DAYS AFTER THE SALT AND SOUTH FORK WILDFIRES ignited in June 2024 near Ruidoso, a mountain town in southeastern New Mexico, Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham, D, snapped into action, issuing the first in a slew of executive orders to declare an emergency and make state funding available at the earliest stages of the disaster. She issued more in response to the flash floods that ripped through the area just days into the fires.
All told, Gov. Lujan Grisham issued more than 85 executive orders for the region that year, authorizing nearly $66 million in state funds. More followed in 2025. And so far this year, over 30 executive orders have already given the New Mexico Forestry Division funding to prevent and suppress yet more wildfires.
New Mexico is among the fastest-warming states in the U.S., and its executive orders have increased by a staggering fivefold since 2021. While some of those orders have gone to food assistance and crime reduction, the majority have been in response to climate-related fires and floods.
Michael Coleman, a spokesperson for the governor’s office, confirmed the link between New Mexico’s natural disasters and the rise in executive orders, attributing it, in part, to the fact that the Legislature limits each order to $750,000, often a fraction of the cost of a calamity.
“Unfortunately, disasters do not abide by legislative caps,” Coleman wrote in an email.
For the small rural communities that have been hit hardest, this money has been an important first line of defense, according to state agencies. But the rise in climate-fueled disasters has created new challenges that many — from community leaders to state agencies and the Legislature — are still figuring out how to manage.
There are active debates about where the money should — and should not — come from. Out-of-state firms have played an outsized role in cleaning up the biggest disasters, diverting emergency funding away from hard-hit local economies. And when the federal government declares an emergency, as it did in Ruidoso, it is supposed to reimburse state and local authorities for damages, an onerous process that can often take years.
ACCORDING TO THE CLIMATE POLICY BUREAU in New Mexico’s Energy, Minerals, and Natural Resource Department, the changing climate has resulted in four of the main hazards currently afflicting the state: Drought, flooding, extreme heat and wildfire.
Some New Mexicans, like state Rep. Harlan Vincent of Ruidoso, have called extreme climate “bull,” instead blaming the “extreme mismanagement of our forests” and lack of brush thinning for the rapid spread and intensity of the Salt and South Fork fires.
New Mexico’s forests are undeniably unhealthy. Snowpack has been low and summers are hotter and drier, leading to longer wildfire seasons. Add to this the severe swings between extreme drought and above-average rainfall — dubbed “hydro-climate whiplash.” This deadly phenomenon devastated Ruidoso, and weather experts project that it will become increasingly common in the West.
To Lynn Crawford, the mayor of the Village of Ruidoso, the fires and floods combined to create one unending disaster. “It ended up in our yard(s), demolished our homes, demolished our bridges, demolished our streets, our infrastructure,” he said.
That climate disasters have come to amplify one another is clear, borne out by the number of flood warnings the National Weather Service in Albuquerque issued in 2024. Of the 278 warnings issued in New Mexico that year, almost 40% were in burn scar areas.
Executive orders have been key to the response, especially when communities can’t foot the bill themselves. After the 2024 fires, for example, New Mexico’s Department of Homeland Security and Emergency Response spent $250 million of its executive order money on a program to help clean up fire and flood debris from more than 1,000 private properties in the Ruidoso area.
“It ended up in our yard(s), demolished our homes, demolished our bridges, demolished our streets, our infrastructure.”
Emergency order funding also paid for “incident command teams that assist local emergency management operations, positioning of swift water rescue teams, and sandbag operations,” Danielle Silva, an agency spokesperson, wrote in an email. Since Ruidoso was a federally declared emergency, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) is supposed to reimburse up to 75% of that, Silva added, but to date, it has provided just $22.4 million — less than 9%.
Just two out-of-state companies received almost 60% of the emergency spending for the state’s largest disasters from 2022 onward, according to a legislative report. At least one of those companies — Texas-based DRC Emergency Services — is suspected of overcharging, a point that the New Mexico’s Department of Homeland Security and Emergency Response disputes.
Rep. Vincent said he was grateful for the emergency declarations, but he criticized how the state selected that contractor.
“All the money that (emergency services companies) make in New Mexico goes back out of state and doesn’t stay in New Mexico,” he said.
THE STATE CAN PAY for the disasters it’s been facing partly because of the revenue generated by the industry most responsible for the rapidly warming climate: oil and gas.
New Mexico is home to part of the Permian Basin, the largest oil-producing field in the world. The oil and gas industry contributes about 23% of the state’s carbon dioxide emissions and about 18% of New Mexico’s methane emissions — more than any other sector.
The industry’s revenues, meanwhile, were projected in 2025 to make up 37% of the state’s general fund, the primary source of the money New Mexico uses to operate.
Typically, a contingency account supplies money for emergency declarations. But with the growing number of emergency declarations in recent years, that account has been overdrawn. The rest of the emergency spending — an estimated $300 million since 2023 — has come from the general fund.
In New Mexico, as elsewhere, relying on oil and gas money is controversial. Supporters justify continued extraction by touting the industry’s revenues as New Mexico’s lifeblood, while critics say the financial benefits are outweighed by the true costs of drilling and burning fossil fuels.
A coalition of organizations led by the Center for Biological Diversity recently criticized the state’s continued reliance on oil and gas money, saying in a letter to the governor that everyday New Mexicans are paying the price, “from pollution to health risks and escalating climate damage.”
“The state budget has grown dangerously dependent on volatile fossil fuel revenues,” the coalition wrote, “and New Mexicans are on the hook for billions of dollars in clean-up costs.” The costs of plugging abandoned or “orphaned” oil and gas wells are currently estimated to be between $700 million and $1.6 billion.
Coleman, the governor’s spokesperson, wrote in an email that Lujan Grisham “has taken a thoughtful approach to oil and gas that deploys its revenues to the best public uses in New Mexico.” He cited universal child care and free college as two areas that the industry has helped fund, adding that the governor has insisted “that the industry do better by the environment if they are going to operate in our state.”
ON THE GROUND, local leaders are simply trying to get enough money — any money from whatever source is possible — to cover the cascading costs of rebuilding after a disaster.
The total damage wrought by the Salt and South Fork fires was estimated at $2 billion, according to the National Centers for Environmental Information. And the price tag keeps growing, said Mayor Crawford of Ruidoso, who is still trying to procure federal funding for homeowners who didn’t have flood insurance.
“It’s like dealing with your insurance company when your car gets wrecked,” Crawford said, referring to the long wait for federal reimbursements. “Your insurance company’s saying, ‘We’re gonna pay you,’ and then three, four years later, you’re still waiting on it.”
To help remedy this situation and others like it, Rep. Vincent co-authored a bill to create a revolving fund for federally declared natural disasters in New Mexico. The state Legislature passed the bill in 2025.
The fund now underwrites zero-interest loans for New Mexico’s political subdivisions, including counties, municipalities, land grants and acequias. As written, the state fronts the money for a disaster until FEMA reimburses it; that money will then be used to replenish the fund, along with transfers from another account largely underwritten by the state’s general fund.
The natural disaster revolving fund is currently operational and has a balance of $107 million.
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