By government standards, about $600,000 isn’t a whole lot of money.
But try telling that to officials in rural counties in New Mexico after they’ve learned that the Obama administration, working through the U.S. Forest Service, has cut that amount from them — retroactively.
“Here again, it’s another cut to the counties that are already getting beaten up,” Paul Gutierrez of [...]

A little more than a week after reporting the Obama administration is taking $26 million from the state’s coffers in mineral extraction, New Mexico Watchdog has learned the feds — citing sequestration — want nearly $600,000 more from timber.
In a letter obtained by New Mexico Watchdog, the chief of the U.S. Forest Service, Thomas Tidwell, [...]

Environmentalists say they’re out to protect endangered species, watersheds and human habitations in forested areas but their critics counter by saying they’re making a flammable situation worse.
The debate has taken on a sharper edge in New Mexico as the state has already battled the Whitewater-Baldy Complex fire that set a state record for most square [...]

Summer has just started but it has already been a deadly fire season in New Mexico and a retired Los Alamos scientist says it’s time to use 21st century technology and even the US Air Force to radically change the way states — particularly in the Southwest — and federal government officials fight wildfires.
Chick Keller [...]

Some wet weather in the Ruidoso area gave forest firefighters some much-needed help in the Little Bear Fire while government officials called a news conference in Albuquerque Sunday (June 17) to defend decisions by the US Forest Service in battling the wildfire that has destroyed 254 structures. Update: A spokesman for the Forest Service says [...]

After a hellish weekend, firefighters made some real progress on the Little Bear Fire in the Ruidoso, NM area on Monday (June 11), going from zero percent containment Sunday to an estimated 30 percent containment by early Monday evening, thanks in part to lower temperatures and some favorable winds.
The fire burned more than 1,500 acres [...]

As firefighters battle the Little Bear Fire that has destroyed at least 36 structures in the Ruidoso area, Congressman Steve Pearce (R-New Mexico) and an official with the US Forest Service had a heated exchange over the agency’s handling of the wildfire that as of Sunday afternoon had charred more than 26,000 acres in the [...]