Mayor Louie Trujillo: Leading a community through water crisis
Las Vegas, New Mexico, has experienced four crises during Trujillo's first term, but he says he still loves the job
Louie Trujillo is mayor of Las Vegas, New Mexico, a town of 13,000 people lying 700 miles away from Sin City. In his three years as mayor, Trujillo has enjoyed only five days when the town wasn’t dealing with some kind of crisis. In Trujillo’s first term, Las Vegas has endured the pandemic, the largest wildfire in New Mexico history, historic flooding, and a drinking water crisis. Today, Trujillo spends his time in meetings with federal agencies and contractors as he oversees the renovation of his city’s water treatment facilities and the rehabilitation of fire-ravaged watersheds. Altogether, Trujillo described his first term as a “big circus” and a “bad dream”.
And yet, Trujillo said he has no plans to leave city hall. In a time when his community needed it most, he was there to offer leadership and help. He has a year and a half left in his current term, and then he’ll have an opportunity to step down. Instead, he intends to run for a second term.
Trujillo was born in Las Vegas, and he has lived there nearly all his life. Las Vegas is a town of modest means, with roughly a third of the population living in poverty. The average person in Las Vegas makes $21,500 a year (roughly 30% lower than the national average). The town is 80% Hispanic/Latino.
Las Vegas is home to a Walmart Supercenter, a state university, a community college, a 54-bed hospital, and two high schools. The town’s largest employer is the state government. The Skillet, a local bar known for its half-enchanting, half-terrifying murals, is, as described by one employee there, “the only place that really stays open past 9 p.m.” More than a few downtown storefronts are empty. Western wear shops, art galleries, furniture stores, and an abundance of antique shops fill the rest.
When Trujillo ran for mayor in 2020, he envisioned himself working on social programs and economic development, working to bring new businesses into Las Vegas. He imagined ribbon cuttings and arts festivals. But by the time he was elected, the pandemic had already descended on New Mexico. He had a virtual swearing-in ceremony, as the state had already restricted gatherings of more than five people. In his first speech as mayor, he called for Las Vegans to support and respect their healthcare workers. (Trujillo worked, and still works, at the Las Vegas office of New Mexico’s state-owned psychiatric hospital).
“I am prepared to get right to work and get us through the worst of this,” he said in that speech.
At that time, he couldn’t have known exactly what that meant.
Trujillo was elected only a month before San Miguel County, whose seat is Las Vegas, saw its first COVID case on April 14, 2020. At that time, Trujillo and his colleagues imposed what he says was the first mask mandate in the state. Three days after the mandate went into place, he said he got a call from New Mexico Governor Michelle Lujan Grisham, who told him she had met with the New Mexico Secretary of Health and the whole state was going to follow Las Vegas’s lead, imposing a statewide mandate.
Over the course of the pandemic, Trujillo watched his community fight the virus. The county saw two COVID waves. During the first one, in November, 2020, the county experienced an average of 51 hospitalizations and roughly two deaths per week (the county is home to around 27,000 people). During the second wave, in January, 2022, the county saw an average of 50 hospitalizations and roughly four deaths per week.
Then things seemed to settle down. Two years after the COVID first arrived in San Miguel County, New Mexico lifted its mask mandate, and life seemed like it might have returned to normal.
That was two months before the fires started.
On April 6th, 2022, the US Forest Service announced it was conducting a controlled burn 12 miles northwest of Las Vegas in the Pecos Wilderness (despite numerous comments by community members that it was too windy that day for a burn). By afternoon, strong winds had swept the burn out of control, and the blaze, at first labeled the “Las Dispensas Controlled Burn”, was officially declared a wildfire, later named the “the Hermits Peak Fire” after the hood-like peak whose summit can be seen from almost everywhere in the surrounding area, including Las Vegas.
At the same time, five miles away from the Hermits Peak Fire, in Calf Canyon, the same winds began blowing life into the still-burning embers of another controlled burn, thought to be extinguished in January, and started a so-called “zombie fire” (also called a “holdover fire” or “sleeper fire”). The embers from that January burn had survived three winter snow events, smoldering underground, before they emerged as the “Calf Canyon Fire”.
