New Mexico

New Mexico’s Free Child-Care Plan Has a Feasibility Gap

Published

1 month ago

October 28, 2025

New Mexico’s Free Child-Care Plan Has a Feasibility Gap

Last month, New Mexico’s governor announced that the state would soon become the first in the country to offer universal free child care. This was a momentous development for child-care proponents such as myself, who have long argued that wide-reaching free programs are crucial for parents and for a healthy democracy. Notably, the policy frames child care not as a private service but as necessary social infrastructure—the kind that, like schools and roads and libraries, should be publicly funded and available to everyone, regardless of their income.

Since the announcement, advocates and pundits have been unreserved in their excitement: An article in Bloomberg declared this was proof that “Universal Child Care Doesn’t Have to Be a Fantasy.” A writer for The Nation made the case that other states should establish similar programs. But this victory lap may be premature. New Mexico has many hurdles to overcome before anyone can declare the policy a success—and the state could, after all of this attention, fail to fully deliver on its promise.

Although the universal policy will not take effect until Saturday, New Mexico already has, at least in name, one of the most comprehensive child-care funding programs in the United States. Its current system, which offers free care to families with children ages six weeks to 13 years, does have an income-based cutoff, but it’s a generous one, in effect meaning about 85 percent of children in the state are covered. Within that income band, any family with all parents working or in school part- or full-time qualifies. Those families are then guaranteed what is essentially a voucher, which fully covers fees at any child-care provider participating in the state system.

Read: The problem with ‘affordable’ child care

In practice, though, the state-covered care has been hard for many families to access. Of the roughly 137,000 children under age 5 (the group with the most acute care needs), only about 21,000 actually receive benefits under the current program. Among the remaining kids, some are not eligible; other families take advantage of different care options, such as Head Start or free pre-K, which are run separately and not counted as part of the child-care-voucher program. But plenty of families do qualify, and many of them want free care—yet have been unable to find open slots at participating providers. Roughly two-thirds of kids who currently meet program requirements in the state don’t receive any help.

The obstacles to higher uptake are multifold and stubborn. Among them are a shortage of child-care educators, trouble creating care options that meet families’ needs, some providers’ reluctance to accept state vouchers, and uneven care availability in rural areas. These aren’t the type of problems that can typically be resolved quickly—and they are highly unlikely to be addressed before the new policy kicks off. At least in the immediate term, then, New Mexico stands to remain one of the many states falling short of a pledge to provide free or subsidized care.

Ambitious policies, even those whose aims aren’t fully met, have real value; despite the relatively low uptake, New Mexico’s current plan has been a boon to many families. But scarcity acquires a different symbolic tenor in the context of a commitment to be available for everyone. An unmet promise, particularly one announced with great fanfare, can make people feel duped. Because New Mexico is the only state with a program like this, the stakes are high: The new policy’s rollout, and its successes or stumbles, may shape views on the viability of universal child care across the country.

New Mexico’s new child-care proposal is bold. It will use the same voucher system as the current plan, along with the same age cutoffs for kids and many of the same eligibility requirements, but it will open coverage to families at any income level. In its idealized form, parents across the state (excepting stay-at-home parents) will be able to easily sign up for benefits and access the care they need.

Seeing this vision through, however, will involve a herculean effort: New Mexico will need to hire an estimated 5,000 new educators to work in the system, while maintaining its current labor force, which a representative for the state’s Early Childhood Education and Care Department estimates is roughly 13,000 educators. The state has succeeded at similar child-care recruitment efforts in the past. When Governor Michelle Lujan Grisham was elected, she and other legislative leaders funneled money into the field, and from 2019 to 2024, the number of child-care practitioners in the state grew by 64 percent, department representatives told me. But attracting and training thousands more could take years.

Carrying out this recruitment in the places with the most need may be particularly difficult. New Mexico’s current child-care offerings are geographically lopsided. For example, in many regions the state is low on slots for children under 2 (an average of 32 spaces exist for every 100 children in that age group), but the sparsely populated Union County has no licensed infant slots at all.

For years, New Mexico had a way to address rural child-care needs: by relying on informal providers known as “registered homes,” in which neighbors (or sometimes grandparents and other family members) care for a few children living nearby and are compensated by the government for their labor. In addition to making it easier for families in rural areas to access care close to where they live, registered homes tend to have more flexible hours—a necessity for parents who aren’t working a traditional 9-to-5. Other parents turn to these homes to find providers who share their language or culture.

Yet the number of slots in registered homes has been falling for more than a decade; from 2019 to this year, it plummeted from nearly 13,000 to just over 3,000. The exact reasons for the decline are unclear, but the drop-off may be related to how “confusing” one provider said the process of registering a home was.

