FEMA revamps New Mexico operations

As Ruidoso area residents return to their homes – or what’s left of their homes – we’ll be watching FEMA.

For the past two years, since the disastrous Hermit’s Peak-Calf Canyon fires in northern New Mexico, we’ve heard more about what FEMA hasn’t done than what it has done.

This year the agency began changing its New Mexico operation. Jay Mitchell, the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s new head of New Mexico operations, announced major changes. FEMA Administrator Deanne Criswell stood next to the governor at a recent news conference, promising, "We will be by your side throughout this recovery."

We’d all like to believe that. It would mean that the agency listened to criticism and responded. Finally.

For months, fire victims, advocates and elected officials complained about Mitchell’s predecessor, Angela Gladwell, director of the Hermit’s Peak/Calf Canyon Claims office. Gladwell became the face of dysfunctional government and failure to help people in desperate need after the fire in early 2022. The claims office didn’t write a check until April 2023 and by year end had expended just 7 percent of the $4 billion allocated by Congress. In April 2024 the payout had inched up to 13 percent.

Maybe Gladwell was the wrong person for the job, but I have to wonder if she was in an impossible situation.

Last year I wrote that “the agency that’s supposed to help victims with housing and reimbursement operates in slow motion, if it operates at all.” In New Mexico and every other state since Hurricane Katrina, FEMA “has done almost nothing, hogtied by its own regulations and bureaucratic inertia.”

From its creation in 1979 to 2003, FEMA was a small, agile, independent agency that responded quickly. After it became a division of the Department of Homeland Security, it became another bureaucratic cog. Decision making, spending and communications bogged down. Gladwell was a 25-year denizen of that culture when she came here in late 2022. I couldn’t find anything in her long and impressive resume to indicate she’d ever been on the ground for a real disaster.

When she stepped down in January, a FEMA news release gave the beleaguered director credit for building a compensation program “from the ground up” and hiring a team of New Mexicans. Because funding came directly from Congress through a bill, her office had to create a new compensation program, which suggests FEMA had no template for a basic function. Her office was still trying to get program rules approved even as fire victims were pleading for help.

With Gladwell’s departure, FEMA began consolidating New Mexico recovery operations and gave Jay Mitchell, the new director of the Joint Recovery Office, a new mission “to lead the on-the-ground long-term recovery efforts” as well as claims. Gladwell has been kicked upstairs.

Mitchell, who once led the state Department of Homeland Security, is a former Air Force colonel and global security consultant, but his most important credential may be that he’s a fifth-generation New Mexican. We need someone who understands us, say critics; don’t send us another FEMA bureaucrat.

In a recent op ed, Mitchell wrote: “I am committed to speeding up the recovery process from this horrific fire. As an experienced emergency management professional, I know recovery never happens fast enough, and that same sad fact is true of the recovery from this disaster. The process needs to go faster…

“I understand the frustration and anger people affected by the fire carry about their loss and slow recovery. Bureaucracy is the last thing people want to deal with after losing homes and livelihoods, and the process can, at times, seem complex and daunting.”

Mitchell is off to a fast start but with the Ruidoso fires, his responsibilities just doubled. If the agency empowers him to do what he needs to do, he could turn “FEMA bureaucrat” into a respectable term.

Sherry Robinson is a longtime New Mexico reporter and editor. She has worked in Grants, Gallup, the Albuquerque Journal, New Mexico Business Weekly and Albuquerque Tribune. She is the author of four books. Her columns won first place in 2024 from New Mexico Press Women.