Fischmann was involved in efforts to reform the Land Office as a private citizen before he became a state senator, working in tandem with Steinborn and Cote to urge the attorney general and state auditor to scrutinize the land office. Then, in 2009 the three proposed a package of legislation aimed at reforming the land office.

“Ray Powell is the reform candidate. He’s who I trust. It’s no question that we need him back at the Land Office,” said Senator Steve Fischmann in a statement released by the Powell campaign.

“The stakes are high. With Ray, he’ll bring much needed stability back to the Land Office,” said Rep. Jeff Steinborn.  “He’s ethical, principled and knows how to work with communities to maximize the dollars returned to the land office and ultimately our schools.”

And, Representative Nate Cote said, “When Ray Powell served as land commissioner, he was recognized for running one of the best land management agencies in the country. Right now, the Land Office is in crisis, and we are desperately in need of leadership we can trust.”

Powell, a veterinarian and regional director of the Jane Goodall Institute for Wildlife Research Education and Conservation in the western United States, served as Land Commissioner from 1993-2002. His opponents in the Democratic primary are Sandy Jones, Harry Montoya, and Mike Anaya.

In the statement released today, he presented a reform platform for the Land Office, which includes public meetings for any land exchange, lease or sale; a local land approval process for any long-term leases of state land; joint planning agreements with municipalities and counties where there is state land; a revamp of the Land Office Web site to achieve greater transparency and accountability; a conflict of interest process for employees at the Land Office; and the adoption of public financing for elections of the commissioner of public lands.

“I have heard from dozens of private citizens as well as members of our congressional delegation and local legislators echoing similar concerns,” Richardson said. “And contrary to statements from the Land Office, my Department of Game and Fish and the Game Commission were not consulted on this particular proposal.”

The New Mexican quoted State Land Commissioner Patrick Lyons saying the area is hard to manage. “Trespassing, vandalism, theft and illegal off-road vehicle use in the Whites Peak area are rampant, and the site has become impossible to manage,” Lyons said in a statement to the New Mexican.

“I am told the swaps would result in a net loss of almost 4,000 acres to the state, much of it pristine mountain, alpine meadow, lake and riparian territory,” Richardson said. “These are some of the finest public hunting and sporting grounds in the state. ”

Last month, former land commissioner and former Albuquerque mayor Jim Baca criticized a similar land swap by Lyons.

“State Land Commissioner Pat Lyons is trading away valuable commercial property from the state land inventory along the border with Mexico for another ranch,” Baca wrote on his blog. “While this trade is even constitutionally questionable I wonder if the meager grazing fees it will bring in comparison with revenues that might be made off the border land isn’t another rip off of the trust.”

A flurry of stories over the past 24 hours,  from national news organizations like Reuters and the Wall Street Journal, have been published profiling the Tres Amigas Project.

What’s the Tres Amigas project? It may well be the answer — or at least part of the answer its developers hope — to getting energy, including energy from renewable sources like wind and solar, flowing around the U.S. with greater ease. In short, the Tres Amigas project in Clovis may help connect the U.S. three energy grids — the Eastern, Western and Texas.

This is how Reuters explains the Tres Amigas superstation:

Power transfer between any two of the
Interconnections … can only be accomplished through special power electronic conversion stations. This is commonly achieved by first converting AC power in one grid to DC as an intermediate power form at a substation, then
reconverting from DC back to AC before reaching the adjacent grid. This, in effect, synchronizes power flows. While there are several relatively small bilateral “DC Links” existing today between two Interconnections, all three Interconnections have never been united by one system.

The Tres Amigas SuperStation will act as a power market hub, enabling the buying and selling of electricity between the nation`s three Interconnections, the Reuters story goes on to explain.

Wind, solar, hydro and geothermal renewable energy sources that do not currently have access to transmission lines and/or customers will be
able to tap into multiple markets through the Tres Amigas SuperStation. For example, regions rich in solar energy will be able to buy electricity at night, when the sun is not shining, from regions rich in wind energy. As a merchant
transmission system, Tres Amigas will charge a fee for usage of the power hub.

Clovis, N.M., has easy access to all three of the nation`s power grids, Reuters reports, and the New Mexico State Land Office already has granted Tres Amigas, LLC the right to lease 14,400 acres (22.5 square miles) of land in the city for this system.

The proposed substation, functioning like a traffic roundabout, would use superconducting cable from American Superconductor Corp. of Devens, Mass., capable of carrying 5,000 megawatts of electricity — equivalent to the output of five nuclear-power reactors, the Wall Street Journal explains in its own story.

Superconducting cable is chilled to minus-300 degrees Fahrenheit, which greatly increases its carrying capacity, and the rights-of-way the cable requires along its path are smaller — and cheaper.

The Tres Amigas substation would use novel technology to solve a basic problem: that power can’t easily flow among the three grids because they aren’t synchronized. It would convert the alternating current of each region into a common direct current. Then it would convert specific electrons back into alternating current to match the grid to which the electrons were destined.

But there could be hurdles before Tres Amigas goes online and fulfills what its developers hope is its enormous potential, reports the Journal.

The project still is in an early stage and could
unravel if it is unable to obtain financing. It also faces regulatory hurdles, since the FERC (Federal Energy Regulatory Commission) is being asked to waive jurisdiction over power sales in and out of Texas. Because Texas removed most electrical connections to other states decades ago, most of its wholesale power sales aren’t subject to FERC regulation.