Read: One obvious, underused child-care solution

The state is aware of these supply limitations. Elizabeth Groginsky, the secretary of New Mexico’s Early Childhood Education and Care Department, told me that her team is launching a campaign to recruit 1,000 new registered homes, working to make the registration process easier, and creating a support network for registered homes’ providers. The department also plans to offer low-interest loans to encourage the construction of new child-care centers and licensed family child-care businesses, and the expansion of existing ones. And it will be increasing the baseline rate at which child-care programs are reimbursed for the children they serve, as well as offering even more to programs that commit to a $16-an-hour wage floor for educators, compared with the state’s minimum wage of $12 an hour.

All of this, though, costs more than the state has set aside. The department will be asking the state legislature for $120 million in additional funding, but the money is not guaranteed to be approved, particularly in the face of budget uncertainty after Congress passed a bill in July that puts new financial burdens on states. Groginsky told me that, no matter what, New Mexico expects to be able to pay for its child-care program through 2026. After that, it’s up to the legislature. This uncertainty has prompted some child-care-center owners—who don’t have to accept state vouchers—to express wariness about participating.

Any major foundering in New Mexico could have long-lasting consequences. Take the case of Quebec, which in 1997 launched a universal, $5-a-day child-care program, whose failures continue to reverberate today. At the time the policy was announced, the province had the capacity to serve only 15 percent of its children. Parent demand for the universal program was much higher, so, to meet it, the province took shortcuts, such as lowering educator qualifications and relying on for-profit providers of questionable quality. Although many kids got great care, others ended up in overcrowded, unclean centers. Evidence suggests that some of the kids in substandard settings may have grown more anxious and less social.

More than a quarter century later, Quebec’s stumbles are still used to argue against expansions of publicly funded child care. In 2021, J. D. Vance co-authored a Wall Street Journal op-ed opposing President Joe Biden’s proposed investments in child care. It took only three paragraphs for Vance to bring up Quebec, asserting that “it was, to put it bluntly, a disaster for Quebec’s children.”

New Mexico doesn’t seem likely to let quality slide in the way Quebec did. The problem, rather, is that the state may not be able to ensure that all families have access to the care they desire. This is where the messaging becomes so important: New Mexico has pledged universal free child care, but it has left itself little wiggle room to explain the time it may take to reach that goal or the challenges that could stand in its way.

Success, then, will depend on whether the state can recruit educators quickly enough, on whether the legislature will continually approve the needed funds, on how many providers opt into the state system, and on how soon families can expect access to the child care they were promised. The state’s program is an admirable gamble—but it is still very much a gamble.

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New Mexico

New Mexico man sentenced to nearly 20 years for distributing meth

Published

10 hours ago

December 11, 2025

Press Room

New Mexico man sentenced to nearly 20 years for distributing meth

ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. – A judge sentenced a New Mexico man to nearly 20 years in prison for distributing meth and having guns in his possession to use while doing so.

Court records indicate 43-year-old David Amaya sold meth from a trailer on his parents’ property in Anthony throughout July and August 2024. Agents executed a search warrant Aug. 22 and found 1.18 kilograms of meth, two firearms and ammunition in the trailer and a makeshift bathroom.

Amaya pleaded guilty to possession of meth with intent to distribute it. A judge sentenced him to 235 months in prison.

Once he is out, Amaya will face five years of supervised release.

The FBI’s Albuquerque Field Office and the Las Cruces Metro Narcotics Task Force investigated the case. Assistant U.S. Attorney Kirk Williams prosecuted it.

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New Mexico

New Mexico Lottery Powerball, Pick 3 Day results for Dec. 10, 2025

Published

22 hours ago

December 11, 2025

Press Room

The New Mexico Lottery offers multiple draw games for those aiming to win big. Here’s a look at Dec. 10, 2025, results for each game:

Powerball

10-16-29-33-69, Powerball: 22, Power Play: 3

Check Powerball payouts and previous drawings here.

Pick 3

Day: 8-2-7

Evening: 6-9-2

Check Pick 3 payouts and previous drawings here.

Lotto America

03-13-37-42-44, Star Ball: 01, ASB: 03

Check Lotto America payouts and previous drawings here.

Pick 4

Evening: 5-0-7-8

Day: 3-7-2-0

Check Pick 4 payouts and previous drawings here.

Roadrunner Cash

02-04-06-21-22

Check Roadrunner Cash payouts and previous drawings here.

Powerball Double Play

13-15-51-67-68, Powerball: 08

Feeling lucky? Explore the latest lottery news & results

This results page was generated automatically using information from TinBu and a template written and reviewed by a Las Cruces Sun-News editor. You can send feedback using this form.

