Over 200 outdoor recreation businesses just asked Congress to pass the America the Beautiful Act — reauthorizing a fund that pays down the National Park Service's maintenance backlog using energy development revenue, not visitor fees. New Mexico already runs a fund built the same way, off the same industry, at a scale most states only dream of. This memo proposes New Mexico build its own version — the New Mexico Outdoor Legacy Fund Act — and names three ways to fund it, including a new one: an assessment on the AI and quantum computing investment the state is already courting.
Over 200 outdoor recreation businesses and trade associations — representing a $1.3 trillion national industry — sent a letter to Congressional leadership this month urging swift passage of the America the Beautiful Act before the August recess.[1] The bill reauthorizes and strengthens the National Parks and Public Land Legacy Restoration Fund (LRF), the mechanism created by the 2020 Great American Outdoors Act to pay down the National Park Service's deferred maintenance backlog — the same backlog Memo 021 cited at more than $22 billion.[2] It has 66 Senate cosponsors and passed both chambers' relevant committees with unanimous or near-unanimous bipartisan support.[3]
Memo 021 made the case that a nation shouldn't fund its parks by raising the price of admission to them. This is what it looks like when that case is already being made, in Washington, by the industry itself — and it points at something worth naming plainly, close to home.
The detail that makes the America the Beautiful Act relevant to Memo 021 isn't the bill's popularity. It's how the LRF is actually funded. Revenue for the fund comes from energy development on non-park, non-wilderness federal lands — oil, gas, coal, and other energy production — not from a single dollar of visitor fee revenue.[3] Under the original Great American Outdoors Act, that mechanism delivered roughly $1.9 billion a year to the parks, funding real, finished projects: the rehabilitation of Glacier National Park's Going-to-the-Sun Road, a replaced bridge over McDonald Creek, modernized water and wastewater systems.[4] It expired in 2025. This bill reauthorizes it through Fiscal Year 2031.[2]
That is the exact structure Memo 021 argued for: fund the backlog directly, from the resource wealth the public lands themselves help generate, and leave the price of walking through the gate alone. The America the Beautiful Act is proof that structure isn't a hypothetical — it's already law-in-progress, bipartisan, and something 200 businesses are actively fighting to keep alive right now.
The federal government is proving this exact model works, at national scale, with bipartisan support. New Mexico doesn't have to invent this playbook. It has to notice it already owns a copy.
New Mexico runs its own version of this mechanism, and it's not a small one. The New Mexico State Investment Council manages more than $68 billion across the state's permanent funds — one of the largest sovereign wealth funds in the country, built overwhelmingly from the same industry the federal LRF draws on. The Land Grant Permanent Fund alone holds roughly $37 billion, with oil and gas royalties on state trust land accounting for about 99% of what feeds it. The Severance Tax Permanent Fund holds another $12 billion, funded directly by severance taxes on oil, gas, and other resources extracted in the state.[5]
New Mexico has been running the America the Beautiful Act's core mechanism — energy revenue, converted into a permanent public asset — for longer than the federal government has, and at a scale most states can't approach. The question this memo is asking isn't whether New Mexico has the capital. It obviously does. It's whether any meaningful share of it has been pointed at the same problem the federal government just spent a bipartisan bill solving: the deferred maintenance and access gap in the public lands that same industry's revenue helped make possible in the first place.
This isn't a call to raid the Land Grant Permanent Fund. That fund exists under the federal Ferguson Act of 1898 and the 1910 Enabling Act, held in trust for 21 specifically named beneficiaries — the largest of which, the Permanent School Fund, receives roughly 88–90% of every distribution by formula.[5] Redirecting any of it isn't a legislative vote. It's a fight over a century-old federal trust obligation that New Mexico has no business reopening, and Memo 017 and the OR Cabinet Charter already made that same call explicitly when this question first came up in a different context.[6]
There's a separate question worth asking about that 88–90%, and it isn't about redirecting a dollar of it. New Mexico has ranked last in the nation for child wellbeing for four consecutive years, rising only to 49th in the most recent report — still last specifically on education and family measures.[8] That's a hard number to reconcile with a public school system already receiving over a billion dollars a year from the nation's third-largest sovereign wealth fund. Memo 021 made the case that the fortitude and comfort young people need in the outdoors used to transfer for free, inside a family, and that the chain has broken for a growing share of the newest generation — the fix has to start in kindergarten. If New Mexico's own school funding is already this large and outcomes are still this poor, it's a fair question whether some of that existing education investment should make room for outdoor education and teacher training as part of the answer — not a new fund, not new money, just a different use of dollars the state is already spending on the same students.