On April 19th, the two fires merged. Officials announced that the two blazes would be managed as one fire, now called the “Hermits Peak/Calf Canyon Fire”. The unified blaze went on to devour an area roughly 25 times the size of Manhattan. It was the largest recorded fire in New Mexico’s history.
That spring and summer, Trujillo and his staff watched from the windows of city hall as the flames crested a ridge just above town.
“Town was smoky-smoky. You looked up and the planes were flying over you like it was a warzone. It took all they had to keep the fire from crossing the ridge,” Trujillo said.
Luckily, the fire never reached Las Vegas, but it did touch everyone there. Local businesses closed for a week so employees could evacuate their relatives who lived in the foothills above town. Locals lost farms and cabins that had been in their families for more than four generations. At least one Las Vegas middle school became a shelter for evacuees from foothill communities.
All told, the fire destroyed more than 900 structures, including two that were special to Trujillo. In one May night, amidst 85-mile-an-hour winds, the fire erased the 51 log-cabin-style homes and 16 commercial buildings at the Pendaries Village golf resort, including a house that Trujillo owned, and then crossed a hill to the town of Gallinas, where it incinerated a family cabin where he had spent summer days with his cousins since he was a child.
“It was just the weirdest night,” Trujillo said. “And of course, you don't sleep. I mean, you can hear the wind at night, and you go to these fire briefings every night and they’re telling you that we're in for a rough night and you know, it just gets very exhausting. And then you go home and try and relax, and you keep the phone with you in case you have to open the evacuation sites.”
Mayor Louie Trujillo at his City Council seat in Las Vegas City Hall. Austin Corona (July, 2022)
When evacuees returned to the hills, they found their homes and their ranches charred. If their houses and barns had not been destroyed, they were often ruined with smoke damage. They found stocks of once-frozen venison rotting in refrigerators and freezers that no longer received power. They cut themselves on rusty nails trying to haul away the rubble. They found their animals, some dead, some barely alive.
Photos of black carcasses – cows, horses, even a bear – circulated on social media. A herd of cows in the town of Rociada had survived by huddling in the local school parking lot as the blaze raged around them. Fire crews used electrofishing gear to stun and net 183 Rio Grande cutthroat trout from local waterways, which they saved from the effects of the fire. Ash killed all the remaining cutthroats in at least one stream. In May, a fire crew discovered and rescued what they assume to be the lone survivor of an elk herd near Hermits Peak: a calf, “lying quietly in a six-inch-deep layer of white ash.” They named the calf “Cinder”.
Finally, in August, partially a result of “robust monsoonal moisture”, fire managers declared the Hermits Creek/Calf Canyon Fire 100% contained.
And yet, the next crisis had already begun. Another effect of that “robust monsoonal moisture” was flooding, which was particularly nasty when it loosened charred soils in the burn scar. Torrents of debris and ash ripped across roads and flipped cars. Three members of a West Texas family, staying at a cabin they had owned for more than sixty years, lost their lives when floodwaters swept them from their property and down a local creek. One local man was killed when floodwaters rushed across a highway in the mid-afternoon, dragging his pickup truck off the road and drowning him. Another local man was charged with DWI homicide after his truck was flipped by floodwaters and his passenger (and friend) was drowned in the cab. The driver was allegedly drunk at the time.
In August, as swollen rivers and creeks were singing in green valleys and yellow daisies were speckling hayfields, people in the villages of Holman and Mora were stacking sandbags around their houses and yards. As prairie sunflowers bloomed on the sides of country roads, black debris was coating farm equipment and children’s play structures like wattle. Hulking National Guard trucks rumbled down tiny farm roads. On the hillsides, the fire had blackened vast patches of forest, which were ringed by thin layers of golden-brown (trees that died but did not burn). Snow-white groves of dead aspens haunted their centers.
And Trujillo and his staff were scrambling to deal with flooding in downtown Las Vegas. In June, a torrent traveling the path of the Gallinas River ran only a few feet from people’s doorsteps in core of town. Federal crews then set up flood-mitigation structures known as Gabion baskets – cube-shaped wire baskets filled with football-sized rocks – around the channel where the Gallinas River runs through Las Vegas. Between the ranks of baskets, a braided vein of black sludge began running where the river should have been, raging with occasional floods. Nearby businesses, including a dog groomer and a maternity store, fortified their doorways with sandbags.
