rdrnews.com · Patrick Lohmann Source NM · September 8, 2026
New Mexico land commissioner announces uranium mining ban on state trust lands | | rdrnews.com
# New Mexico land commissioner announces uranium mining ban on state trust lands
- By Patrick Lohmann Source NM - Sep 8, 2026 - 33 mins ago
New Mexico Commissioner of Public Lands Stephanie Garcia Richard on Friday signed an executive order that bans all new uranium mining projects on state trust lands. Patrick Lohmann/Source NM Photo
New Mexico Commissioner of Public Lands Stephanie Garcia Richard on Friday signed an executive order that bans all new uranium mining projects on the more than 13 million acres of state trust lands she oversees.
Garcia Richard, a Democrat who has roughly four months left in her term and is running for lieutenant governor, said at a news conference Friday on the front steps of her office’s Santa Fe headquarters that the longlasting environmental and public health impacts of uranium contamination outweigh any potential revenues to state coffers uranium mining could provide.
She said the executive order is needed now, in particular, amid a recent uptick in uranium extraction proposals statewide, including in the Grants Mineral Belt, Canjilon and Pie Town areas. She attributed the renewed interest to President Donald Trump’s administration, which has sought to fast-track federal permits for uranium mining and identified two such proposals on Cibola National Forest land near Mount Taylor as “priority projects.”
“New Mexicans have been overlooked by the uranium industry and the federal government for far too long, and now the Trump administration is once again completely ignoring these communities and pushing for aggressive uranium development nationwide, despite the fact that there still remain thousands of sites that are abandoned and need to be remediated,” she said.
While there are no pending uranium proposals before the State Land Office, Garcia Richard noted that approximately 50 abandoned sites are on state trust lands, vestiges of the decades in the 20th century in which New Mexico produced most of the nation’s uranium ore. Those sites still risk contaminating nearby ground and surface water, she said.
The state Legislature this year approved the second round of $20 million in funding dedicated to remediating abandoned uranium mine sites, approximately 350 of which dot the New Mexico landscape. Previous funding has gone to clean up four abandoned mines on state trust land in McKinley County.
“We are putting this out there so that if a future land commissioner wants to mine uranium, they’re going to have to overturn this, and we will be asking them why they did not uphold this document,” she said.
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