Bob Williams of State Budget Solutions thinks New Mexico and other states could see the same positive economic numbers as North Dakota where the unemployment rate is 3.2% (New Mexico’s is more than double that), but that Washington’s heavy hand in land ownership is holding us back. Check out his article from Forbes.
Utah has already adopted legislation requesting federally-controlled lands back from Washington and New Mexico has considered such legislation as well.
Interestingly enough, state management of BLM lands which, as media reports have stated, are being overrun by wild horses, could result in more innovative solutions to the West’s wild horse problems. As things stand now, slaughter is the only albeit controversial serious solution anyone has broached. It would be great to see the various states working to find innovative solutions.
I recently did a Wikipedia search for Jeff Bezos and was stunned to see that he had been born in Albuquerque. Think what the city would look like had Bill Gates stayed with Microsoft and Jeff Bezos had returned with Amazon. Both ended up in Washington state which has no state income tax.
Yes, this would be a different place!
Encana, an exploration company based in Alberta, has leases on land in the NW part of NM and has drilled enough exploratory wells in the Mancos Shale formation to assure itself that the area is productive. Other oil companies have leases there as well.
However, given the nature of proving a field and then getting the pipelines built to take the oil out, as truck/rial carriage of oil is not efficient, in the long term, it will be some time before we know how large the fields are.
Still, the premise that NM could be like ND is TRUE !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Prosperity in NM threatens the one party status quo as does educational improvements. As long as the majority of the NM citizens vote “party line” democrat this state will remain poor and uneducated. Corrupt politicians have control and they are not about to give that up no matter how destructive it is to the citizens of this state. Coulda, woulda, shoulda won’t fix the problem, but a more “business friendly” legislature would help.