New Mexico

Growing New Mexico maternity care deserts bring long drives, increased worry

Published

2 years ago

January 9, 2024

Growing New Mexico maternity care deserts bring long drives, increased worry

Christina spent much of 2023 traveling to Santa Fe for medical care during her pregnancy. She’d leave home about two hours before each doctor’s visit for the roughly 100-mile one way trip from her home in northern New Mexico’s rural Mora county, in case accidents or construction caused traffic slowdowns.

Two years ago, she would have received her care 30 miles down the road at Alta Vista Hospital in Las Vegas. But the hospital closed its delivery care unit in June 2022.

“People say it’s because they weren’t getting paid enough, I don’t really know why but they closed,” said Christina, who asked New Mexico In Depth not to use her last name to protect her and her newborn’s privacy. “So I have to go to Santa Fe.”

Her high-risk pregnancy forced the trip to Santa Fe three times a week in her final months, with transportation costs running about $150 a week.

The transportation was unhealthy too. “They tell you they don’t want you to sit that long, but what do you think I’m doing? Sitting,” she said.

Once at Santa Fe Medical Center, Christina sometimes waited up to 30 minutes to see a specialist.

Now, with the birth of a healthy baby in November, the cycle has started over – long drives to Santa Fe for infant and mother checkups for another year.

Christina isn’t alone. Across the state, one in three New Mexico counties are “maternity care deserts,” according to a 2022 March of Dimes report on maternal care nationwide. Nearly 18% of women in New Mexico lack access to birthing hospitals within 30 minutes of where they live, compared to the national 9.7%, according to the report.

In addition to Alta Vista, hospitals in Gallup and Artesia recently closed their birthing units, leaving 14 rural birthing hospitals across the state. Raton’s hospital is currently considering closing its delivery unit, according to a presentation by the New Mexico Hospital Association to the Legislative Health and Human Services Committee in September.

High costs not fully covered by Medicaid or other revenue sources are the chief challenge to sustaining rural hospitals and the specialized care needed for delivering babies, hospital administrators told lawmakers at the September hearing.

Public officials agree. “We’ve had several hospitals close their obstetrics wings, as a result of needing to make some changes for their own operating costs,” said Lorelei Kellogg, acting Medicaid Director at the New Mexico Human Services Department.

When hospitals close their delivery units, there are cascading effects. Not only must women travel long distances to deliver their babies at a hospital, but access to care over the nine months of pregnancy declines as well. That’s because Medicaid, the government run low-income health insurance program, pays much less for pre-delivery care than the actual birth of a baby. More than 40% of New Mexico’s population uses Medicaid.

When rural providers can’t count on income from the delivery of a baby at a nearby hospital, it becomes difficult for them to offer important prenatal care over the prior nine months.

New Mexico Hospital Association

The NM Hospital Association in a September 2023 presentation to lawmakers on the Health and Human Services Committee bluntly labeled Rural New Mexico an “OB Care Desert”, mapping where birthing units have closed in recent years.

A dwindling rural population lies at the root of hospital struggles to maintain birthing facilities.

According to New Mexico State University, 20 counties experienced significant population decline from 2010 to 2018, a trend that continues today. Rural counties have aging populations and fewer births, making it difficult for hospitals to sustain specialized maternity care units.

In 2020, nine hospitals in rural New Mexico reported delivering fewer than 300 babies, said Troy Clark, the executive director at the New Mexico Hospital Association, which is considered low. But to keep their birthing units open, hospitals need to maintain certain staff on hand regardless of how many babies they deliver.

“You don’t just need an obstetrics gynecologist to run a birthing center, you need anesthesiologists, nurse practitioners and family physicians to be available around the clock. And that cost adds up,” Clark said.

In short, it’s expensive to maintain a hospital birthing unit. When hospitals face hard choices to keep their doors open, they are more prone to shut down the more expensive services to maintain others.

Compounding growing financial stress, in 2020, rural hospitals began receiving less money from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), the federal agency in charge of the government’s health insurance programs for seniors and low-income people.

The agency instead began sending more money to high-volume hospitals as a response to the COVID-19 crisis. Generally, hospitals rely on these payments to sustain their operations, as payment for providing Medicaid services in New Mexico isn’t enough to keep a hospital running. The change placed a financial strain on rural hospitals, which typically serve fewer patients than urban hospitals.

