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Data Centers are just the newest form of a long battle between what communities want, and what their local representatives are willing to do.
Las Cruces, NM - Right now, the small communities of Dona Ana County are fighting a “Hyperscale” data center called Project Jupiter. The construction is happening in the Santa Teresa Industrial park that was first designated in the mid-1990s with the intention of bringing more industry to create new jobs and economic opportunities for Santa Teresa residents. Instead, they got a massive data center that was given a $165 Billion mandate by the Dona Ana County Commission. That mandate came in the form of an Industrial Revenue Bond (IRB) that the commission voted on last year during a 10 hour long County Commission meeting where Commissioners heard 7 hours of testimony from County residents.
The Commission decided that, in the name of being fair and hearing everyone’s perspective, they would hear one hour of comments against Project Jupiter followed by one hour of comments in favor. For the next 7 hours they did just that, but their story fell apart when they ran out of comments in favor and, despite the large line of commenters speaking against the project, ended the public comment period. The commission then voted 4-1 to approve the unprecedented $165 Billion IRB.
In the year since September 19th, 2025, community members have continued to organize against Project Jupiter and give public comment at every single commission meeting since.
This begs the question, if the community was so opposed to the actions of the commissioners, why don't they just recall them?
The New Mexico constitution has its laws for issuing a recall petition of a county official in Article X, Section 9, Subsection A:
The cited grounds shall be based upon acts or failures to act occurring during the current term of the official sought to be recalled. The recall petition shall be signed by registered voters:
(1) of the county if the official sought to be recalled was elected at-large; or
(2) of the district from which the official sought to be recalled was elected; and
(3) not less in number than thirty-three and one-third percent of the number of persons who voted in the election for the office in the last preceding general election at which the office was voted upon.
The problem for issuing this recall petition is twofold, the 33.3% of registered voters who voted in the last election for that seat, and the bigger problem: the stipulation in Subsection B:
Prior to and as a condition of circulating a petition for recall pursuant to the provisions of Subsection A of this section, the factual allegations supporting the grounds of malfeasance or misfeasance in office or violation of the oath of office stated in the petition shall be presented to the district court for the county in which the recall is proposed to be conducted. The petition shall not be circulated unless, after a hearing in which the proponents of the recall effort and the official sought to be recalled are given an opportunity to present evidence, the district court determines that probable cause exists for the grounds for recall.
The law protects commissioners over communities.
Now, I understand that in writing this language into the constitution, the intention was likely to prevent undue stress on the county clerks from frequently having to confirm thousands of signatures from recall petitions, or with the intention of preventing “mob justice” and setting legal precedent for citizens to interpret the laws themselves. In practice, it only serves to protect those already in power. In a county like Dona Ana, it's hard to find candidates to run for these seats, so it creates an environment where people already in positions of power can often run for a seat unopposed.
The same problem exists in our State Legislature. As the only unpaid state legislature in the nation it only promotes people who are already independently wealthy running for public office. Our volunteer legislature comes from our constitution too, and it was also added with good intentions.
When New Mexico was constituted, the legislature was unpaid to make sure that legislators would keep working “regular” jobs to keep them more connected to the everyday resident. Today, the responsibilities of a legislator have grown significantly but they still do not receive a salary. This often prevents anyone who doesn’t have independent wealth or a job that lets them take large amounts of time off to legislate.
The biggest difference? County Commissioners are paid.
The intention of both articles of our constitution was to keep our democracy functioning and keep legislators connected to the people they represented. After over 110 years of being a state, that has changed significantly. Knowing that this has changed, our state legislature responded with a Constitutional Amendment to set a base salary for legislators to the ends of modernizing our legislature. So how can we modernize our democracy?
Keep Representatives Honest
Building a truly representative democracy means keeping those elected to represent us honest, so that’s where we can start.
Without a straightforward recall process, constituents and their representatives are placed into an extremely unfair power dynamic. In local elected bodies where even getting someone to fill a seat is a burden sometimes, we have to ensure that when they do fill those seats they are actually representing their constituents.
The best way to equalize this power dynamic is to ease the process to recall those representatives that the community wants out. Making it easier for a recall position to be issued is the first, and most important step. Removing the need for a hearing to prove malfeasance or general breach of their oath prior to the recall petition being distributed, levels this power dynamic significantly. It also provides another action to use when we organize against a representative acting outside of the interests of their constituents. If this is truly to be a representative democracy, what is the issue?
Hearing arguments against this, most state–in different words–that it would allow people who disagree with their politics to recall politicians they agree with, that it would create frivolous recall petitions just because constituents had a personal disagreement with an official, or that it would deter someone from running for office if they could be easily recalled.
