New Mexico Mercury

The biggest problem with sound-bite politics is that the focus of the electorate is rarely in the right place. In a state where the Republican governor, a Republican congressman, two Democratic congressmen, and a Democratic senator are all virtually guaranteed to win reelection, most of the media focus is on those races.  Most other races get ignored even though they are still very real decisions for voters to make.  Yes, the offices of attorney general, auditor, and treasurer are all likely to remain in Democratic hands, and the state house races are getting some coverage because of a potential Republican takeover aided by the 2012 redistricting process, but none of these are the real stories.

Instead, the races that should be getting most of the airtime and column inches in New Mexico are the races for secretary of state and commissioner of public lands.  Both races have a clear choice and a clear difference, and thanks to their low visibility both races could result in Republican victories by individuals completely unqualified for the offices they are running for.

Republican Secretary of State Dianna Duran originally won her seat only because of Democratic crossover voters, myself among them, who were cheered by the prospect of the first seemingly competent candidate the New Mexico GOP had run for the office in a long time.  Unfortunately, she turned out to be a party line obstructionist who repeatedly violated the Inspection of Public Records Act, twice attempted to remove tens-of-thousands of mostly Democratic voters from the rolls, spent an untold amount of taxpayer money investigating non-existent ineligible voters, and claimed that a counting error on the night of the primary election was the fault of the county conveniently clerked by her opponent despite that county not having submitted any numbers yet.

Her opponent, by contrast, is the most competent county clerk Bernalillo County has ever seen. Maggie Toulouse Oliver has managed to run universally clean, efficient, and generally uncontroversial elections in a county that contains approximately a third of the state's voters and had a prior history of election-night disasters.  Democrats should be enthusiastically lining up to vote for her, but instead polls show the race at a virtual tie, primarily because the race receives very little coverage.

Even more important than the secretary of state's office, however, is the race to head the land office. The New Mexico commissioner of public lands wields a level of power second only to the governor and is subject to virtually no oversight.

The primary duty of the Land Office is to make as much money from the 13 million acres of mineral rights and 9 million acres of surface land controlled by the state of New Mexico. This money resides in trust in the Land Grant Permanent Fund and pays out interest that pays for public institutions, including hospitals, universities and, arguably most importantly, public education.  To put it in simple terms that speak directly to the pocket books of New Mexico's citizens, operating costs paid for by the trust saves the average household $800 in taxes every year.

To do this job, the land commissioner has almost-absolute power to sign leases for grazing, mining, oil & gas exploration, business development, etc., and to make deals to sell or swap state land.  An audit performed towards the end of the previous administration of Republican Commissioner Pat Lyons discovered he was actively changing valuations, swapping larger parcels than those that had been appraised, collecting below-market fees on oil drilling, and generally diminishing the health of the trust.  When Ray Powell returned to the office nearly four years ago, he found missing records and stunning misuses of state land that included an acre covered in chicken manure and an illegal tire dump that was visible from space (billed by Pat Lyons as an “erosion control project”).

Positions taken by Powell's Republican opponent Aubrey Dunn are almost a mirror-image of Lyons', and he has recently shown disdain for transparency and criticism.  A perusal of comments left on his campaign's Facebook page reveals universal approval.  This is because the campaign started removing all negative comments in late-August after Dunn himself left an angry retort accusing a questioning voter of “socialism.”  The retort (and the comment that prompted it) was removed within a couple of days, along with all other critical comments since.  One has to ask, if Dunn refuses to subject himself to simple questions from voters during a low-participation election, how will he treat citizens' right to transparent government?

Avoidance tactics, however, are not out-of-the-ordinary for candidates, nor is avoidance Aubrey Dunn's biggest sin.  Were he running a campaign for a more prominent office, it is unlikely he would get away with his ubiquitous Dixon Orchard ads.  The simplistic, sound-bite friendly story that Ray Powell somehow caused what was then the largest fire in state history, and an unseasonable monsoon, and then callously forced the family off of the land comes with one glaringly obvious factor that every journalist in the state should be crowing from the rooftops: It is completely false.

The reality of what happened is very different from Dunn's nightmare scenario and goes back eight years to the administration of the man whom Dunn apparently hopes to emulate.