“Rural hospitals depended on a fixed payments system to survive. They are now in crisis,” said Christina Campos, the administrator at Guadalupe County Hospital.

In 2023, state lawmakers increased the rate paid to providers for Medicaid services, but the amounts still aren’t enough to cover hospital costs.

Finding money for rural hospitals

To shore up facilities still operating birthing units, the hospital association and the New Mexico Human Services Department want to leverage a federal matching program that gives hospitals $4 for every $1 raised by the state.

“We are roughly looking to raise somewhere between $300 million to $500 million in state funds for matching,” said Clark. Kellogg said the funding scheme would require them to keep their birthing units open. “That’s really the intention behind those supplemental payments,” she said, adding “The requirement, or the metric that’s tied to the supplemental OB payment is really that they cannot minimize their services.”

Healthcare administrators say it’s also important to increase Medicaid rates for prenatal care.

Right now, Medicaid pays for prenatal and delivery care together in one package. Clinics and hospitals that provide both services to the same patient receive full payment from Medicaid. Clinics that provide prenatal services sometimes shut down soon after delivery units close when they can no longer deliver babies at a nearby hospital.

That was the case for Alumbra Women’s Health and Maternity Care center, a midwifery clinic based in Las Vegas, which shut down 15 months after Alta Vista Hospital first suspended their delivery care unit in 2016.

Connie Trujilio, the clinic’s founder and a certified nurse midwife from Las Vegas, used to provide prenatal services at her clinic, and delivered babies at Alta Vista hospital.

When the delivery unit at Alta Vista hospital unexpectedly shut down in 2016 because of lack of staff and a low demand for services, her patients had to travel to Santa Fe to deliver without Trujillo, who couldn’t sustain her practice from the low Medicaid payments for prenatal care. Alta Vista hospital eventually reopened their delivery unit again in 2017 for a few years before permanently closing again in 2022. But by 2018, Trujillo’s practice was already closed.

“We took care of so many people in Las Vegas and it was just such a huge loss. I sometimes think of patients I’ve had for years and wonder, where are they getting care?” said Trujilio.

One solution may be using phones or the internet to offer prenatal care at home, called telehealth.

The Rural Ob Access & Maternal Service, or ROAMS for short, is a collaborative project of hospitals and clinics in northeast New Mexico meant to increase access to prenatal care. It created a telehealth program in 2019 that uses computers or phones to connect health clinics and hospitals in Clayton, Raton, and Taos with women at home. It also deploys community healthcare workers who help pregnant people navigate various tasks like accessing transportation for appointments, or ensuring they get the right nutrition. This is particularly important in rural New Mexico where communities grapple with higher poverty rates.

According to Colleen Durocher, the executive director of ROAMS, the program significantly increased the number of women receiving prenatal care through the Raton hospital, through a combination of telehealth visits during the pandemic, public education, and services from community health workers.

Now, with a federal grant that supported ROAMS just ended, ROAMS is looking for how to keep its momentum going. Because Medicaid payments for pregnancy and delivery are bundled together, health clinics that only provide prenatal care struggle to sustain their services.

“We need to look at untangling the global rate of reimbursements so that prenatal services are reimbursed properly,” said Durocher

ROAMS is currently exploring how to offer telehealth to women with high risk pregnancies. According to various studies, women in rural communities are prone to increased rates of high risk pregnancies, which require visits to specialized doctors who in New Mexico are largely in urban areas.

“We see high risk patients who need to be seen by a maternal fetal specialist. However, these specialists are only in urban areas like Albuquerque,” said Jay Fluhman, a certified nurse practitioner with ROAMS.

Telehealth is capable of serving those with high risk pregnancies, but it requires specialized equipment that rural communities usually don’t have. As a result, women with higher risk pregnancies, like Christina in Mora county, have to travel long distances for care.

Christina said that had Alta Vista offered simply an ultrasound service it would have been a big help.

“If that was closer, that would save you one trip right there,” she said. “One trip makes a difference, it costs money to go over there all the time.”

Marjorie Childress contributed to this report.

This story was originally published by New Mexico In Depth.

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New Mexico

New Mexico man sentenced to nearly 20 years for distributing meth

Published

3 hours ago

December 11, 2025

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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

15 hours ago

December 11, 2025

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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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