Trujillo and his staff spent that time staying up late, listening to walkie talkies and watching rain gauges, praying the gullies above town wouldn’t overflow and send more debris down towards town. They also began having meetings about how the fire would affect the city’s drinking water.
In the beginning, City Manager Leo Maestas said the fire “played with everyone’s emotions,” sometimes veering towards the Gallinas watershed, sometimes away. But ultimately, the fire came right down to the banks of the river. By August, the city’s diversion dam was surrounded by the burn scar, and the river was running black and brown with ash. Maestas called it “Willy Wonka’s chocolate river”.
Las Vegas relies on the Gallinas River for 90% of its drinking water. With the river water polluted, the city could only rely on what they had already stored in their reservoirs. And even that was ultimately compromised.
In May, a clot of debris became congested against the six bulwarks of an overpassing bridge on a canal near Pederson reservoir, forcing contaminated water to jump the canal and spill into the reservoir’s previously untainted water supply. Around the same time, floodwaters passed through gaps in hundred-year-old diversion gates that bring water into Storrie Lake, where the city of Las Vegas has a storage right for drinking water. That meant two of the city’s three drinking water sources were rendered unusable.
By July 29, the city’s only remaining bank of drinking water was Bradner Reservoir, a small artificial lake which, at the time, had been mostly drained for maintenance operations. As a result, the city of Las Vegas was faced with a critical deadline. Unless urgent action was taken, the town would run out of water in 50 days.
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Now, a year later, the city has installed a new filter at Storrie Lake, enabling them to use its water for drinking. The city is also now building a whole new water treatment plant that can handle higher levels of turbidity. And they’re investing in a greywater treatment plant as well, which will allow them to maximize the use of their limited water resources.
The city is using federal aid money to complete the projects. In all, the federal government has designated a total of nearly $4 billion for relief and recovery efforts addressing the Hermits Peak/Calf Canyon Fire.
City staff expect the new water treatment plant will take five or six years to plan and build. FEMA says it will probably keep its compensation office in Las Vegas open for about the same time. And even after that, experts have told Trujillo it could be ten years before water quality in the Gallinas River returns to normal.
If he wins his next election, Trujillo will be in office for nearly all of that process. And if he wins again after that, he will likely oversee its completion. If it were up to him, parts of that process would be happening a lot faster.
“I just think FEMA is acting like this is their first emergency they've ever dealt with, you know? They’re not ready for primetime. I'm sorry,” he laughed.
Trujillo himself has had to put in requests for FEMA compensation for his Pendaries house and the family cabin he lost in Gallinas.
“The claims process is just atrocious … you fill out this form, then you have to come back and fill that form, and then they request this form, and then they mail you this. And so you fill this out, and then you take it back … etc,” Trujillo said. He said he can’t imagine what it’s like for people who lost their main homes and need that compensation to rebuild.
In the meantime, he says he is continuing to take turns with his family caring for his 94-year-old father, and he continues to work an administrative job at the psychiatric hospital, which he says is his retirement plan. The mayor’s salary is only $600 per month.
He also has to tend to the other, non-disaster-related aspects of running a town. Trujillo said the city has over $20 million in non-disaster-related projects going on, from paving streets to building a new children’s park.
With all these responsibilities, Trujillo says there has been no time for vacations, and little time to relax. At the time the fire started, Trujillo’s nephew invited him up for a visit at his lake house in Oregon, but Trujillo couldn’t do it. He mentioned how bad it looked when Ted Cruz took a vacation to Cancún during widespread blackouts in Texas. Even a year later, amidst all the stress of dealing with nonstop crisis, Trujillo has not taken that vacation. Instead, he drives 65 miles to the town of Santa Rosa every weekend, where he submerges himself in a sapphire blue cenote called the “Blue Hole”.
“That's my little refuge … I'll go down there on a Sunday and just jump in there and stay in there for a while,” he said. “I jump in rivers and in lakes. I always have a towel and a little kit in my truck. I’ve never said no to a river, you know. Head-first in the river, it's always just been me. And I don't know where that comes from.”
Trujillo used to relax in a swimming hole he built on a creek by his family cabin, but the fire contaminated it.