The fund that actually fits already exists, and it's already doing exactly this work — just at a fraction of the scale the moment calls for. The Conservation Legacy Permanent Fund is a $350 million trust the Legislature created in 2023 specifically for land, water, and outdoor recreation infrastructure, distributing through the Land of Enchantment Legacy Fund at roughly $12.5 million a year, administered by New Mexico's own Outdoor Recreation Division (ORD) — the same division Memo 017 argued deserves Cabinet status. It already funds the Outdoor Equity Fund and the Trails+ Grant.[7] It passed both legislative chambers with bipartisan support. There is a proven, working, popular vehicle already sitting exactly where this memo's argument points. It's just funded like a pilot program, not like a state with a $68 billion sovereign wealth fund actually believes in it.
$1.9 billion a year, nationally, from federal energy revenue, dedicated to park and public land maintenance.[4] $12.5 million a year, in New Mexico alone, from the state's own energy-revenue-built sovereign wealth fund, dedicated to the equivalent mission.[7] That is not a call for New Mexico to match the federal number dollar for dollar. What it is a fair comparison of is intent: whether a state sitting on one of the largest energy-revenue-built sovereign wealth funds in the country has made anything close to the same deliberate commitment the federal government is now making, using the same category of money, to the same category of problem. New Mexico's own State Parks Division carries 35 parks' worth of maintenance and access needs, per the OR Cabinet Charter's own accounting, and we do not know how much investment is needed for that backlog specifically. What isn't in question is the scale mismatch between a $68 billion fund and a $12.5 million annual outdoor commitment drawn from it.[9]
This memo's answer to "how do we 10x the $12.5 million" isn't a single new tax or a single bigger appropriation. It's a named act — call it the New Mexico Outdoor Legacy Fund Act — that consolidates a growth mechanism already in motion, borrows a funding model other states have already proven, and adds one genuinely new stream this memo is proposing for the first time. Three streams, three different sources, one fund.
Stream 1 — Growth. The Conservation Legacy Permanent Fund didn't start at its current size. It launched in 2023 with a $100 million seed investment, and within about a year the Legislature grew it past $350 million through a second appropriation.[10] That's the fund's own two-year track record, not a hypothetical. Getting from $12.5 million a year to something closer to $125 million isn't primarily about raising the payout rate on the existing balance — it's about growing the fund's principal toward a size that can support that draw at a sustainable, endowment-style rate, likely in the neighborhood of $2–3 billion. This memo isn't laying out a precise funding schedule for reaching that number, but the source of the growth doesn't require a new mechanism: a larger, deliberate share of the state's existing oil-and-gas-derived revenue, directed at the fund's principal the way the Legislature already proved it would move in 2023 and 2024, repeated at the scale and pace the moment calls for. The scale isn't a stretch relative to what the State Investment Council already handles routinely — the SIC's total assets grew by $5.8 billion in a single recent fiscal year alone, from investment returns and continuing oil-and-gas inflows compounding on top of each other, with no new legislation required to produce that growth.[13] A $2–3 billion target for the outdoors is smaller than one year of the fund's own organic growth, sustained over several years instead of demanded all at once.
New Mexico has already shown it's comfortable moving at this scale for a priority it decided mattered: $185 million of the SIC's own sovereign wealth fund went to quantum computing market development, committed inside a year. That wasn't treated as reckless or unaffordable — it was treated as an investment in the state's future economy, and the state made it. The outdoors deserves the same comfort level, not a smaller one. If New Mexico can find nine figures for a bet on quantum computing's future market position, it can find the same for the outdoors that already generates $3.6 billion and 31,000 jobs today, with a documented sector story instead of a projection. This isn't a request to treat the outdoors as charity while treating quantum as investment. Both are investments. New Mexico should fund them like it believes that.
Stream 2 — An Outdoor Recreation Sales Tax. New Mexico doesn't have to invent this model; it has to adopt one already running in three other states. Texas's Sporting Goods Sales Tax generates roughly $168.5 million a year, constitutionally dedicated to Texas Parks and Wildlife. Georgia's 2018 Outdoor Stewardship Act dedicates 75% of the state's sales and use tax on outdoor recreation equipment to land conservation and park stewardship. Missouri's Conservation Sales Tax — one-eighth of one percent, statewide — has generated more than $100 million a year for wildlife and habitat conservation since 2012.[11] The OR Cabinet Charter already sketched a New Mexico version of this exact mechanism as its own funding stream. This Act is where that idea gets its name and its statutory home, instead of sitting as one line in a larger charter.