The land on which the Dixon Apple Orchard grew was previously owned by the University of New Mexico, given by the original landlord in 1964.  In 2006, the Lyons administration swapped the land for the 3,000-acre Mesa del Sol property in southern Albuquerque, a mixed-use development that started under Commissioner Powell's previous tenure in the late 1990s and some of the most profitable land in the state.  The less-lucrative orchard was certainly a bad deal for the trust, and the family who owned and operated the orchard were given no say in the matter (both facts that go unmentioned by Dunn).

Less than six months after Ray Powell returned to office in 2011, the Las Conchas Fire started not on state land, but in the Federally controlled Santa Fe National Forest (something else Dunn neglects to mention), and ended up as the largest fire in New Mexico up to that date.  Among the many victims of the fire was the Dixon Apple Orchard, which lost around 300 of its trees.

To add ecological insult to serious property damage, the fire was followed only a few weeks later by an unexpected monsoon and unprecedented flooding, again starting on federal land, destroying most of the remaining property.  This was obviously not the fault of the state Land Office, but it was certainly the end of the orchard, as the land will take decades to recover.

Unfortunately, it was not the end of the increasingly surreal drama, because the orchard owners never insured their business.  Instead, they insisted the Land Office take money out of the trust to pay them not only for the business losses, but also for losses to property improvements built by the Land Office.  Commissioner Powell rightly refused to take money from New Mexico students.  In Powell's own words:

Sadly, fire & flood destroyed the Dixon's Apple Orchard on state land. I quickly provided help but another flood wiped everything out. Unfortunately, the orchard owners did not protect themselves by insuring their business. Cochiti Pueblo wants to save their many cultural sites there and paid the family $1.8 million dollars to give up their lease.

The fact that the family received compensation from Cochiti Pueblo's buyout is yet another factor that Dunn doesn't want voters to know.  After all, if he's going to exploit this tragedy for political gain, it does him no good to tell the real story if he intends to keep using the family's situation to distract voters from the extreme likelihood that he would run the office in a manner that would create many more families exactly like theirs.

As of the most recent finance reports (October 6), half of Dunn's $316,000 campaign purse comes from the oil and gas industry, including more than $27,000 from the varied interests of New Mexico oilman and former state Republican Party chairman Harvey Yates.  Thanks to Mr. Dunn using these industry payoffs to make massive ad buys repeating his tall tales, a race that should be a runaway Democratic reelection is potentially very tight.

The concerning word there is “potentially”.  There are only two recent polls on this race.  One by Gravis Marketing shows Powell with an inside-the-margin-of-error six-point lead (43% to 37%, with 20% undecided). The second, commissioned by the Dunn campaign and performed by BWD Global, has an outside-the-margin 10-point lead (49% to 39% with 12% undecided) by Dunn.  Both polls are useless.

Gravis Marketing is a national firm that polling guru Nate Silver gives a C- rating, and that mediocre grade is reflected in this recent poll.  An examination of their methodology shows that 18-49 year-olds were lumped into one large category that did not separately account for the lower turnout generally expected of the under-25 demographic.  Additionally, while the survey sample matches New Mexico's breakdown of registered voters, it thus under-samples likely voters from both parties by anywhere from three to ten points and over-samples third-party and undeclared voters by a two-to-one margin.  It also under-samples Hispanics by a full ten points.

The uselessness of the Gravis poll is nothing, however, when compared to the confusion presented by Dunn's BWD Global poll.  A firm led by Bruce Donisthorpe, a lobbyist and one-time staffer of former Republican congressman Joe Skeen, BWD has performed multiple polls lately, many of them commissioned directly by the New Mexico Republican Party.  The firm has so far released party-by-party breakdowns whose numbers usually don't add up.  If the party-by-party numbers in the Dunn poll are accurate, then predicted turnout suggests that Dunn is not leading by ten points as he claims.  Instead, he may be ahead 46% to 41%, within the margin of error.  Of course, the BWD poll also claims that 25% of Democrats support Dunn, numbers unmatched in any other down-ticket race, so their predictions should be treated with a certain weariness.

In a race in which no one can be certain about the results, we can be certain that a victory by Aubrey Dunn would be a disaster for New Mexico.  After eight years of appalling land management by Pat Lyons, it took the first two years of Ray Powell's current term just to repair the damage.  Now, Lyons' old backers are trying to buy the office back for Aubrey Dunn, and they're doing so through some of the most stunningly bald-faced lies ever to sully New Mexico politics. 

Tell your friends and family, and tell them every day between now and November 4^th: Ray Powell has run the most successful land office in state history, making more money for New Mexico education than any land commissioner before him - and Aubrey Dunn thinks it's time for that to change.