Policy Platform

This is an incomplete list of my positions on various issues. If there are other matters that you would like to hear more about email me at withers4nm@gmail.com and I will respond and post my positions here. If you agree with me on the majority of these issues, I think you should vote for me. And if you agree with me on all of these points you might want to see a therapist. The following is my opinion on a wide range of topics. The things I would devote my energy into if elected are water, water, food and agriculture, and water. And maybe the lawyer one at the very end.

A note on my political philosophy

My personal political philosophy is generally rather libertarian (more mid nineteenth century European libertarianism than modern American libertarianism). I generally don't trust the state and think that the role of a representative is as much to check the state from depriving people of their rights as is is to advocate that the state ensure their welfare. However I am not running for office to push a political ideology or partisan agenda. I hope to push for pragmatic solutions (real, long term solutions) to the very real problems facing our State.

I will also disclose that my views differ wildly from both the Democratic and Republican parties (who in my opinion agree on a lot more than they disagree on). Namely I am not an industrialist, a globalist, a corporatist, a zionist, an imperialist, a federalist, or a crony corporate capitalist. I am an agrarian, meaning I believe all real wealth is generated in the soil and the sea and the basis of a prosperous and free society is sound, independent small communities that are connected to the land and the water that sustains them. I am a localist and think our economy and our political process should be focused on a local scale instead of a national or global one. I believe that small independent businesses are the core of a stable and functioning economy and the push for corporate consolidation is a threat to our freedom and our communities. I strongly oppose supporting genocide an ethnic cleansing under all circumstances. I oppose the aggressive use of military force against other countries to further our own economic interests ( or for any reason other than absolutely necessary acts of self defense or defense of an ally). I oppose the consolidation of power generally, and am especially opposed to the ongoing proliferation of unconstitutional assertions of the federal government to exercise powers not enumerated in the US constitution. I am not a crony capitalist because I don't believe that the chief end of all economic activity should be the continual concentration of monetary wealth. I believe money should be used as a tool to facilitate the exchange of goods and service necessary to create things of real value to sustain our communities. Also 100% do not support pedophiles or traitors.

Effective Governance

The problem in New Mexico that drives most of the rest of the problems in New Mexico is that we have a corrupt and incompetent state government that does more to serve their own interests and the interests of outside entities than they do to serve the people of New Mexico.  This problem is dramatically exacerbated by the toxic partisanship that dominates politics. We do not have effective checks and balances between the executive and legislative branch, we do not have sufficient safeguards against nepotism, cronyism, and blatant corruption, we do not have an accessible political process to those outside the two major political parties, we do not have a sensible non-partisan approach to defining district boundaries, and we certainly do not have any real transparency around the way that our state's budget is allocated. This is made much worse by having two deeply entrenched partisan groups that are more concerned with fighting each other than doing their jobs and are united in keeping out anyone that wants to actually effect good governance. 

-I support open primaries.

-I support independent redistricting. 

-I support enacting term limits. 

-I oppose any restriction on people's ability to vote or participate in the political process. 

-I support ethics guidelines for public officials, and the enforcement thereof. 

-I support ending the bifurcated system that separates legislation from finance. 

-I support legislative rules reform that would eliminate the bottle neck that allows two individuals from the Democratic party to dictate which bills are considered by the state legislature. 

-I support reforming the emergency powers protocol to require legislative approval of prolonged emergency actions by the Governor. 

-I support reducing financial barriers to participating in state governance to make political participation viable for working class people through increased per diem spending allowance or a moderate salary commensurate with the effort we expect our state representative and senators to put forth.. 

Water

Wells across district 22 are going dry. Groundwater levels are dropping at over 2 ft a year on average in the Sandia sub-basin and around a foot a year on average across the Estancia basin due to unsustainable water mining. Much of the suburban development in the northern part of the district is being supported by pumping water from the Estancia basin in the southern part of the district as far north as the suburbs of Santa Fe, while farms across the Estancia basin are critically threatened by declining well levels resulting from both inter basin water transfer and extractive forms of irrigated commodity agriculture. 

 Our communities and our economy are directly threatened by poor water management that have put us on a course for ecological and social collapse. Private companies are increasingly taking control of water infrastructure and profiting off of the water crisis facing our communities, while the state and local governments play hot potato with the responsibility for ensuring that our communities will have access to healthy and affordable potable water, never mind sufficient water to produce enough food to maintain some level of food sovereignty. 

There are no silver bullets or easy solutions. Technology won't save us. Continuing to dig deeper to mine more water is not a long term plan.