“I wouldn’t swim in there. I think they're concerned about not only the ash, the debris from the fire, but also the chemicals. You know, there was fire retardant on everything that they used. There were homes that burned that may have had asbestos or some kind of plastic and chemicals,” Trujillo said.
Business owners put up signs thanking fire crews in downtown Las Vegas. Austin Corona (July, 2022)
Charred forests in the Pecos Wilderness west of Las Vegas. Austin Corona (July, 2022)
Charred forests in the Pecos Wilderness west of Las Vegas. Austin Corona (July, 2022)
Evidence of a debris flow that crossed a road near the town of Mora, New Mexico. Austin Corona (July, 2022)
Mud piles up around a mobile home and a car in Holman, New Mexico. Austin Corona (July, 2022)
Sandbags left in front of a business in downtown Las Vegas, by the Gallinas River. Austin Corona (July, 2022)
Human and raccoon tracks in ashy sludge that now coats the path of the Gallinas River in downtown Las Vegas. Austin Corona (July, 2022)
Storrie Lake, where the City of Las Vegas has a storage right for drinking water. The lake was contaminated by floods in June of 2022. Austin Corona (July, 2022)
Las Vegas City Manager Leo Maestas (right) meets with contractors at the site where Las Vegas installed a new water filtration system for drinking water from Storrie Lake. Austin Corona (July, 2022)
The City of Las Vegas’s diversion dam on the Gallinas River. A mass of ash and mud rises out of the river above the dam. Charred trees on the hillside show how the Hermits Peak/Calf Canyon Fire came right down to the water’s edge. Austin Corona (July, 2022)
Nonetheless, Trujillo says there have been some thrilling aspects to being a mayor in crisis time. He said it’s “pretty cool” to be the mayor of a small town, but it’s something else when you get to appear on all the national news networks while doing it. Trujillo has appeared in coverage from CNN, ABC, Reuters and the New York Times, not to mention local and state outlets. And he has also talked with political bigwigs. He shook President Biden’s hand when he made the first presidential visit to Santa Fe, New Mexico, in twenty years. Biden later circled over Hermits Peak on Air Force One to see the fire damage. Trujillo also sat at a table with former Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi as she visited with fire victims during a trip through the state. And Governor Lujan Grisham and her entire cabinet traveled to Las Vegas in the spring of 2022. Trujillo said he believes it was the first time an entire gubernatorial cabinet had visited any town in New Mexico.
More important than the photo ops, though, have been the opportunities for Trujillo to serve his community in a time of need: “I think this is a weird thing to say, but I'm glad I was here at the worst time. Yeah, I think I was able to help the community a lot more in a different way because of these crises. It feels good that I was able to be here at a very difficult time” Trujillo said.
This is a community Trujillo knows – it is his community. Before he was mayor, he worked decades in his compliance and accreditation job with the psychiatric hospital. He got his bachelor’s degree in political science and his master’s degree in social work both from New Mexico Highlands University, located in Las Vegas. He earned his high school diploma from West Las Vegas High School. He grew up in a family with ten brothers and sisters in an old adobe house on South Pacific Street (Las Vegas). And he now lives only two houses down. All told, Trujillo has spent his entire life in Las Vegas.
“My parents were really generous, so we all had friends over,” Trujillo said. “Sometimes there would be, you know, 18 people or 20 people around the table. It was no big deal. The community, you know?”
Trujillo’s mother served as a county treasurer. One of his brothers was on the local school board. Another is a county commissioner. Another is the municipal judge who swore him in at the beginning of his term.
There are six businesses with “Trujillo” in their title in the Las Vegas area, and the name appears over a hundred times in the local White Pages phonebook (these folks are not all necessarily related).
And Trujillo says that the community has stood with him through all the mayhem.
“I'm sure there are critics out there who don’t like the way we handled things, but for the most part, people have been very kind to me and very respectful to me,” Trujillo said.
It is worth mentioning that this largely Catholic community elected an openly gay man as their mayor. Trujillo commonly carries a water bottle with a pride sticker on it through City Hall.