This stream also pays for itself in a way worth stating plainly. New Mexico State Parks restructured its fee schedule effective January 2025, specifically to raise an additional $4.8 million a year in revenue. The annual day-use pass rose from $40 to $75 for residents and $150 for nonresidents; the annual camping pass rose from $180 to $300 for residents and $600 for nonresidents; primitive camping rose from a flat $8 to $10 for residents and $15 for nonresidents.[14] That entire fee increase exists to close a $4.8 million gap. Missouri's conservation sales tax alone generates more than twenty times that every year from a tax most shoppers never notice at the register. A New Mexico outdoor recreation sales tax, even at modest Missouri-scale rates, doesn't just fund new investment — it's large enough to fully replace the revenue the 2025 fee increase was built to raise, and return New Mexico's own park fees to the pre-2025 schedule the state's own campers had grown used to. Fund the parks through a broad, dedicated tax on the gear people already buy to use them, not by making the gate itself more expensive every time the maintenance bill grows.
Stream 3 — An AI and Quantum Digital Impact Assessment. New Mexico is in the middle of actively courting the same wave of AI and quantum-computing capital investment playing out nationally — the data center economy Memo 020 covered through Project Jupiter in Doña Ana County, and a quantum computing push the state itself has already funded with real money: a $315 million initiative combining $185 million from the State Investment Council's own sovereign wealth fund, $60 million in federal support, and up to $120 million in matching DARPA funds, anchored around Sandia and Los Alamos National Laboratories and a new Albuquerque quantum network hub.[12] New Mexico has already shown it will direct a nine-figure slice of its sovereign wealth fund at a single emerging-technology bet, on a timeline of months, when the state decided the priority mattered enough. The instinct this memo has been asking for isn't hypothetical. It's already been exercised — just never yet pointed at the outdoors.
The proposal: a dedicated assessment on AI, data center, and quantum computing capital investment and state incentive packages, directed to the New Mexico Outdoor Legacy Fund. The mechanism doesn't require new enabling statute to get started — New Mexico's existing Local Economic Development Act already uses project participation agreements with clawback provisions for companies accepting state incentives, the same paperwork structure the OR Cabinet Charter already proposed attaching its own Outdoor Products Checkoff to.[6] A data center or quantum-sector company accepting a state incentive package agrees to the assessment as a condition of the deal. This is a proposal sketch, undeveloped past what's outlined here and not yet before the Legislature in any form — the point this entire memo series tries to hold itself to. But the logic isn't a stretch: New Mexico already taxes the extraction of one finite resource, oil and gas, to build a permanent public asset. A parallel logic applies to a new industry consuming the state's land, power, and water at scale to build data centers and quantum infrastructure — directing a share of that investment toward the outdoors the same industry's footprint quietly competes with for space and power.
There's a reason this stream matters beyond the dollars it could raise. New Mexico is investing real, serious money in the digital future — $315 million into quantum computing, a data center economy Memo 020 already covered through Project Jupiter, a state agency actively courting more of both. None of that is wrong. But it is lopsided, and the imbalance isn't cosmetic. The digital world is getting a deliberate, well-funded bet on where the next economy is headed. The analog world — the physical, outdoor, place-based half of a person's life — is getting $12.5 million a year and whatever's left over. A state doesn't actually get to choose only one. People still live in bodies, in a specific place, breathing specific air, walking specific trails. Analog isn't the thing the digital economy is replacing. It's the counterweight that keeps a person, and a state, from tipping entirely into a screen.
That imbalance is sharper, not softer, once New Mexico's own education numbers enter the picture. A quantum computing sector needs a narrow, highly specialized pipeline of graduates — advanced math, physics, engineering — flowing out of a school system that already ranks last in the nation for child wellbeing and education, four years running.[8]
Most New Mexico high schoolers are not going to be that pipeline, through no fault of their own, and building an entire growth strategy around an industry that only a small slice of the state's graduates will ever be positioned to enter doesn't reach the rest of them.
The outdoor economy asks something different of a graduate — not a physics degree, a willingness to work outside, guide, build, maintain, host. It's already a $3.6 billion sector employing 31,000 people today, open to a far wider range of the students this state is currently failing to prepare for anything narrower. A dollar invested in the analog world doesn't just balance the ledger against the digital one. For the graduate quantum computing was never going to reach, it may do more for their actual quality of life than a dollar invested in the industry built for someone else's kid.
New Mexico didn't wait for the rest of the country before creating its Outdoor Recreation Division in 2019, and it didn't wait for a federal blueprint before building the Conservation Legacy Permanent Fund in 2023, or before committing $185 million of its own sovereign wealth fund to quantum computing in 2025. It shouldn't need a federal bill to justify an Outdoor Legacy Fund Act now — but if it takes one, the bill just passed committee with unanimous bipartisan support. The precedent, and the political will, are no longer hypothetical. New Mexico has already shown both. It just hasn't aimed either at its own outdoors yet.
The federal government is about to prove that energy revenue can rebuild a park system without raising the price of admission. New Mexico already has the fund. It just hasn't made the same choice with it yet.
— Mike Isaacs
Founder, Tymmber Outdoor
Sierra County, New Mexico · Nullius in Verba