignited the wildfire with two botched prescribed burns, Congress in late 2022 passed the Hermits Peak Fire Assistance Act requiring FEMA to compensate people who lost their homes or livelihoods due to the wildfire or subsequent flooding. The claims office, which is overseeing $5.45 billion in compensation funds, also pays property owners in and around the wildfire perimeter for smoke and ash cleaning costs for both exteriors and interiors.

According to recent estimates from the claims office, 74 individuals or families who lost their homes in the wildfire are still awaiting final compensation offers more than 3 1/2 years after the fire ripped through their communities. 

Mitchell and his wife did not respond to multiple recent requests for comment from Source New Mexico, including phone calls and text messages. Source NM attempted to contact Mitchell at his Santa Fe office and his Angel Fire home. At his home, Mitchell slammed the door after shouting an expletive at reporters for approaching him at his “private residence,” and his wife accused reporters of “harassing” her.

Adán Serna, communications director for U.S. Sen. Ben Ray Luján (D-N.M.), told Source that while he had no first-hand knowledge of the Mitchells’ payout, “It would be deeply disappointing and shows the need for greater transparency from FEMA. The senator, Serna said, “has repeatedly called for greater transparency, improved processes, and faster claims decisions. That is the sole purpose of the Claims Office: to get money out the door to people who need it. It must also answer to Congress. Unfortunately, FEMA has failed to meet those standards.”

In a letter Friday afternoon, Luján, Senator Martin Heinrich and U.S. Rep. Teresa Leger Fernández called on Mitchell to resign. The letter did not mention the $500,000 payments explicitly but alleged Mitchell continuously failed to report to Congress on his activities or focus on wildfire victims who needed the most help.

“Jay Mitchell has lost the trust of Northern New Mexico,” the lawmakers said in an emailed statement to Source NM. “He must resign.”

In addition to Mitchell’s resignation, the statement calls for an “independent review of the Claims Office’s administrative management of the funding.”

Less than 1,000 feet from the boundary line

FEMA named Mitchell as its new director of the Hermits Peak-Calf Canyon claims office in April of 2024. A native New Mexican, Mitchell previously served as director of the New Mexico Department of Homeland Security and Emergency Management under Gov. Susana Martinez. He took over the claims office at a time of deep public dissatisfaction among fire victims and public officials over delays in distributing funds.

Mitchell also began work one month after the claims office rolled out its smoke compensation program.

Mitchell applied for smoke damage compensation in July 2024, and indicated in his application that he needed the payout to clean his two-story, 4,800-square-foot home and a 1,700-square-foot casita with an attached two-car garage. Recent tax records value the Mitchells’ home at about $785,000. 

On July 15, 2024, Mitchell signed FEMA’s application, which requires signatories to affirm under threat of perjury that they are telling the truth that the “reported structures, contents, and need for smoke, ash, and soot cleaning on this worksheet is true and correct.”

It’s unclear how much smoke Angel Fire experienced during the wildfire, which burned primarily in nearby Mora and San Miguel counties. Last week, Source New Mexico visited Mitchell’s neighborhood, which features numerous million-dollar houses, most of them vacation rentals, tucked between aspens and Ponderosa pines on a hillside overlooking the Angel Fire Country Club. 

Two year-round homeowners along the winding dirt road through Mitchell’s neighborhood, Michael Martinez and Dan Brown, in separate interviews said they were paying close attention to the fire during spring and early summer of 2022. They said they remember a few days during which they could smell smoke, but said that it did not cause any discoloration or damage to their homes or to those of anyone they know.

“We didn’t have any smoke damage,” Brown said in an interview at his home. “Now, sometimes you could smell it. Sometimes you were breathing some of it, but not heavily.”

Martinez, who lives a half mile northeast of Mitchell, told Source that, “There was no smoke damage to my house at all. We never had a day where smoke was that bad coming in. We have pictures of it just blooming up over to the south of us, but never anything that really hit our neighborhood.”

