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Molly Montgomery/Searchlight New Mexico

Unless county-level movement to reject the Antiquities Act of 1906 succeeds

county-level movement to reject the Antiquities Act of 1906 succeeds

By Molly Montgomery/Seachlight New Mexico

In January and February, county governments in New Mexico, Arizona, Utah and North Carolina began passing resolutions containing nearly identical language. The resolutions oppose what they refer to as an “abuse” of the Antiquities Act of 1906. Enacted by Congress as people went west and frequently looted from historic sites, the law gave presidents the authority to protect any area on federal lands by declaring it a national monument. A deep anti-federal current runs through the county resolutions, and they express support for extractive industries and a general objection to “the designation of lands, whether private lands or government lands as national monuments, wilderness, wilderness study areas, wildlife preserves, open space, or other conservation land.”

These convictions flow from a right-wing anti-regulatory movement that raged through the 1990s and is surging during the second Trump administration. Those who rally around such ideas believe that the federal government is imposing its values on them, and that public lands would be best-managed by local or state governments—or privatized. Luna County Commissioner Colette Chandler, for instance, who supports the resolutions, believes that a blend of state land management and private ownership would be ideal, and contends that New Mexico should oversee areas in the state currently in federal hands. The federal government, she told me, “shouldn’t just be able to dictate to us exactly how to handle our own land, in our own place.”

In March, Chandler delivered copies of the resolutions to lawmakers in Washington, D.C.  Meanwhile, at the highest levels of government, activists and politicians have been lobbying for sales and transfers of federal lands. Last August, the state of Utah filed a case in the US Supreme Court calling for a transfer of lands from federal to state management; the Court ultimately declined to hear it. In January, House Republicans adopted a rules package that simplified the process of passing lands from federal to state and local control. On a menu of options for a reconciliation bill, the House Ways and Means Committee listed “Sell Federal Land” as a possibility, which GOP members of both the Senate and the House are currently debating.

These actions go against what most New Mexicans hope to see. Eighty-nine percent of state residents believe that existing national monument designations from the last decade should remain in place, while 66 percent do not think New Mexico should have control over federal lands, according to a 2025 Colorado College State of the Rockies poll. Every member of the state’s congressional delegation has in various ways expressed support for maintaining federal protections on public lands. In January, Representative Gabe Vasquez co-sponsored proposed bipartisan legislation that would largely ban the sale or transfer of lands managed by the Interior Department and the US Forest Service.

“Our cherished public lands should remain in the hands of the public so that New Mexicans and the American public can enjoy them in perpetuity, including national monuments established through the Antiquities Act,” Vasquez said in a March 21 statement. He pointed out that public lands generate billions of dollars in economic activity and support thousands of jobs.

Supporters of federal land management are motivated by a fear that a rollback of protections could make beloved places vulnerable to sale and irreparable harm. “You and I are not going to be the private hands buying up that land,” Luna County Commissioner Ray Trejo told me. “It’s going to be the Elon Musks of the world, the Ted Turners, the Rockefellers.”

Trejo, southern New Mexico outreach coordinator for the New Mexico Wildlife Federation, grew up around Deming. On surrounding BLM lands, during hunting season, he’d spend afternoons and weekends hunting doves and rabbits. As an adult, he hunts quail three or four days a week during the season. Ninety percent of the meat he consumes is venison he harvests. He opposes Luna County’s current version of the resolution, which takes the form of a proclamation, and he hopes to ensure that future generations can spend time on public lands.

To understand the anti-federal sentiment in New Mexico, I started by focusing on the resolutions. Who created them? Was it the county commissioners? A constituent? A think tank?

“A fine drafting”

New Mexico counties that have passed versions of the resolution—which is usually called Resolution Opposing Abuse of the Antiquities Act—include Catron, Otero, Hidalgo and Sierra.

It was difficult to reach commissioners who voted in favor of it, and little was clarified when I did. Catron County Commissioner Audrey McQueen approved a version of the resolution in January but told me she couldn’t remember why. She directed me to Catron County Commissioner Haydn Forward. Forward said that Catron County attorneys based their resolution on a Luna County version.

In the conversations I had, a name kept coming up: Howard Hutchinson. Hutchinson is a private property rights activist in his mid-70s who lives in Glenwood, New Mexico. For decades, he’s been arguing that federal lands should be managed by states or privatized. “I am such a staunch believer in private property that any property that is under state control is problematic,” he told me during one of several interviews.

Since the 1990s, Hutchinson has served as the executive director of the Coalition of Arizona/New Mexico Counties for Stable Economic Growth, an organization that advocates for private property rights and increased resource extraction. The Coalition’s membership consists of representatives from the ranching and agricultural industries as well as county officials from eleven counties in New Mexico and five in Arizona. (Historically, mining and timber industry representatives also participated, Hutchinson told me, but none are currently active in the organization.)

