Area blogger makes the paper

Image of scrawny old man by Nathan Burton.

During my private discussion with the community coalition's lawyer she asked me why i didn't act on this in November and i told her that i was duped by NMDOT then became frustrated with the magical thinking among most of the community members. She also encouraged me to contact the US Attorney for the District of New Mexico with my concerns about the likely tribal government conspiracy to extort LOBCO and other landowners.

Santa Fe New Mexican journalist, Cormac Dodd used several of interested party's articles to write his piece but chose not to quote its author or include attribution despite an hour-long interview and an entire paper trail but an aging writer did get a couple pictures in the paper.

The closure also would leave the community — one full of solar-powered homes amid rugged but scenic terrain, where New Mexico jazz musician Arlen Asher once lived and where Sam Peckinpah shot Convoy — without critical services, including firefighters and emergency medical responders, residents said. [Santa Fe County community says Santo Domingo Pueblo plans to close major access road]

MOU materials: a solution to preserving public access over the Galisteo Dam Road

The Galisteo Dam was completed in 1970 by the US Army Corps of Engineers and built solely for flood control and sediment impoundment on the Rio Galisteo because of its long history of violent floods including one that wiped out the Kewa or Santo Domingo Pueblo. To accommodate the dam project both the Pueblo and main line of the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe railroad were relocated and a newer rail bed serves Amtrak's Southwest Chief and the New Mexico Rail Runner. 

Sam Peckinpah shot a bunch of scenes for the 1978 film Convoy out here but the Corps has long since abandoned responsibility for the dam road's maintenance and blocked access to a recreation area at the dam in 2018. In research for its 2024 Master Plan the Corps found trespassing cattle were the most significant impact on the Galisteo Dam. 

In July 2010, the federal government returned 310 acres of land to the Kewa Pueblo originally condemned by the Corps decades after the dam's completion. USACE officially determined this specific parcel was in excess of its active operational needs so a transfer solidified the Pueblo's boundaries but surrounded several pre-existing private tracts with tribal land. While the transfer successfully solidified the outer boundaries of the Kewa Pueblo, it created a complex "checkerboard" property map. Because several private tracts of land had already been established in the area before the 2010 transfer, the return of the surrounding federal parcel effectively landlocked private real estate, leaving some virtually encircled by sovereign tribal land. 

The 2012 trust action was reviewed then the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) action published in the Federal Register and specifically states that existing rights-of-way and easements of record remain in place and the memorandum of understanding or MOU with Santa Fe County for a Rural Addressing network with the dam road as Mile Zero means a record exists.

The Specific Target: Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) Title Status Reports (TSR) and the formal boundary description appendices of the Santo Domingo Pueblo Claims Settlement Act of 2000. 

What it Shows: The federal "Grants of Easement" that preserve public access over tribal trust territory. These notes trace the "existing public ROW" and confirm how the trust land boundaries interact with highway infrastructure. 

How to Get It: Contact the Realty Officer at the BIA Southern Pueblos Agency in Albuquerque (505-563-3680). Request the Title Status Report and underlying easement deeds for Township 15 North, Ranges 6 and 7 East. 

Based on the principles of federal Indian law and property encumbrances, here is the breakdown of the terms and legal effects of the 2012 Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) Trust Action regarding the Galisteo Dam road Right-of-Way (ROW).

Administrative Order: The publication of the trust acquisition in the Federal Register creates a permanent, legally binding administrative record. 

Preservation of Rights: This action explicitly protects existing infrastructure rights, ensuring that the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (USACE) retains full operational and maintenance access to the Galisteo Dam. 

Access Guarantees: Local resident ingress and egress rights over the designated road are legally preserved and cannot be unilaterally terminated by the tribe. 

Title Encumbrance: The BIA accepts land into trust status subject to all existing valid rights-of-way, easements, and liens. The federal government does not wipe the title clean when taking land into trust.  

Kewa Pueblo Acceptance: The Kewa Pueblo (Santo Domingo Pueblo) took beneficial ownership of the land with the explicit legal condition that the Galisteo Dam road ROW remains intact, valid, and enforceable.

Legislative Carve-Outs include the leverage of federal representatives to introduce specific Acts of Congress or force a permanent access easement via the ongoing Galisteo Dam Master Plan updates.  

Red Rock Road is an unpaved, gravel and caliche mostly two-track trail on private ground connecting NM-14 to NM-16 over a remote and historic mesa in Santa Fe County. About five miles long, it dead ends where Paseo Sudeste and Sendero de Toho meet and after two miles of slightly better roads join Camino Cerro Chato and another three miles to 14. Now add at least three more miles for the people at the end of Baja Waldo.