We need to balance the water budget. The amount of water ‘income’ we have is based on precipitation and effective water cycling. Our water use has to take that into account or we go broke. You can’t print more water. 

 The low hanging fruit is funding mutual domestics and municipal water systems to fix leaks and stop millions of gallons from being lost. A more challenging issue is how to check the proliferation of wells that increase demand on rapidly dwindling water supplies.. and not tank our property values, dry up the public coffers, and kill our local economy. Our entire district is closed to new applications for commercial water rights due to the dramatic decline in groundwater levels, yet there are tens of thousands of lots approved for residential development with no real plan on how to supply those houses with water long term. Private water coops, mutual domestics, and municipal water systems are equally affected by this problem.

-I support amending the domestic well laws to ensure that appropriate restrictions are in place to prevent increasing demand on over-allocated ground water resources.

-I support holding our local and state governments responsible for fulfilling their basic obligations to effectively steward our communal water resources to ensure all people have equitable access to potable water now and into the future, and providing the support and funding to help them fulfill their responsibilities. 

-I support legally tying water back to the land at a water basin scale and prohibiting increases in inter basin water transfers. 

-I support updating the mandate given to the office of the state engineer in managing our states water resources to include a mandate that we ensure water availability for future generations, clearly defining what constitutes a ‘beneficial use’ of water and including the interests of the riparian system itself, and basing water management and planning on clearly defined hydrological lines and realistic hydrological data. 

-I support holding water users responsible for restoring the health and purity of any ‘waste water’ or return flow to the same level as when the water was appropriated as a condition of being granted a right to use that water. 

-I support allocating sufficient funds to the Office of the State Engineer and other state water agencies to do their jobs effectively.

-I support major investment into forest thinning on public and private land, prescribed grazing as a way to reduce fire load and increase watershed health, funding for large scale compost production and application to increase water sequestration, and reforming state tax law to incentive soil health practices and increase water cycling back to the aquifers and streams.

-I support public funding and tax incentives for rainwater catchment and storage to offset unsustainable groundwater pumping for domestic and commercial use. 

-I oppose the ongoing privatization and commodification of our communities' water resources. 

-I oppose speculation on and price gouging for water. 

-I strongly oppose the recent settlement enforced against New Mexico by the federal government in the Texas v New Mexico & Colorado suit. 

-I support allocating whatever resources necessary to the Interstate stream commission to protect New Mexico from unrealistic and grossly unfair compact obligations under the Rio Grande Compact, and preserving the current base levels of Colorado water diversions for use in central New Mexico in the Colorado river compact negotiations. 

Land and agriculture

Agriculture is both a major cause of unsustainable ground water pumping, and potentially a critical part of the solution in reducing groundwater dependency to sustainable levels while increasing the amount of water going back into the aquifers. Supporting farmers and ranchers in transitioning to more ecologically and economically resilient production models has the potential to reduce the amount of water we need to continue producing enough nutrient dense food to be able to feed ourselves into the future and sustain an agrarian economy that supports our local communities and keeps us connected to each other and the land. 

1% increase in carbon in the soil can increase water absorption capacity by 25,000 gallons per acre. That can reduce the amount of water needed to produce crops, reducing the amount of groundwater we need to pump to grow food, and increase the amount of water that flows back into the aquifers. We can do that through the use of diverse cover crops, diverse crop rotations, organic amendments, well managed grazing, and incentivizing soil health practices. It is imperative that we provide funding, technical support, and any necessary regulatory changes needed to clear a path for the emergence of viable local and regional food systems that does not destroy itself by mining fertility from the soil and fossilized groundwater from the aquifers. 

-I support expanding and improving the Cottage Food law to provide meaningful market access to independent food producers. 

-I support reforming the State Meat Inspection program to make it a useful tool for increasing market access for livestock producers instead of adding another layer of policing and regulation to do the opposite of that. 

-I support using tools like conservation easements to protect agricultural lands from subdivision and development, and the use of groundwater conservation easements to help farmers fund transitioning to less water intensive crops, more efficient irrigation systems, and investments in soil health that will increase economic viability and resilience in our local food system. 

-I support investment in middle supply chain and value added enterprises. 

-I support expanding public funding to support regenerative agriculture and responsible land stewardship. 

-I support expanding capacity in the relevant state agencies to effectively bring federal dollars back into the state to help fund these efforts, and expanding the permanent funding available to ensure we can get back as many of our federal tax dollars as possible to support New Mexicans. 