How county officials are selected for Coalition membership is unclear. At least four Coalition members listed as representing counties on the board are not currently elected officials, and one member, Peggy Judd, a former Republican county supervisor in Cochise, Arizona, pleaded guilty to refusing to certify the 2022 midterm elections. “It’s up to each county commission or county supervisors to appoint a representative,” Hutchinson said. But Trejo said he knows of no public or government process behind the selection, and that he has never received an invitation to join. 

Each entity that joins has to pay yearly dues: According to a membership application on the Coalition’s website, counties are charged $2,600, “major corporations” $1,000 and livestock organizations $500. “The industries are basically there in an advisory capacity,” Hutchinson told me. “In other words, we go to them and we say, ‘Will this federal regulation impact X, Y, Z?’ And then we take that information and the data behind their answer to formulate policy.”

Hutchinson initially said that he saw a version of the resolution when Luna County Commissioner Colette Chandler sent it to him. He said she wrote it and shared it with him after Luna County adopted it; he then sent it out through his channels across the US—to other county commissioners, fellow property rights activists and the American Stewards of Liberty, a Texas-based think tank that promotes the sale of federal lands.

Several details conflict with Hutchinson’s account, however. Luna County still has not yet passed the proclamation that represents their version of the resolution. Chandler said that the Luna County attorney, Charles Kretek, drafted the proclamation, and that she didn’t send it to Hutchinson.

A response to an Inspection of Public Records Act request filed in Sierra County turned up an email that Hutchinson sent to members of the Coalition in mid-December 2024. “At our December 11th meeting it was asked that a resolution template be drafted opposing the Antiquities Act counties or organizations can adopt,” he wrote. “Please see the attached template.” The attachment, a Word document, lists “Howard Hutchinson” as its author. (Another public records request returned an email from Commissioner Forward, saying that he had modified Catron County’s resolution from Hutchinson’s version, a statement at odds with Forward’s claim that the resolution came from Luna County.)

When I showed Hutchinson a copy of the template and asked if he knew who wrote it, he said, “I’m not sure who actually wrote this, but it looks like it’s like a template that somebody started circulating.” When I said that the document’s properties list him as the author, and that he circulated it, he said, “I may have taken it and scanned it and pasted it into a Word document.” He said he didn’t remember where he’d scanned it from. In a follow-up email, he wrote: “Well, I did not remember drafting the resolution but upon looking at the original document ‘properties’ I was shown to be the author. Well now I can pat myself on the back for a fine drafting.”

“Unilaterally making a decision”

Hutchinson is behind other county actions calling for an end to federal management of lands. Last October, a couple of months before counties began passing the resolutions, the Coalition and others filed an amicus brief in support of Utah’s lawsuit seeking a transfer of lands from federal to state control.

The eleven New Mexico counties of the Coalition are named in the brief, though the decision-making process for signing onto the suit was not made transparent. Chaves and Roosevelt counties are misspelled “Chavez” and “Rosevelt” at one point in the brief. At least four counties—Eddy, Otero, Hidalgo and McKinley—posted nothing about the brief on agendas for public meetings between last August, when Utah filed its suit, and January, when the Supreme Court declined to hear it. Catron, Socorro, Roosevelt, Lea and Luna counties listed the matter only on agendas for meetings that occurred after the brief was already submitted. At press time, the Coalition website listed meeting minutes only through last July—the month before Utah filed  suit.

The effort to file the brief was “anti-democratic,” said Mark Allison, executive director of the New Mexico Wilderness Alliance, a statewide nonprofit working to protect wildlands. “It seemed like they were unilaterally making a decision without providing the public the opportunity to be aware of or weigh in on that decision about their public lands.” He noted that there are New Mexico Wilderness Alliance members across all eleven counties who do not want to see a transfer of public lands.

When Catron, Socorro, Roosevelt, Lea and Luna included discussion about Utah’s suit on their agendas, they did so to debate whether to contribute financially to the efforts behind the brief—not to debate whether to sign onto it in the first place. In a November 2024 email to Coalition members, Hutchinson wrote that Socorro, Catron and Roosevelt intended to contribute $500 each to fund the “crafting” of the brief and asked if other counties wanted to contribute. Socorro and Roosevelt made public their plans to contribute last October and November, as did Lea County. Catron County Commissioners approved a contribution at a December meeting.

Luna County Commissioners discussed the possibility of contributing but ultimately decided not to pay for the brief, in part out of concern that doing so would violate the New Mexico Anti-Donation Clause, which states that no county “shall directly or indirectly lend or pledge its credit or make any donation to or in aid of any person, association or public or private corporation.”