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New Mexico

Secretive New Mexico Data Center Plan Races Forward Despite Community Pushback

Published

1 day ago

December 10, 2025

Press Room

Secretive New Mexico Data Center Plan Races Forward Despite Community Pushback

By Dan Ross

This article was originally published by Truthout

To power the growing demand for AI, New Mexico is gearing up to build a data center with a city-sized carbon footprint.

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At the very Southeastern tip of New Mexico bordering Texas and Mexico, a new artificial intelligence (AI) data center is gearing up to be a greenhouse gas and air pollution behemoth, an additional water user in a drought-afflicted region, and a sower of community discontent.

Project Jupiter is one of five sites in the $500 billion Stargate Project, a national pipeline of massive AI systems linked with OpenAI, Oracle, and SoftBank.

“Health is my biggest concern. I’m worried about the air pollution, the ozone, and the buzzing noise,” local resident José Saldaña Jr., 45, told Truthout. Saldaña has lived in Sunland Park, New Mexico, nearly his entire life, and he’s worried about Project Jupiter’s added environmental footprint in a pollution hotspot. Another big data center is going up in nearby El Paso, Texas. He lives less than two miles from a landfill that emits such an unpleasant smell, he can’t even hang his clothes out to dry.

“I’m just trying to stand up for my community,” Saldaña said of his opposition to the facility. But the project is racing ahead, and has already cleared one important hurdle: financing, including a massive tax break for the data center’s backers.

Between September and October, the Doña Ana County Board of County Commissioners approved three funding ordinances, including the sale of industrial revenue bonds up to $165 billion.

With important permitting decisions still pending, work at the project site has already begun. Proponents tout all sorts of alleged benefits. This includes at least 750 well-paid new full-time positions and 50 part-time roles within three years of operations, with a priority for local hires. Instead of paying property and gross receipt taxes, the project will make incremental payments spread out over 30 years totalling $360 million — just a fraction of the bond monies.

Opponents of the project argue, however, that any benefits to the local economy are far outweighed by the impacts from potentially millions of tons of heat-trapping gas emissions annually from the plant’s proposed energy microgrid. This, when global warming is on track to increase by as much as 2.8 degrees Celsius over the century, blowing past Paris Agreement benchmarks set just 10 years ago.

And while Project Jupiter isn’t expected to be as thirsty as some of its fellow data centers, water advocates warn about any uptick of water usage in this drought-afflicted region, especially when New Mexico is projected to have 25 percent less surface and groundwater recharge by 2070 due to climate change.

“There’s so much secrecy and lack of information about the project,” Norm Gaume told Truthout. Indeed, a lot of the negotiations around the project have occurred behind closed doors. Gaume is a retired state water manager and now president of the nonprofit New Mexico Water Advocates.

“What is certain is two things: Global warming is taking our renewable water away. And Project Jupiter intends to use the least efficient gas turbine generators,” said Gaume. “Their emissions are just over the top.”

Massive Energy Consumption

The recent, rampant proliferation of AI in everyday life has prompted the swift buildout of enormous facilities to house the machinery needed to crunch extraordinary amounts of data — a process that requires enormous amounts of energy. Just how much?

The Western Resource Advocates, a nonprofit fighting climate change and its impacts, recently published a report showing how seven of the eight largest utilities in the interior West forecast an increase in annual energy demand of about 4.5 percent per year, driven primarily by the growth of energy-sucking data centers. In comparison, their annual electricity sales grew by only about 1 percent per year between 2010 and 2023.

This week, over 200 groups from all over the country jointly signed a letter to Congress urging for a moratorium on new data centers until safeguards are in place to protect communities, families, and the environment from the “economic, environmental, climate and water security” threats they pose.

Project Jupiter is set to be powered by two natural gas-fueled microgrids. But air quality permits recently filed with the New Mexico Environment Department show the project could reportedly emit as much as 14 million tons of carbon dioxide a year, according to Source NM. How much is that? The entirety of Los Angeles, the country’s second-largest city by population, emitted just over 26 million metric tons of carbon dioxide in 2022.

Under state law, qualified microgrids won’t be required to transition to a 100 percent renewable energy system for another 20 years, Deborah Kapiloff, a clean energy policy adviser with the nonprofit Western Resource Advocates, told Truthout. “So hypothetically, up until January 1, 2045, [Project Jupiter’s operators] could run their gas plants at full capacity. There are no interim guidelines. There’s no off-ramp,” she added.