-I support reforming public land grazing laws, creating competitive contracts for using prescribed grazing on public lands to increase watershed health and provide critical ecosystem service to the people of New Mexico. Instead of ranchers paying the state a nominal fee to continually graze and often severely overgraze public lands, the state should be paying ranchers to use intensively managed grazing to restore the health of public lands. 

-I support dramatic expansion in fuel reduction efforts and preparation for catastrophic wildfire response. 

-I support the reintroduction and expansion of predator populations, including wolves. I also support a workable system for compensating ranchers for predation losses, and more importantly direct support for adopting practices like range riding and in-herding that can prevent predation while also facilitating improved grazing management to meet definable and verifiable land health goals. 

-I support reforming the game commission and clearly defining ecosystem health as the metric by which public land management decisions involving game and hunting licenses are made. I support reforming the EPLUS system to put more tags back into the public draw, and redirect more landowner tags to the farmers and ranchers that are contributing most to the maintenance of publicly owned wildlife. 

-I support restricting eligibility to participate in private land utilization systems to full time New Mexico residents that are actively engaged in managing the lands on which they claim hunting authorizations.

-I oppose issuing unit wide private land hunting tags. 

-I support responsible stewardship of all public lands.

-I oppose selling public lands. 

-I support unrestricted use of state trust lands including overnight camping on undeveloped sites. 

Local Economy

The economy in District 22 is based largely on residential development and commodity agriculture. Both of these industries are in direct conflict with our limited water resources and will not provide a long term stable economy. We need to transition towards a strong agrarian economy that preserves our water resources, our rural communities, and our food sovereignty. The solution is built into the problem. We can build a vibrant local economy that produces real value in the form of food, fiber, fuel, and community by creating local supply chains for the many products we can produce sustainably. I also view the local economy as a key part of the basis (along with public education) for a real solution to the high crime rates and high homeless rates in our state. Crime and homelessness are both primarily economic issues, and supporting vibrant local, circular economies that support strong communities is the most effective and necessary step in addressing these issues. 

 Agricultural processing facilities like abattoirs, butcher shops, malting houses, breweries, distilleries, wineries, cideries, wool mills, flour mills, wood mills, feed mills,  composting facilities, and educational facilities to support the development of the skills and knowledge we need to support those industries offers immense potential for growing a sustainable economy. Manufacturing and installing the water infrastructure we need to deal with the water crisis is another industry in itself. Rainwater harvesting both on structures and across the landscape would be employing thousands of people, as could forest thinning and ecological restoration projects. Natural building and the production of natural materials like hemp and reclaimed wood materials from our overgrown forests presents another potential growth sector, as does agrotourism and outdoor recreation. 

-I support reforming state laws governing food processing to create an equitable regulatory environment for small local food producers and processors. 

-I support providing direct funding and technical support for developing localized food systems and shortening supply chains. 

-I support focusing economic development efforts on small locally owned businesses instead of large out of state corporations. 

-I support the development of a sustainable agrarian economy in the East Mountains. 

-I support expanding ecosystem services like watershed rehabilitation, countering erosion, fuel reduction in areas at risk of catastrophic wildfire, and carbon sequestration as an economic driver. 

-I support all efforts to develop local circular economies that keep money and people in our communities and counter the current trend of supporting maximum economic extraction from our land and our communities. 

Guns

I bought my first rifle when I was ten years old, grew up hunting and shooting both recreationally and competitively. I use firearms on a regular basis for hunting, humane slaughter, and protecting my livestock from predators (I don’t kill coyotes as a rule, but if they get too comfortable coming around the farm or are actively attacking livestock I have found that nontoxic .410 bird shot to the rump is an effective deterrent). Shortly after we began raising hogs on my family's property I was informed by the Bernalillo County sheriffs department that I could be jailed for 30 days for using a firearm to humanely harvest an animal on my farm. It took almost nine months to force the county to amend the ordinance to allow county residents to discharge a firearm for the purposes of ‘euthanizing livestock’. That vote passed unanimously on a 3/2 partisan split and weirdly the republicans were the most opposed. I  support and will do everything in my power to protect 2nd amendment rights. I do not think that there is anything the state can legally do to address violence in our communities by restricting access to firearms, and we should be focusing on real solutions to the pandemic levels of violence ripping apart our communities instead of trying to criminalize gun ownership. And given the current state of the Republican Party and the rise of authoritarianism and the blatantly anti-constitutional nature of the current administration I feel it is more important now than ever to protect our right to bear arms. 