“I said, not ‘no,’ but ‘hell, no,’” Commissioner Trejo told me. “I wasn’t going to send our taxpayer dollars to Utah.” He believes the New Mexico Attorney General should investigate the counties that did contribute money to support the filing.

How transfer becomes sale

Utah filed its case, Utah v. United States, in the Supreme Court by invoking the Court’s original jurisdiction. (The Constitution allows a state to file a case with the Court when the state is suing another state or the federal government.) After the Court declined to hear it, Gov. Spencer Cox raised the possibility of pursuing it in a federal district court. Even if the state does take that route, legal experts are skeptical it will prevail. The lawsuit tests whether courts, interpreting the Constitution, have the power to order a transfer of federal lands—which is highly unlikely, according to John Leshy, a law professor at the University of California, who wrote a history of public lands called “Our Common Ground.” “The Utah theory is really muddled,” he told me. “I don’t regard this, frankly, as a serious lawsuit.”

But there’s no doubt Congress could get rid of all federal lands, Leshy said. If activists “can create a political movement that catches fire, then from the standpoint of people who love public lands, the worst could happen,” he said. “It is something that’s worth taking seriously.”

Those who call for the transfer of federal lands often say they want the lands to remain public, but under state control, and are not worried that the states would sell off the land. “The states aren’t stupid,” said Commissioner Chandler. “They’re not going to just all of a sudden decide, ‘Well, we can’t have this anymore.’ They’ll decide what’s best for the state, and the state legislation comes from the people, the voice of the people.”

But if Congress were to take action to sell off lands, which are likely worth trillions, conservationists and legal experts are skeptical that they would simply pass the lands to the states. “There’s really no mechanism to dispose of them in that mass quantity right now, so Congress would probably have to take some sort of an action to set up a system,” said David Willms, the associate vice president of the National Wildlife Federation and an adjunct professor at the University of Wyoming. “If you look at the value of those lands, and this is a little bit of speculation, it would be very difficult to get the bipartisan support you’d need to get a bill to pass Congress to just flat give those acres to a state with nothing in return.”

If a transfer to state management were to happen, extraction and privatization would likely follow. Western states, including New Mexico, have constitutional mandates to maximize revenue from state lands. “Because of that, states have very frequently sold those state trust lands, when their land boards have determined that the highest economic value of those lands actually is through selling them,” said Willms. Since becoming a state, New Mexico has sold off four million acres, close to a third of its trust land. The presence of oil under New Mexico’s ground could make management of federal lands profitable for the state—but extraction would then likely occur in places that are currently protected.

The Secret Meeting

Hutchinson regularly communicates with a network of private property rights activists who jokingly refer to themselves as the Secret Meeting. He says that when reporters ask him for the group’s name, “the response might be, ‘If we told you, we would have to kill you.’”

On a Sunday afternoon, we met outside the New Mexico Roundhouse, which, he told me, he’s been coming to for 35 years. “What you’re looking at here,” he said, waving at the structure, “this is corruption at its finest example.”

He does not believe humans have caused climate change. People, because of their “arrogance,” overestimate human impact on the climate, he said. “To surrender my personal liberty to a bunch of grafters in this building, and in Washington, D.C., so that they can pretend to adjust a thermostat for the climate, I have no desire for that.” 

Over the course of eight decades, Hutchinson moved from one side of the political spectrum to the other. He was born in Mobile, Alabama, but his family moved to Alamogordo, New Mexico, when he was two, and then to southern California when he was in third grade. His mother was an “avid strict construction constitutionalist,” he told me, and as a young man, in the late 1960s and early 1970s, he rebelled against her by becoming a socialist. 

He was an early supporter of Earth First!, a radical-left environmental organization founded in New Mexico in 1980 by activists reacting against the moderate tactics of the conservation movement. Its eco-warriors unrolled 300 feet of black plastic down Glen Canyon Dam to make the structure look cracked, hammered metal into the trunks of trees to stop loggers and dressed up as bears to protest the uranium industry.

“I believed that the collective was the motivating force behind a person’s activities, so centralized command-and-control government was more of a positive than a negative,” Hutchinson said. “I’m 180 degrees out from that.” Even so, he still considers himself an environmentalist. “In my mind and spirit, I am still very much a radical environmentalist, but I have changed my view of what entails being a good steward,” he said. 

The shift began in the forest. In the 1970s and ’80s, Hutchinson told me, he contracted with the Forest Service around Glenwood, thinning growth and planting trees and actually living for eight years in the woods. “I got an observational perspective of looking at forest health and how everything in forest health was interconnected as an ecosystem,” he said.

