Impacts San Juan County

Staff Reports

On Nov. 6, the Utah Federal District Court held a status conference in Navajo Nation v. San Juan County. After the conference a minute entry was entered scheduling two public meetings in San Juan County on Nov. 16. One meeting will be held at the Hide Out Community Center in Monticello, UT from 10:30 am -12:30 pm. The second meeting will be held at Bluff Community Center in Bluff, UT from 3:30 - 5:30 pm.

These meeting will provide San Juan County community members an opportunity to comment on the proposed School Board and County Commission election districts. Each site will have tables for the public to submit comments and a court staff...

“I’m openly skeptical we’ll ever be able to fill Elephant Butte Reservoir again,” Dr. David Gutzler told attendees of a recent climate change conference. That’s given the trend toward diminished flows in the Rio Grande resulting from the continued global rise in temperature.

The University of New Mexico Earth and Planetary Studies Department professor delivered the grim news on a crisp, yellow and blue fall morning along the bosque in Albuquerque.

Since the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation completed the reservoir in 1916 to supply farmers in southern New Mexico and Texas with water, the reservoir’s levels have fluctuated—from highs in the 1940s to lows in the 1950s...

President Donald Trump nominated a Santa Fe attorney to be the next U.S. Attorney for New Mexico.

Trump announced Nov. 1, that John C. Anderson is his choice for the position, which has been vacant for nearly eight months.

U.S. Senators Tom Udall and Martin Heinrich, both Democrats, and U.S. Rep. Steve Pearce, a Republican, suggested Anderson and Assistant U.S. Attorney Fred Federici as candidates for the position, which has been empty since March 10 when U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions asked Damon Martinez and more than 40 other U.S. Attorneys to resign.

“The New Mexico delegation worked closely together to identify and recommend qualified New Mexicans for federal law...

During the 2016 election, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security didn’t know which state officials to communicate with to relay the threat of attempted Russian interference.

That confusion is one thing U.S. Senator Martin Heinrich wants to fix with the Securing America’s Voting Equipment (SAVE) Act, which he introduced with Maine Republican Senator Susan Collins.

“I think overall, over the course of the last few decades, we may have become complacent as a country as to the potential for this,” Heinrich said of attempts to influence elections in the United States.

“There were cases where they were maybe engaged with the wrong decisionmaker or talking to the vendor...