Ruidoso and Mescalero officials seek state help as communities face post-fire flooding
Emergency warnings sounded twice during an interim legislative committee meeting Monday, as south-central New Mexico officials told lawmakers about ongoing dangerous flooding in their communities — and the help they still need to rebuild after last year's wildfires.
Village of Ruidoso Mayor Lynn Crawford told the members of the interim Economic & Rural Development & Policy Committee that water had flooded the Ruidoso Downs Racetrack and the village's midtown area on Sunday, and on Monday damaged homes left intact during the 2024 South Fork and Salt fires.
Mescalero Apache Tribe President Thora Walsh Padilla told the committee the mountains have received little snowpack over the last few years, which means less vegetation to mitigate flooding in areas even outside the tribe's reservation.
In addition, many years' worth of sediment remains in the ravines, decreasing how much water they can hold and making current and future floods even worse, she said.
'We have done quite a bit as far as limiting the debris, the burnt logs, all the stuff coming off the reservation, but that does not stop the water,' Padilla said. 'We have multiple burn scars contributing towards this, both on and off the reservation and on the Lincoln National Forest.'
Ruidoso Downs Racetrack General Manager Rick Baugh said what Ruidoso is experiencing will happen somewhere else in New Mexico.
'We almost lost the track yesterday,' Baugh told the committee. 'I'm just at the end of my rope, I'll be honest with you. If y'all got any way you can help us, we need your help.'
The meeting followed a deadly weekend of flooding in neighboring Texas.
Crawford said the village is still rebuilding from the 2024 fires and subsequent floods, and hardening its infrastructure for future ones.
Thus far, he said the village has spent $16.8 million on repairing homes and buildings, but some homes remain unfixed, and the village has run out of money.
'Every dime that the village has had access to, that we could spend, we have deployed it,' Crawford said.
The village has formally requested only $4 million of the $44 million lawmakers set aside in House Bill 1 for disaster cleanup, Crawford said, because of a provision in the law that requires approval by the Federal Emergency Management Agency before the local government can ask for it.
The Legislature has, in several bills over the last three years, approved at least $200 million in emergency loans for communities recovering from fires and floods. Crawford said the state Department of Homeland Security and Emergency Management, one of the state agencies helping towns get the funding, told the village that it is 'way down the list' behind other communities asking for the loans.
'The process is broke,' Crawford said. 'What you passed, we don't have access to.'
Crawford said the village assessed 498 sites eligible for some kind of repairs and organized them into 27 projects and sent them to FEMA for approval. Crawford said he learned on Monday that late last week, FEMA approved 17 of the projects.
FEMA's engineers originally estimated the damage to total $29 million, Crawford said, and now the estimate is five times that amount.
Rep. Harlan Vincent (R-Ruidoso Downs), a former fire chief for the village, suggested to the committee that more legislation is needed because the funding lawmakers enacted in the prior session does not cover costs of flood maintenance.
'This silt is going to continue,' he said. 'Did we mess up again? Does anybody want to run another $150 million bill for maintenance budgets? If this happens in your community, you're going to go through it, or that water will come out of the banks and it's going to devastate people's properties.'
Padilla said the Sierra Blanca Regional Recovery Task Force has been coordinating cleanup efforts and sediment removal since the fires both on the reservation and in Lincoln County and Ruidoso. She said the task force wants to build a regional training center to improve local firefighting capabilities.
Padilla said local floodways are becoming active again nearly a century after the Civilian Conservation Corps came in during the 1930s to terrace and drain wetlands.
The landscape around Ruidoso and Mescalero doesn't look like it did then, Padilla said. It used to be a forested grassland but now the forest is so thick and the elk populations so large that the water table can't support it.
'This land is not in its natural state anymore, and we need something to jumpstart that and take us back a little further in time to be able to maintain living in these mountains,' Padilla said.
Padilla said there has been a huge buildup of trees that is harming the land, and her tribe wants to reopen a sawmill that closed in 2012 in order to thin the forest and reduce fire risk.
'It became very apparent during the fires that we need to get back on that track,' Padilla said.
'We've taken natural fires out of the system,' Padilla said. 'Good logging and thinning is how we intend to replace that, and that's how we've been able to keep our lands safe for many years. The sawmill is critical to that.'
Padilla said the tribe received $2 million from the Legislature to reopen the sawmill, and is now asking the U.S. Economic Development Administration for $17.5 million to finish the job.
'We're not giving up,' she said. 'We'll stand for our homelands forever.'
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