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Senator Domenici's legacy will be felt across New Mexico years after he leaves office

Landmark New Mexicans

By James W. Brosnan
Friday, December 7, 2007

Pete Domenici listens to testimony during a 1997 hearing. He has served on the Budget, Indian Affairs, Energy and Appropriations committees and carved a legislative niche that will be apparent for decades to come. "Out of all the elected officials in the 95 years that New Mexico has been a state, Domenici has to overshadow everyone because of the depth and breadth of the issues he's been involved with," says Sherman McCorkle, a longtime supporter.

Joe Marquette/Associated Press file

Pete Domenici listens to testimony during a 1997 hearing. He has served on the Budget, Indian Affairs, Energy and Appropriations committees and carved a legislative niche that will be apparent for decades to come. "Out of all the elected officials in the 95 years that New Mexico has been a state, Domenici has to overshadow everyone because of the depth and breadth of the issues he's been involved with," says Sherman McCorkle, a longtime supporter.

Sen. Pete Domenici, shaking hands with President Reagan in the 1980s, was a powerful influence on the Senate Budget Committee.

Bill Fitz-Patrick/The White House

Sen. Pete Domenici, shaking hands with President Reagan in the 1980s, was a powerful influence on the Senate Budget Committee.

Pete Domenici — hugging his wife, Nancy, at a news conference announcing his impending retirement — brings his U.S. Senate career to a close as perhaps the most influential politician in New Mexico history. His ripple effect, critics and supporters agree, is legendary.

Photo by Craig FritzTribune

Tribune

Pete Domenici — hugging his wife, Nancy, at a news conference announcing his impending retirement — brings his U.S. Senate career to a close as perhaps the most influential politician in New Mexico history. His ripple effect, critics and supporters agree, is legendary.

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WASHINGTON — First, the math.

Always, the math.

Pete Domenici has served longer — nearly 35 years — than any of the other 15 U.S. senators in New Mexico history.

He has cast more votes — 13,442 — than all but six of the 1,896 men and women from every state who have served in the U.S. Senate.

But Domenici's impact on New Mexico is not about a cold, hard calculation — years or votes or longevity or statistics.

It's about influence.

And from influence, action.

From a bomb factory at Los Alamos to a border crossing near Las Cruces, friends and critics alike acknowledge Domenici has had a profound effect on the way New Mexicans work and live every single day.

That impact, they add, will be here long after the Albuquerque Republican gives way to a successor in January 2009.

"Out of all the elected officials in the 95 years that New Mexico has been a state, Domenici has to overshadow everyone because of the depth and breadth of the issues he's been involved with," says Sherman McCorkle, president of Technology Ventures Corp. in Albuquerque and chairman of the Kirtland Partnership Committee.

Sometimes courtly, sometimes cantankerous, Domenici grasped the reality of the federal government in the late 20th century — follow the money, indeed — but added his own twist.

He directed the money. It was a talent, a gift, and sometimes a cudgel. But it worked very well for the state he called home.

Since 1981, when the independent Tax Foundation began tracking tax burdens by state, New Mexico has ranked first in a calculation of the amount of federal spending received versus federal taxes paid per capita.

In 1981 the ratio was $1.84 received for every $1 paid in taxes, ($3,752 to $2,064 per person). As of 2005, the ratio grew to $2.03 received for every $1 paid in taxes ($10,733 to $5,153).

Those numbers, experts say, are smudged with Domenici's fingerprints.

Sure, New Mexico already had two national laboratories, four major military bases, 19 pueblos, two American Indian reservations and millions of acres of land controlled by federal agencies when Domenici came to the Senate in 1973. But his powerful committee assignments, combined with a wonky passion for legislation, helped create a funding reality New Mexico had never enjoyed.

"I knew that my life in public service would never be a life of ease and never be a life of plenty because I would never be rich," Domenici says today. "But it would be a job with plenty to do because I was excitable and excited — and excited when I was shown things that could be that weren't, or things that ought to be but (that) we weren't doing.

"As a result I ended up being everywhere."

Here are just a few of the stories about how Domenici used his power — both real and perceived — by people who worked with him in New Mexico:

Saving Kirtland Air Force Base

Albuquerque was shocked in 1995 when the Defense Department proposed closing Kirtland Air Force Base, but the city had nothing to fear by the time the base closing commission met.

McCorkle said Domenici invited Defense Secretary William Perry to his office and told him the Pentagon's projected savings from closing Kirtland were wrong.

Perry's response: Prove it.

With Domenici's help, city leaders did the math, eventually writing a letter that, indeed, showed that closing Kirtland would be more expensive than sparing it.

Kirtland moved off the list.

Same story, 10 years later: Cannon Air Force Base in Clovis was targeted for closure in the 2005 base closures but instead was converted from an F-16 fighter base to a special operations wing with tilt-rotor Ospreys and other special aircraft.

The labs

The prospect of major budget cuts and the certainty of workforce reductions at Los Alamos National Laboratory and Sandia National Laboratories are already the subject of debate among Domenici's would-be successors.

But this is not the first time their future was put into question.

As the Soviet Union weakened and finally collapsed in 1991 many questioned the need for two nuclear weapons design laboratories, Los Alamos and Lawrence Livermore in California.

Sig Hecker, director at Los Alamos from 1986 through 1997, said it was Domenici who came up with the new mission for the labs in concert with Clinton Administration assistant secretary of energy for defense programs, Victor Reis.

The mission was "stockpile stewardship," a means of ensuring the continued viability of a nuclear weapons design and production program while at the same time guaranteeing that the existing weapons would continue to work without live testing of nuclear bombs.

