Albuquerque Journal ]Thursday, July 31, 2003 By Tania Soussan Journal Staff Writer Otero Mesa ranchers and a group that campaigns to protect private property rights are joining environmentalists in a fight to limit new oil and gas drilling in a remote but highly valued expanse of southern New Mexico. “What’s right is right,” said G.B. Oliver III, executive vice president of the Paragon Foundation and president of Western Bank in Alamogordo. “Our goal is the same.” The biologically rich grassland, which could hold significant natural gas reserves, has attracted national...

L.A. Times • Lawsuit seeks to stop federal plan to extract oil and gas from sensitive grassland area. By Julie Cart, Times Staff Writer April 28, 2005 New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson raised the ante Friday in his battle to protect a rare desert grassland by announcing the state had filed suit to stop the Bush administration from allowing oil and gas drilling on Otero Mesa, a lonely stretch of federal land near the Texas border. Richardson, who was secretary of Energy during the Clinton administration, charges that drilling would destroy archeological treasures, diminish wildlife habitat and contaminate...

The Ruidoso News Time needed to research aquifer in the Salt Basin 06/05/2007 Bipartisanship, lacking as it is in today’s divisive political arena, can be a wonderful thing. It is especially welcomed with the meeting of the minds of New Mexico’s two U.S. senators, one a Democrat, the other a Republican, in calling for a groundwater resources study that will shed light on the nature and extent of water resources in New Mexico. Senators Pete Domenici (R-NM) and Jeff Bingaman (D-NM) have co-sponsored the New Mexico Aquifer Assessment Act, which instructs the U.S. Geological Survey, in...

T or C Herald EDITORIAL By Carlos A. Padilla HERALD Editor Sierra County officials may be considering a June 14 resolution in support of protecting a vital Salt Basin aquifer in our backyard. New Mexico’s largest untapped freshwater aquifer lies beneath the vast wilderness of Otero Mesa. The reason our elected officials should support a moratorium on drilling for oil and gas is due to that industry’s own track record. Modern day oil and gas development is a malignant process that can—and often does—contaminate precious groundwater located nearby, regardless of what regulations are in place. Last...

On April 28, 2009 the United States 10th Circuit Court of Appeals issued a decision invalidating the Bureau of Land Management’s oil and gas drilling plan for New Mexico’s Otero Mesa. The court ruled that the BLM’s original Resource Management Plan Amendment, which opened the vast majority of Otero Mesa to oil and gas leasing and limited protection for the desert grasslands, was fatally flawed due to its failure to consider protection for Otero Mesa and the Salt Basin Aquifer. The court ruled that the BLM had to consider an alternative that closed Otero Mesa to oil and gas leasing, admonishing...

From The Santa Fe New Mexican 4/29/2009 – 4/30/09 To embattled environmentalists and their lawyers, and for politicians taking their side, it came as a ray of sunshine. As for the endangered and threatened animals on whose behalf they’ve been fighting, ni hablar. On Tuesday, the U.S. Court of Appeals for New Mexico’s neck of the woods ruled that the federal rush to allow gas and oil drilling on Otero Mesa was, to put it mildly, flawed. For that matter, said a three-judge panel, so is the Bureau of Land Management logic that it must allow development on public land. What a turnaround...

Blowing grasslands in central Otero Mesa. By SUSAN MONTOYA BRYAN Associated Press Writer 4-29-09 The Bureau of Land Management failed to comply with federal law in developing a plan for managing oil and natural gas development on southern New Mexico’s Otero Mesa, an appeals court has ruled. A three-judge panel of the 10th U.S. Court of Appeals in Denver said in a ruling filed Tuesday the BLM skirted the National Environmental Protection Act by not considering an alternative that would have put the mesa off limits to drilling and by not analyzing all of the likely impacts of the agency’s...