-I oppose all state laws that directly violate the United States Constitution, including the 2nd amendment. 

Bodily Autonomy

I oppose any and all efforts by the government to claim control over individuals' bodies. The assault against women’s reproductive rights and the ongoing efforts to reduce women to second class citizens by giving control over their bodies to the government is not just an immediate threat to women but represents an unacceptable threat to all people’s basic liberties. 

-I support women in maintaining control over their own bodies and in making reproductive choices, including abortion. 

-I support all people's rights to make their own decisions related to their own bodies with no interference from the government. 

-I support alternative medicines and people's right to choose what type of treatment they receive. 

-I support midwifery and traditional birth practices. 

-I support decriminalizing drugs, and treating addiction as a public health issue instead of a criminal issue. 

-I oppose insurance companies having any say in treatment options. 

Immigration 

This is a federal issue according to chapter 4 of the United States constitution. If I was running for federal office I would support comprehensive immigration reform that allows current residents a clear and attainable path to citizenship and ensures that all migrant workers that want to come contribute can do so with legal status and legal protection by dramatically expanding H1A and H2A visas. In my opinion the current division around immigration is mostly political theatre. There is a quiet consensus between the Republicans and Democrats on immigration policy. The main goal is to ensure there is an abundant, easily exploitable and easily disposable labor force. The secondary objective of immigration policy is to create a partisan issue that can be used to exploit and control the major parties' political bases. 

-I support comprehensive immigration reform on a federal level. 

-I oppose spending New Mexico tax dollars on border control efforts.

-I oppose the rise of xenophobia and blatant racism in our political process. 

-I support local oversight of immigrant detention facilities and all federal law enforcement agents.

-I violently oppose the militarization and weaponization of Immigrations and Customs Enforcement.

-I believe all people are created equal and should be treated as humans with inalienable rights.

Transportation

I believe transportation infrastructure should be aimed at fostering healthy communities. I do not support expansive spending on huge infrastructure projects that do not materially contribute to the wellbeing of the communities they pass through. If there was anywhere I think we could eliminate waste and fraud in the state the Department of Transportation is at the top of my list. I think the DOT should be audited yearly and be held to account for every penny spent, and major restructuring around the way projects are planned and implemented is in order. I'm a big fan of trains, and believe we should continue investing in rail infrastructure both for commerce and passenger service. At the local level one of my main priorities would be securing funding and access to ensure all residents of the East Mountains have multiple means of egress out of their homes. Communities like the Sandia Knolls and Monte Vista have only one way in and out which could cost people their lives if/when a major fire comes to the Sandias. 

-I support investment in new roads in the East Mountains that ensure everyone has multiple evacuation routes out of their communities in case of a fire. 

-I support regularly auditing the DOT and eliminating waste fraud and abuse in transportation spending. 

-I oppose the DOT unilaterally and selectively banning the posting of political signs on private property where a public right of way passes through. 

-I support investment in reliable public transportation. 

Legal Reform

The legal system in New Mexico is, in my opinion, a bit of a hot mess. Im not a lawyer, but I've learned a lot in the last couple years about litigation and how the legal system works after one of my incumbent opponents friends filed an attack lawsuit against me and my family three weeks after I announced I was running for office in 2024. We were just scheduled for trial for June of 2027. Medical malpractice lawsuits are threatening the availability of quality medical care in New Mexico. Violent criminals are released on bail within hours of being arrested, while nonviolent offenders that pose no threat to society sit in jail because they cant afford bail. The system is broken. I think part of the reason for this problem goes back to issues of effective governance. The governor herself has called out the Democrat attorneys in the Legislature for blocking reforms. The issues of ethics in governance rears its ugly and complicated head.

-I support amending the New Mexico Constitution to allow keeping violent offenders and people who pose a risk to our communities incarcerated until trial regardless of their ability to post bail, and to allow non violent offenders that pose no risk to society free pending trial regardless of their financial ability to post bail.

-I support amending the state ordinances pertaining to 'malicious litigation' to redefine such as litigation that has no material basis in fact, is not supported by the law as written, and can be proven through a preponderance of evidence that the motivation for filing the lawsuit was external to the claims made in the original complaint, including but not limited too personal grievances, pursuit of monetary gain, infliction of economic hardship, or defacement of character. I would further support establishing proscribed penalties for both the plaintiffs and the filing attorneys in such cases that would include fines, criminal charges, and loss of license to practice law for repeat offenders.