Hecker said Domenici made sure that Los Alamos, Sandia and Livermore all got a piece of the stockpile stewardship program and major new investments in high-tech machines.

And when Sens. Richard Lugar, an Indiana Republican, and Sam Nunn, a Georgia Democrat, proposed a program to help the Soviet Union and its former satellites protect their bombs from terrorists, Domenici stepped in to expand the program to chemical weapons and have the labs play a role in the nonproliferation efforts, says Hecker.

"In addition to what some people are saying as having saved Los Alamos, he also is in my opinion one of the great American statesmen and one of the most influential senators in the last 30 years," Hecker adds.

Such platitudes are not universal. One critic of the nuclear weapons program says Domenici "coddled" the labs.

Jay Coughlan, executive director of Nuclear Watch of New Mexico, adds: "In my view, Domenici did the state and the nation a disservice by keeping the labs, particularly Los Alamos, so focused on nuclear weapons."

Hecker responds that Domenici didn't just support weapons programs, noting the senator's authoring legislation to set up a center at Los Alamos that began the mapping of the human genome.

"What people don't understand is that Senator Domenici is a champion of science and technology in this country. It happens that in his territory there is a significant amount of science, but first and foremost he is a champion of science and technology," Hecker says.

For his part, Domenici simply describes himself as "a sucker for science."

It shows. When Domenici took office, New Mexico was getting 3 percent of all federal research dollars at that point, according to the National Science Foundation. By 2001 the state's share had climbed to 5.3 percent. Only California, Maryland and Massachusetts got a larger cut of the federal science dollar.

From think tank to the street

Domenici and Sen. Jeff Bingaman, a Silver City Democrat, made a change in federal law that has led to dozens of new technology ventures in Albuquerque, said McCorkle.

The change allowed national laboratories to patent their discoveries and license them for production to private industries. McCorkle says this has been especially helpful to New Mexico because Sandia is the hands-on engineering laboratory.

Phil Eaton, vice president emeritus of the University of New Mexico Center for Health Sciences, tells of another initiative that was solely Domenici's initiative.

At Los Alamos, Domenici saw a brain-scan technology, magnetic encephalography, which can map when there is activity in parts of the brain.

"It was obvious to the senator that something had to be done to see how this could affect an outcome for treatment," said Eaton.

Domenici came up with a proposal and $10 million a year in funding to link researchers at Harvard, the University of Minnesota and UNM Health Sciences into a joint research project using magnetic encephalography. It's now called the Mind Network.

"It's an enormous stimulus to make a difference in all kinds of illnesses of the brain," says Eaton.

"I don't think there was anything about the Mind Network that was ever perceived as having anything to do with getting re-elected. It was just an agenda he believed in and knew how to make happen for the good of the country."

Helping women start a business

Using a federal grant program aimed at small-business owners who are women, WESST Corp. has assisted 1,950 businesses, claiming to help create about 2,800 jobs.

Agnes Noonan, the group's executive director, said that as chairman of the Budget Committee Domenici protected the federal funding program from threatened cuts under Presidents Reagan, George H.W. Bush and Clinton. She said Domenici's background as a grocer helped him understand the importance of retailers and small businesses.

"Senator Domenici was kind of leading the charge long before it became politically fashionable to say you're in support of women business owners," says Noonan.

Hikers versus ranchers

Jim O'Donnell, northern director for the New Mexico Wilderness Alliance, credits Domenici with generally being supportive of wilderness designations, particularly early in his Senate career.

"He had a really positive impact. Then it got to the point 10 to 15 years ago when his attitude toward conservation changed abruptly and dramatically," O'Donnell says. "I still don't understand where that came from."

O'Donnell points to Domenici's slowness to endorse legislation to protect the Valle Vidal or sponsor new wilderness bills in the Senate.

Mike Casabonne, president of the New Mexico Public Lands Council, which represents ranchers, praises Domenici for standing up for their interests against environmentalists and developers.

"We feel like we're a minority. There aren't many farmers and ranchers. Senator Domenici has helped us make our case to the other senators and representatives in Congress," says Casabonne.

Minnow vs. farmer

Minnow vs. Farmer could have been the title of a lawsuit when it looked like the Middle Rio Grande Conservancy District would be forced to choose between water for about 6,000 farmers in the Middle Rio Grande Valley or use its water to save the endangered silvery minnow — a tiny fish that few New Mexicans even knew existed.

Instead, the minnow became one of Domenici's great ideas — and great compromises.

Ed Hild, Domenici's legislative director for more than a decade, says the minnow was an example of Domenici's pragmatic approach to problems.

At first, in 2001, Domenici used an appropriations bill to block the diversion of San Juan-Chama river water that would have saved the fish. But Domenici later came up with the idea of moving the minnow to a more sustainable habitat upriver — and funding that notion with millions of dollars for a minnow sanctuary.

"As a result of Senator Domenici's intervention, we all worked together to save the minnow and to ensure that there would be adequate water for agriculture," says Subhas Shah, chief engineer for the district.

Shah points out another fact of life for bureaucrats in New Mexico who have sought Domenici's help.

"The senator has always been very demanding, expecting things to be done quickly and correctly. Over the years he has said nice things about me personally in public. But he has never hesitated to scold me when things were not going to expectations," Shah says.

Domenici makes no apologies.

"I didn't take any excuses," he says. "I'd say, 'We've got a screwup and it belongs to you people and I'm not going to take the blame so you're going to fix it.' "

Adds Hild: "He (Domenici) kinds of looks at it as, 'I just did a whole bunch up here to help you guys and you have to hold of your end of the deal.' "