Water Quality Control Commissioner Krista McWilliams starring in a video paid for and hosted on NMOGA's website in which she falsely claims there has never been any groundwater contamination from fracking.
On June 6th, 2024 New Energy Economy, Daniel Tso, Samuel Sage and 16 organizations opposed to produced water reuse and the associated risks of contamination of New Mexico land and waters filed complaints against Water Quality Control Commissioner Krista McWilliams at the New Mexico State Ethics Commission and a Joint Motion at the Water Quality Control Commission (WQCC) to request that she disqualify herself from consideration of the “Ground and Surface Water Protection – Supplemental Requirements for Water Reuse” (“Reuse Rule”), Case No. WQCC 23 - 84 (R), currently pending before the Water Quality Control Commission.
Today we filed a Notice to Supplement the Motion for Disqualification and the Ethics Complaint, New Energy Economy v. McWilliams, Case No. 2024-036, after new evidence was forwarded to New Energy Economy on July 1st, 2024. That evidence, a video in which Commissioner McWilliams acts as a poster girl for NMOGA in a promotional video, extols the virtues of fracking and falsely claims that in 50 years of the practice there have been no incidences of water contamination, was paid for and is still hosted by NMOGA on the NMOGA website here. NMOGA is a party to the WQCC case.
The Commissioner’s statement in the video that there have been no incidence of groundwater contamination in fifty years of fracking is not only patently false (See this 2016 EPA report), but McWilliams failure to recuse, her false statement at the outset of the Reuse Rule hearing that “I have no conflicts of interests, professional or otherwise,” and her response to the ethics complaint released today, in which she writes the complaint is “frivolous” and “unsubstantiated,” ignore the legal standard governing recusal, which requires disqualification for any activity that gives the appearance of impropriety or bias.
The evidence admitted today adds to the mountain of evidence detailed in the original complaint, in which we enumerated the conflicts at issue, including the fact that Commissioner McWilliams is currently the “Vice President of Operations Engineering,” for Logos Energy (“LOGOS”) and serves on the board of the Independent Petroleum Association of New Mexico (“IPA NM”), while her husband, Jay Paul McWilliams, serves as the CEO of LOGOS and served on the board of NMOGA, a party in the case, until recently. Commissioner McWilliams’ company, LOGOS, is directly engaged in the produced water reuse business and has publicly admitted that risks to the company include “ “new restrictions impacting LOGOS’s development activities, including restrictions on water sourcing and/or disposal, restrictions on LOGOS’s water business; and risks associated with the ownership and operations of LOGOS’s water and compression services.”
The Commissioner and her husband’s personal and financial ties to her company, their O&G associations (including with a party in the case), corresponding fiduciary duties, and the admission that rules restricting water sourcing and/or disposal threaten their company’s bottom line should be immediately disqualifying. The Commissioner’s public role as a spokesperson for NMOGA and her attempts to cleanse the image of oil and gas companies with false claims of industry care for New Mexico groundwater only add to that conclusion.
Krista McWilliams appears to stand for beauty and purity in NMOGA’s promotional video while her company, LOGOS, and the fracking industry are actually contaminating the Earth and water. The evidence admitted today exposes that she is in fact a profiteer for the fracking industry. Not only did she falsely claim to have no conflicts of interest and today denied the ethical violations alleged in her response to the complaint, she covers up for the harm that her fracking company, and the industry, are causing in New Mexico. Her attempts to cleanse the image of oil and gas have been exposed, as well as her obvious bias in this case.
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