All of these arguments are weak, I have not heard a strong argument against this change other than the risk of setting a legal precedent for “mob justice” where the petition law could be extended to apply beyond the realm of recall petitions. To the “mob justice” argument I say that we simply need to craft the amendment in such a way that prevents any legal precedent from being applied to other petitions of government. The City of Las Cruces has a recall clause that allows residents to overturn a city policy if they have enough signatures, this never has to go in front of a judge and can be started by any group of Las Cruces residents. Municipal officials in New Mexico also don’t require a judiciary hearing where wrongdoing must be proved before issuing a recall petition, and only require 20% of that districts voters to sign.
Your constituents agreeing that you should be gone is reason enough for removal.
Council Democracy
Moving over to the deep-red Otero County, residents are organizing to make their government work for them. The organization Community Power New Mexico maintains a public tool library, has been helping organize and execute citywide cleanup days in collaboration with the City of Alamogordo, as well as hosting skill sharing, vocational workshops, and more to ensure that the people of Alamogordo have what they need. Most importantly, Community Power is working to organize neighborhood councils on a ward-by-ward basis that will then report need to the city commission for what their neighborhoods need. This model is called Council Democracy, and is, in some ways, similar to the workers councils established after the Second Russian Revolution.
The workers councils of the Soviet Union had easily revocable seats, ensuring that representatives would be held accountable to their constituents. Structured in this way, the councils were a truly representative form of government where the political opinions of the representatives were second to that of their constituency. Council Democracy was the most effective part of the Soviet government, and survived even after the rise of Stalin and the fall of the USSR. While the Russian oligarchy that replaced it did dismantle these councils, their power persisted in many other places, like Cuba!
"What we are seeing is a big push for [better representation]." Says Community Power New Mexico co-founder Evan Lambert. "Its not just the 'where you are' but also the 'who you are'" I spoke with Lambert about how the Council Democracy model improves representation. "The 'where you are' is based on the ward model, that's your neighborhood councils that work in their wards with people they already know." Community Power has also been able to start community-specific councils. "Alongside the 'where' we have the who, be they youth, seniors, indigenous folks, disabled folks, would all have access to the legislative process through our model." Lambert is running as an independent for Otero County Commission District 2, in collaboration with Democrat Alan Gonzales in District 1. Alamogordo has already started a Youth Council called the "Mayors Council" which Lambert and their team helped to start and fill.
"Its a whole process democracy, so everyone is involved and nothing is obfuscated behind a locked door."
Today, some cities have tenant unions that act similarly. These unions are meant to equalize the unbalanced power dynamics between renters and their landlords. Alamogordo, in the most republican county in our state, has just established one of these Tenant unions as well. Community Power facilitated this process, and also maintains a database of all out-of-state (or absentee) landlords in Otero County, gathered through information from Census databases.
"The bigger part of the project is showing what we don't have access to," Said Lambert "like how we can only see certain census information and have to look up the owner's address ourselves to know if [a property] is owned out-of-state."
Council Democracy and tenant unions are just some ways to make our government more representative. The current system denies young people a voice in government, and neighborhood councils are one way to mitigate that, but why not make the existing government work for us?
The Fix
In order for us to make our government work for us, the law has to protect constituents over representatives. New Mexico law is not consistent on how these recall petitions are issued for different levels of office in both process and volume. Municipal officials can be recalled with the submission of an application for a petition, and signatures of registered voters in the district that is greater than 20% of the average of voters that voted in the last election for that seat. For county officials, a judicial hearing is required before the petition can be issued and 33.1% of registered voters who voted in the last election for that seat must sign the petition. This creates an unnecessary burden on petitioners since voters move or otherwise change their registration.
t the very least, we can make our laws consistent by removing the need for a hearing before a judge and lowering the threshold for signatures to match that of municipal officials. Considering that the county officials often have bigger, more populated districts this would still be a fair threshold for recalls. To build a better democracy, we need to make sure that constituents can hold their representatives accountable and remove them when they vote with clear dissonance to what their constituents want. If elected officials are worried about being removed because constituents don’t like them, they should consider acting in a way that their constituents like.
With the current system, it is impossible to hold any elected officials accountable to the needs and desires of their constituents. If they get to make the laws that we have to follow, the power dynamic is extremely unequal. Effective government should be by and for the people, not developers or special interest groups. Free and fair elections are only one part of a whole system that keeps our democracy truly a democracy. Representative democracy is meant to ease the bureaucratic burden of direct democracy by having representatives create and vote for policies on behalf of their constituents, but there is nothing in the law that keeps them accountable to the needs or desires of their constituents.
To fix the system as it is currently built, we must ease the recall process and ensure that our laws are written to hold representatives accountable to the needs of those they represent. So the next time you hear someone complaining about how their county commission doesn’t listen to the community–consider telling them why and how we can change it.
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