OPINION: New Mexico should take over the claims process for wildfire victims

Two years is long enough. You can’t pay your bills with promises that went unkept.

After flying over the perimeter of the Calf Canyon/Hermits Peak fire in Air Force One in June 2022, President Joe Biden said the federal government had “a responsibility to help this state recover, to help the families who have been here for centuries in the beautiful northern New Mexico villages who can’t go home and whose livelihoods have been fundamentally changed.”

Heck yeah it did.

The nation’s Forest Service started the largest and most destructive wildfire in New Mexico history with ill-advised and unsupervised prescribed burns that, when aided by gusty winds, record heat and dry forests, merged in April 2022 and burned more than 320,000 acres in Mora, San Miguel and Taos counties, destroying about 430 homes and causing an estimated 18,000 people to flee a 534-square-mile fire zone.

Pets, livestock and priceless belongings too often had to be left behind.

“There were some people who just left without anything,” said Ledoux Volunteer Fire Department firefighter Krystle Garcia.

Poor air quality persisted throughout northern New Mexico for months, and fire damages threatened the Gallinas watershed that supplies water to Las Vegas.

Post-fire flooding was sometimes as destructive as the wildfire itself. Experts say the environmental consequences of the fire will span generations.

Meanwhile, countless families remain homeless and lives remain upended.

“At this time of reflection, the federal government’s response becomes even more poignant and critical,” Mora resident Antonia Roybal-Mack wrote in an April 7 Journal guest column. “This (two-year anniversary) milestone not only serves as a somber reminder of the initial disaster but also of the prolonged suffering that has followed.”

Biden, in his first visit to New Mexico as president, described the damages inflicted by the Forest Service’s incompetence as a “moonscape.” He said the fire area was “so damn big we couldn’t go in,” vowing his administration would do everything it could to help the families who had lost their homes. He even suggested the federal government had a moral obligation to help the people of northern New Mexico recover.

Right again.

Congress responded in November and December of 2022, appropriating nearly $4 billion for wildfire victims, requiring the Federal Emergency Management Agency to design and administer a program for fully compensating New Mexicans who suffered personal injury, property losses, and business losses.

Yet, deep anger persists in northern New Mexico at the federal government for starting the massive wildfire, and dismay lingers about the slow pace of emergency aid offered to families who lost property.

The Forest Service, which manages almost a third of the state’s forested lands, initially delayed admission that it had sparked the Calf Canyon and Hermits Peak fires and withheld fire records, unnecessarily delaying initial insurance claims.

It hasn’t been any better with FEMA, which, sadly is again letting Americans down.

FEMA’s red tape initially denied trailers to people burned out of their homes because their properties lacked septic systems and utilities. It is remote mountainous areas, for crying out loud, where some people use wells for water and wood stoves for heat.

Of the 140 households FEMA initially offered travel trailers or mobile homes, only about a tenth moved in because of FEMA’s strict rules. More than a hundred people withdrew their applications in frustration.

It wasn’t until April 2023 that FEMA opened offices in Mora, Las Vegas and Santa Fe to help fire victims navigate the arduous federal claims process.

FEMA’s red tape continues to prevent much of the aid from being distributed. FEMA has paid only about $465 million of claims so far, or about a tenth of the amount Congress appropriated.

Additionally, the Biden administration has earmarked approximately $1 billion of the $4 billion appropriated by Congress to administer the claims program. That’s about the degree of efficiency we can expect of the federal government. Those FEMA claims offices themselves are likely costing us a pretty penny, equipped with ceremonial bells for victims to ring upon receiving their aid checks — as if it’s something they won, when in fact it is something they’re owed.

So, about 80% of the relief money is sitting in limbo in Washington, D.C., two years after the fires were started.

FEMA is consistently missing its own 180-day deadline to make a determination on a victim’s claim. The bureaucracy has even lost claims and cannot find receipts for payments that it believes it has made.

“We’ll do whatever it takes, as long as it takes,” Biden said in June 2022. “We are a federal system – that’s why I have no reluctance to do everything we possibly can to meet all of New Mexico’s needs and stay as long as it takes to meet those needs.”

Well, two years is long enough, Mr. President. We can’t wait for FEMA to get on the ball, not while New Mexicans are suffering prolonged hardships. Not while we have the means to do something about it, thanks to billions of dollars in surplus oil and gas revenues the state is reaping from the sweat of the brows of workers in the oilpatch.

New Mexican’s have pulled themselves up from the bootstraps before, and we can do it again.

An interesting proposition worth exploring has emerged at the 2-year anniversary of the largest wildfire in state history: Use New Mexico’s overflowing state coffers to process and pay claims to fire victims, and let the state fight for reimbursement from the feds in the courts.

Gov. Lujan Grisham has signaled she may call a brief special session after the June primaries for lawmakers to consider crime legislation. That’s well and good. Some of the suggested legislation, such as mandating inpatient treatment for defendants deemed incompetent to stand trial, are good ideas.

But rather than having a special session that chips away at the edges, the governor and lawmakers could do something historic: They could take care of the fire victims.

We know the people affected, we have boots on the ground, and we have the means to make it so.

Republican U.S. Senate candidate Nella Domenici has presented such a plan to the governor. It’s rather straight-forward: The state would assume the claims of the fire victims, assume a rebuttable presumption that the claims are valid, and pay claims to the victims.

Then, our lawyers would fight with FEMA’s lawyers for probably a decade or so — after valid claims have been paid. Who knows, it could become a landmark U.S. Supreme Court case one day — “The pissed-off fire victims of the State of New Mexico vs. FEMA.”

Yes, it would take some bipartisan guts to get this done. It’s time to put the D’s and R’s aside and fight for New Mexicans. We’re a small state. It would take a united front to confront and prevail over the mammoth FEMA bureaucracy.

But it was through boldness that we became a state. And it’s through boldness that we can marshal our resources and make our northern New Mexico fire victims whole, with or without the help of Washington.