According to a Source New Mexico analysis of the map officials consult when approving smoke damage payments, Mitchell’s home is less than 1,000 feet from a boundary line demarcating a roughly 2,200-square-mile zone in which claimants need only to sign a declaration form to receive smoke compensation payments.

Had he lived on the other side of the line, Mitchell would have been required to provide additional proof of smoke damage or discoloration as part of his claim, including photos, a site inspection or invoices for professional cleaning.

Burn scar victims left behind

After FEMA rolled out payments for smoke damage, the category quickly became one of the most expensive areas of loss the office paid out. By September 2024, the office had cut checks for $393.8 million in smoke and ash damage claims to 4,168 claimants, which works out to an average of $94,500 each. That was more than one-third of the total compensation the office had released to fire victims at that time. 

Meanwhile, concerns grew among survivors and elected officials that even as it released huge sums of money, the office was leaving behind people who lost the most in the fire.

Those people reside in what victims refer to as the “burn scar,” the 534-square-mile wildfire that contains multiple communities. It stretches from outside of Las Vegas, through Rociada and other hard-hit areas to south of Taos. The fire destroyed more than 900 homes within that boundary, in addition to livelihoods and forestland. 

Luján posted on social media in May of 2024 that he had met with Mitchell “on behalf of impacted New Mexicans” and emphasized the importance of “prioritizing people with total home loss.”

But those concerns continued into 2025 and in January of that year, Yolanda Cruz, a fire victim who moderates a Facebook page for fellow neighbors still navigating the recovery process, and Luján’s office pushed for a meeting with Mitchell to hear directly from those who had lost their homes. 

According to Cruz’s notes, which Source NM reviewed, at the meeting, Mitchell committed to prioritizing compensation to fire victims living in the burn scar, and particularly those who lost their homes.

Serna from Luján’s office said that Mitchell, at a late January meeting last year, reiterated that commitment. Luján’s office “has repeatedly pressed FEMA for updates on that commitment and has received insufficient responses,” Serna said. 

U.S. Rep. Teresa Leger Fernández, who represents the state’s 3rd Congressional District where the fire hit hardest, said in a statement provided to Source NM that her office continues to hear from constituents “who are desperate for answers and aren’t getting responses, and every week of delay means more suffering for families.”

In an interview last week at her home in Sapello, Cruz sat on her living room couch and reviewed the records of the Mitchells’ payments, a picture window behind her revealing the charred remains of acres of trees. 

She said she felt betrayed to see that Jay Mitchell would agree to receive any funds for himself. She said he had an obligation, even if he was technically eligible for compensation, to ask for his claim to be put “on the back burner” until everyone in the wildfire perimeter was compensated. 

“It is really disheartening and disturbing that he received this,” she said, holding a document showing the $266,000 payment for smoke damage.

She rattled off names of people who live in the direct path of where the fire burned and are still waiting: her friends, the Silvas, whose adult children lost their home and had to move with young grandkids into their trailer. Their neighbor: a mechanic waiting on business compensation and funds to pay for equipment the fire melted. Down the road, Cruz has a neighbor who has since moved to near Albuquerque after losing her home and also has yet to be compensated. Then there’s the diner owner in Las Vegas who had to shut down for months. 

“Jay Mitchell has not been honest with people. He is not putting the people in the burn scar first, like he said he would,” she said. 

On a tour later of her scorched property, Cruz pointed to signs of progress in her family’s recovery. Her family has been able to remove the vehicles the fire destroyed, as well her granddaughter’s playground that it liquefied. 

Her son had just completed downing hazard trees at the top of the hill, she noted, leaving the hilltop barren of trees and covered with blackened sawdust. Despite the lack of vegetation, deer visit her daily, she said. 

As she walked slowly back down the hill toward her home, she stayed upright by placing her hands on the bark of scorched trees. By the time she reached the bottom, her hands were coated with soot.

“This always happens,” she said, wiping the soot off her hands onto her pants. 

Source New Mexico reporter Patrick Lohmann has written extensively about the Hermits Peak-Calf Canyon Fire. He can be reached at (505)933-9013 or on Signal at PLohmann.61.