He also read extensively about ecology and forest and species management. “I’m kind of a weirdo. When someone purports giving me a fact, I start researching, looking for science papers.” What he learned eventually led to a disillusionment with Forest Service policy and its misapplication, which hardened into a conviction that the federal government could not be a responsible steward of land.

By the ’90s, alongside staunchly anti-federal activists, Hutchinson was working with the Coalition, which formed at the beginning of that decade. Several of the activists prioritized economic concerns over environmental considerations. Since its early days, the Coalition received funding from mining, timber and livestock interests.

Hutchinson now tends to lead with a call for state management of lands. During our first round of phone interviews, he told me he wants state government to manage federal lands and argued that such management would “give the public greater access” to natural resources.

But when I called a county commissioner who approved of an Antiquities Act resolution in Cherokee County, North Carolina, I learned that Hutchinson views state land management as only the second-best option. The commissioner, an ophthalmologist named Dan Eichenbaum, presented the resolution to the Cherokee County Commission after Hutchinson shared it with him. He runs a website called Dr. Dan’s Freedom Forum, which invites visitors to pray for Trump and Vice President J.D. Vance and sells T-shirts that show Trump’s face and read “Guilty of Making America Great Again!” He says that he and Hutchinson are old friends, and he argues that “private property is what separates us from totalitarian governments.”

I found an article Hutchinson wrote on the Freedom Forum last July, calling for the privatization of public lands. In subsequent conversations, he told me he believes private management of all lands would be ideal.

The Antiquities Act

The county resolutions opposing the Antiquities Act describe monument designations as “land grabs.” President Trump used similar language in 2017, calling the designations “a massive federal land grab,” when he rolled back protections on Bears Ears, a place sacred to several tribal nations—including the Navajo Nation, the Pueblo of Zuni and the Hopi, Ute Mountain Ute and Ute Indian Tribes—and coveted by corporations for uranium mining. Using the Antiquities Act, Obama had declared the place a national monument in 2016, and a year later, Trump reduced its boundaries by 85 percent. (Biden restored the boundaries.)

The “land grab” characterization is misleading. The Antiquities Act stipulates that the president can designate any area a national monument on lands that are already federal; monument status gives those lands extra legal protections. In some cases, a president has designated a monument on a recently acquired area after private owners willingly sold or donated their land. But the Act does not give the president the power to condemn and seize land to designate it a monument—and no president has ever done so.

“There’s no circumstance where the federal government, the president, has said, ‘Hey, there’s a bunch of private land, let’s go take it,’” said Justin Pidot, a law professor at the University of Arizona who served in both the Obama and Biden administrations. “There are kid gloves around private property.”

Those who criticize the Act—a group that includes Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts—also feel that the legal protections following a designation are overly restrictive to commercial interests, and that the president should not be able to put such restrictions in place without approval from Congress.

“I don’t think that one man, namely the president in this instance, should have a say over everybody in the country,” said Luna County Commissioner Colette Chandler. “He shouldn’t be able to dictate to us exactly how we’re going to feel about something.” The controversy around the Act in Luna County is especially contentious: one group of constituents hoped that the Florida Mountains, which jut out from federal lands within county borders, would be declared a national monument, while another group rallied against the designation.

But presidents have often issued protections that are less restrictive than what is laid out in law, Pidot notes. And the Act’s stipulations respect pre-existing mining and grazing rights. Designations have usually come about after local groups, tribes or state officials asked for them. The claim that the president has unchecked power to restrict access to land is also not accurate—Congress is able to overturn any national monument designation the president issues. Over the past century, the Supreme Court has upheld Antiquities Act designations several times, in suits whose plaintiffs alleged that presidents had abused their power with the law.

At an April 3 public meeting about the Luna County proclamation, several constituents who spoke against its passage noted its endorsement of extractive industries and voiced concern about the consequences of decreased regulation. (Commissioners and the county attorney may still change the wording of the proclamation; those who spoke at the meeting were referring to a version published in February.) Deming resident Charles Feyh questioned the idea that giving Congress oversight on national monument designations would increase local power and argued that mining and oil and gas industries can more easily influence Congress than they can a president. The “phantom proclamation,” he said, “is not really getting more power to the local people.”

Commissioner Trejo read a statement written by Keegan King, founder of the Native Land Institute, who noted that the Act has often been used to protect sacred indigenous lands. “For more than a century, this law has been one of the few tools that recognizes a deep and enduring connection tribal nations have to our ancestral lands, has protected sacred places, preserved cultural landscapes, ensured that our stories, the stories of this land, are not erased,” wrote King. “To dismantle these protections serves no real public need. It answers no call from the people. Instead, it is driven by corporate interests that view these lands only in terms of extraction and profit.”

 Searchlight New Mexico is a nonprofit, nonpartisan media organization that seeks to empower New Mexicans to demand honest and effective public policy.