Furthermore, the region is already classed as a marginal “non-attainment” area, meaning it fails in part to meet federal air quality standards for things like ozone and fine particulate matter levels. And local residents are concerned about the addition in the area of noxious air pollutants — including PM2.5, one of the most dangerous such pollutants linked to serious health issues like cardiovascular disease — from the gas powered microgrids.

“Technically, the EPA could decline these air quality permits because we have such bad air quality already,” documentary filmmaker Annie Ersinghaus told Truthout. She lives in the adjacent city of Las Cruces, New Mexico, and is skeptical the Environmental Protection Agency will intervene. “It very much feels like David and Goliath.”

Then there’s the water component.

Water Usage

According to online materials, the project’s data centers will require a total one-time fill volume of approximately 2.5 million gallons (which is the equivalent to the annual water usage of just under 25 households). Once operational, Project Jupiter’s data centers will use an average of 20,000 gallons per day (which is equivalent in daily usage of about 67 average households).

This doesn’t appear to be a lot of water — some data centers can use millions of gallons daily.

Project Jupiter’s developers boast an efficient closed-loop cooling system. But Kacey Hovden, a staff attorney with the nonprofit New Mexico Environmental Law Center, warned Truthout that this type of cooling system hasn’t yet been used at a fully operational facility, and therefore, it’s currently unknown whether those projected numbers are realistic.

In the background lurks a rapidly warming world marked by huge declines in global freshwater reserves. Arid New Mexico is at the heart of this problem.

A comprehensive analysis of the impacts from climate change on water resources in New Mexico paint a picture over the next 50 years of temperatures rising as much as 7 degrees Fahrenheit across the state, and with it, reduced water availability from lighter snowpacks, lower soil moisture levels, greater frequency and intensity of wildfires, and much more aggressive competition for scarce water resources.

Gaume told Truthout the state needs to take every step possible to curtail water usage rather than add to its needs. “This is a pig in a poke,” Gaume said about Project Jupiter. “We’re living in a fantasy world where people aren’t really paying attention to water.”

The project’s potential impacts on the community’s drinking water supplies is further complicated by the fact that both will share a water supplier, at least for a while — the Camino Real Regional Utility Authority, which has long been marred by water quality issues, including serving water containing elevated arsenic levels to its customers. An Environmental Working Group assessment of the utility’s compliance records finds it in “serious violation” of federal health-based drinking water standards.

The utility’s problems have gotten so bad that the Doña Ana Board of County Commissioners voted in May to approve the termination of the joint powers agreement that created the utility. Exactly what will replace it is currently unclear.

Project Jupiter will supposedly contribute $50 million to expand water and wastewater infrastructure. But it’s also unclear exactly how those funds will be used — whether just for the data center or for the community as well — and when. Hovden described this promised investment as nebulous. “I would say that’s probably the best way to describe everything around this project,” she said.

Multiple messages to BorderPlex Digital Assets — one of two project developers alongside STACK Infrastructure — went unanswered.

Then comes the issue of groundwater, the region’s primary water source. Once again, there’s very little known about the sustainable health of the region’s groundwater tables.

“The horse is way out ahead of the cart in this situation, where we don’t really know a lot of the details of how this project might impact New Mexico, especially its water,” Stacy Timmons, associate director of hydrogeology at the New Mexico Bureau of Geology and Mineral Resources, told Truthout. She’s currently involved in a state project to better understand the status of New Mexico’s groundwater resources.

Community Pushback

Caught unawares by the speed with which this project was announced and is moving forward, community pushback is beginning to coalesce. At the end of October, the New Mexico Environmental Law Center filed a lawsuit on behalf of José Saldaña and another local resident, Vivian Fuller, against the Doña Ana County Board of County Commissioners, arguing that they had unlawfully approved the three funding ordinances.

Ersinghaus is one of a group of local residents behind Jupiter Watch. They turn up at the construction site to monitor and track its progress, to make sure permits are in order (they often aren’t, she said), and to bring some “accountability” to the project. A large protest is scheduled for early next year, to coincide with the air quality permit decisions.

“Jupiter Watch came along very spontaneously,” said Ersinghaus, about the impetus behind the group in light of the hastily fast-tracked project. “Our commissioners voted for this [bar one], and we want them to feel ashamed.”

Saldaña said that he’d like regulators and politicians to halt the project and move it elsewhere. If they don’t, he speculated that he might pack up and move from the region he’s called home since 1980.

“In the worst case scenario, I’ll tell my mom, ‘Let’s move, let’s get the hell out of here.’ But I don’t want to move,” said Saldaña. His mother lives next door to him and he has many relatives in the area. “It’s sad. Very sad.”

This article was originally published by Truthout and is licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0). Please maintain all links and credits in accordance with our republishing guidelines.

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