“I have two aunts that were Catholic nuns, so that Catholic thing is really strong. I was told I was gonna go to hell since sixth grade. And here I am, it’s literally raining ash. Dealing with all this. This might be hell, who knows? But you know, I got married about two years ago, and my dad was totally cool. You know, like, no big deal. He was choking up,” Trujillo said. “I haven't had any negative remarks. I mean, not to my face. I'm sure there are remarks, but not to my face. I've never been approached. But I think it's in the way that I conduct myself too. I don't make a point of it.”
Hermits Peak, as seen from a hill in West Las Vegas. Austin Corona (July, 2022)
A western wear shop on Bridge Street in Las Vegas. Scenes for the Coen Brothers’ 2007 film ‘No Country for Old Men’ were shot in front of, and inside, this shop. Austin Corona (July, 2022)
A mural next to Las Vegas’s Gallinas River Park, which runs along the now muddy trail of the Gallinas River in downtown. Austin Corona (July, 2022)
“Welcome Friends,” written in the entryway of Charlie’s Spic and Span Cafe in downtown Las Vegas. Austin Corona (July, 2022)
Bridge Street, Las Vegas, New Mexico. Austin Corona (July, 2022)
A billboard on highway 518 north of Las Vegas. Austin Corona (July, 2022)
In the future, Trujillo said the community will endure because its people are tough. When it came to the water shortage, he said the community’s toughness was an asset. Las Vegas residents are accustomed to some degree of water restrictions. In the last two decades, with historic drought and aridification plaguing the southwest, Trujillo said the community has lived consistently under some stage of water conservation measures.
“So our citizens know how to save water. Man, this extra push was big. It was a big ask. But we did it. We got through that crisis because our citizens really get it,” Trujillo said.
Ironically, the silver lining of this disaster may be the funding for a new greywater plant, which will ultimately provide more water supply for the city.
“We'll always have a fresh supply of water for the city. So that's fixing a huge problem that has plagued this community for centuries,” Trujillo said.
Nonetheless, Trujillo knows the community will continue to live with trauma from this crisis. A year ago, in the midst of the water crisis, he said he was worried about the lasting psychological effects the fire would have on community members.
“I've seen it as a social worker, where grief is stored and how it's stored, and what it does to people. And what happens is that other social problems pop up, like chemical dependency, and poverty and everything else that goes with it. So it's just, it's a huge impact and a huge ripple effect on the entire community,” Trujillo said.
This year, when a small fire started in nearby Mora County, Trujillo said the community’s reaction was intense.
“There was a fire recently, in Mora, and the residents just went completely crazy, you know, calling people and… I mean it was huge. So, people are very, very traumatized from this. And it's still very fresh. It's just a year ago … They're not in a better place, you know, the people who lost everything. So, yeah, so it's very fresh, people are still traumatized. People are still injured by this whole thing,” Trujillo said.
I cannot help but mention the daughter of City Manager Leo Maestas, a seven-year-old girl who recovered from cancer only months before her school shut down due to COVID. That was three years she went without being able to attend school with her friends. And when the pandemic happened, she lost time with her father too. Maestas led San Miguel County’s pandemic response for a year before joining the City of Las Vegas, and then began the long nights of watching for flooding in the canyons above town.
Trujillo says Maestas has continued working hard hours since the floods: “He's one of the hardest working people I know.”
For Trujillo himself, there hasn’t really been time to deal with all the emotions and grief after losing the site of beloved childhood memories and leading the city through so much destruction and fear. During the fire, Trujillo said he relied on support from a men’s group he attended every week. At one of those meetings, he said he told the other group members he hadn’t had any time to grieve after losing that special place.
“It’s just boom, boom, boom, one crisis after another,” he said at that time.
Ever since they burned, Trujillo said he has been emotionally unable to visit the sites of his old family cabin or his house in Pendaries.
“It's just very traumatic, you know, and people don't realize that sometimes it's not just a structure. It's a building that means a lot more and holds a bigger place in your heart than just a bunch of bricks and mortar” Trujillo said.
Going forward, Trujillo says he will continue to balance the personal impacts of Las Vegas’s crises with his commitments to his job and his community.
“It requires a certain person to be able to balance and deal with everything. But you know, this has been a good lesson. This first term has been a good lesson on how to balance all that,” he said.
He said it’s possible he will decide not to run for another term, but so far, he has managed to handle everything pretty well, even if it requires diving into cold water every so often to decompress.