Rep. Vasquez, Secretary Buttigieg visit NMSU

U.S. Rep. Gabe Vasquez of New Mexico’s District 2 came to Las Cruces Wednesday, April 5, along with U.S. Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg and U.S. Rep. Nanette Barragan of California.

The three met at New Mexico State University’s Corbett Center auditorium, along with NMSU Chancellor Dan Arvizu and four NMSU engineering students to discuss issues of transportation, infrastructure and workforce in New Mexico and the United States.

“I literally wouldn’t exist if it weren’t for this university,” Buttigieg said.

He went on to tell the story of how his father, Joseph Buttigieg, an immigrant from Malta, took a teaching job at NMSU. The elder Buttigieg met another junior faculty member named Anne Montgomery, who was from Indiana but had grown up in El Paso. Before long, they were in Anne’s parents’ living room, getting married. Joseph’s naturalization papers were drafted in Doña Ana County.

Wednesday’s visit was the younger Buttigieg’s first visit to his origins, so to speak.

The four NMSU students were Jonah Madrid, a mechanical and aerospace engineering student from Hatch; Gregory Gonzales, a civil engineering student from Tularosa; Amelia Marmalejo, a geotechnical engineering student from Las Cruces; and Noah Madrigal, a civil engineering master’s student from Nebraska.

Buttigieg, Vasquez and Barragan had spent the morning in Deming, and Buttigieg was in Albuquerque Tuesday, April 4.

At the Corbett Center, the students asked questions about aging infrastructure and the future of building plans. The visit was part of the Biden-Harris Administration’s “Investing in America” tour, learning the needs of different regions of the country, and discussing investments being made.

Meeting with the students, and young people, was important, Buttigieg said, because the country will need their expertise and capabilities to accomplish the plans.

“Getting the funds was hard enough, but delivering will be even harder,” Buttigieg said. “Recruiting will be a big part of that. We need to make sure we build out the human capital. It’s a limiting factor on this infrastructure work.”

Another reason for stopping at NMSU was so Barragan, the chair of Congress’s Hispanic Caucus, could visit the Hispanic-serving university. Arvizu said that to qualify as a Hispanic-serving institution, the student body must be at least 20 percent Hispanic. At NMSU, Arvizu said, the percentage is 62.

Barragan said the current caucus, which has 42 members, including Vasquez, is the largest it’s ever been.

Buttigieg, who met with Tuesday with New Mexico’s U.S. senators Ben Ray Lujan and Martin Heinrich, as well as U.S. Rep. Melanie Stanbury, had praise for them, as well as Vasquez and U.S. Rep. Teresa Leger Fernandez.

“You are well served in New Mexico by a very energetic Congressional delegation,” Buttigieg said.

While in Las Cruces, Buttigieg also announced the City of Las Cruces has been awarded a $10 million grant from the U.S. Department of Transportation and its Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration (PHMSA) to improve and modernize natural gas distribution lines in the city.

“This funding to modernize our gas pipelines will help protect residents from dangerous leaks, create good-paying jobs, and reduce methane emissions in communities across the nation, particularly in rural and underserved areas,” Buttigieg said.

Las Cruces is one of more than 20 U.S. communities to receive NGDISM grant funding.

The grants are projected to create hundreds of jobs in rural and urban communities across the U.S. Grant funding recipients, like Las Cruces, will repair, replace, or rehabilitate nearly 270 miles of pipe, which is expected to reduce methane emissions by approximately 212 metric tons annually.