The adjacent area, often locally referred to as part of a Galisteo Dam neighborhood comprises about 29 remote households divided between Red Rock Road and Baja Waldo Road many of whom have occupied these off-grid in-holdings for over 30 years believing they had prescriptive easements assigned to the Corps' right of way over the Galisteo Dam Crest Road. Any closure of the dam road would be catastrophic for the people living on Baja Waldo, which is an arguably more horrible road than Red Rock is. 

So, the foundational goal of one plan is to formally convert disputed tracks into explicitly defined public roads. This is achieved by granting long-term rights-of-way either to Santa Fe County or directly to the BIA. Santa Fe County routinely works with the BIA and local Pueblos to survey, secure, and maintain long-term rights-of-way (often 99-year agreements) so regional historic tracks and access roads remain designated as public and stay integrated into tribal transportation inventories. By legally formalizing the easement where private driveways cross Pueblo land, one plan can be designed to satisfy title companies, allowing residents to firmly secure insurable access to their homes. 

Under standard Pueblo road settlements in Santa Fe County, once a right-of-way is granted by the Secretary of the Interior, a Road Maintenance Agreement (RMA) is executed. The County takes over regular maintenance of the road surface to an agreed level of service. However, the Pueblo retains sovereign authority over the surrounding land, meaning the County is not responsible for side fencing, private utilities, or ejecting trespassers from tribal land. In exchange for granting permanent easements, a Pueblo like Kewa ensures that strict boundaries are maintained to protect agricultural land and sacred sites. Non-pueblo traffic is strictly confined to the defined ribbon of the road easement and trespassing or veering off-trail onto tribal land remains strictly prohibited. 

Because Red Rock Road connects NM-14 to NM-16 across private tracts, Santa Fe County could attempt to condemn or formalize a public right-of-way along the unpaved portions that sit strictly on private ground, bypass tribal land where possible or negotiate a government-to-government infrastructure agreement with the Pueblo. 

Any sudden decision by the Pueblo to completely block historical access routes can be legally challenged as a willful, arbitrary, and capricious action because residents' life-safety access is fundamentally altered by federal land returns and shutting down routes without adequate review or mitigation violates administrative notice standards. 

But, here’s Herb’s dealio: proposals for toll gates and an offer to the Pueblo to share a well on private property were rejected because the tribal council and governor don't want an agreement so they're forcing the community into federal court. 

And, unless lawyers are talking to lawyers it's just noise and the Baja Waldo/Red Rock Community Coalition doesn't seem to realize that the Pueblo wants as much property as they can acquire so the tribe will block the road then buy the LOBCO parcels at a steep discount and landowners will start falling like dominoes. 

And, because if all easements are untethered to the dam road as Mile Zero a landowner on Red Road could erect a toll gate.

And, after the Pueblo closes the road it's going to cost far more than what the coalition has in the bank to sue for a permanent injunction unless attorneys for the stakeholders agree on an MOU or file for a preliminary injunction before 30 September. 

And, because of my good faith negotiations with the Pueblo's attorney the other coalition officers are hoarding information and excluding me from community emails despite the fact that I am still an elected member of the board!

I've been saying this since November: negotiations favor the bold. 

This proposal has been widely shared with other members of the local media and is cross-posted at my Faceberg page.

interested party remembers Stan Adelstein

The late Republican former South Dakota State Senator Stan Adelstein's ancestors owned a store in Kadoka adjacent to the Pine Ridge Reservation and was vested in mining interests from gold to gravel on stolen treaty lands. But Stan Adelstein became ten times the man Denny Sanford was and screwed way fewer people. 

In 1997, I performed my first of six seasons as Mother Ginger in the Black Hills Dance Theater’s production of the Nutcracker; Vanessa Short Bull danced the Sugar Plum Fairy. One of her inspirations was Maria Tallchief, America’s first major prima ballerina who was an Osage Tribal member and danced the Sugar Plum Fairy. Stan Adelstein was always at our productions even sometimes backstage.

My only personal interaction with Mr. Adelstein was in 2005 after he bought the Black Hills Fort Pierre Roundhouse in Lead. After losing the Ross Compressor Building bid to the now-defunct outfit that was casting the giant presidential heads my business partners and I turned our attention to rehabilitating the roundhouse. I made an appointment with Stan at his office in Rapid City and met with him after spraying texture so I was coated from head to toe. But after tracking drywall mud all over the carpet he sold it to Dr. Duane and Phyllis Sander of Brookings in 2007. 

Fast forward to 2010 in response to journalist Kevin Woster showing sunlight on the hiring of South Dakota War College poo peddler Pat Powers to the office of incoming Republican Secretary of State Jason Gant, Sen. Adelstein, also a Republican, exposed the War College blog as likely defamatory and called for an investigation of Gant and the SOS's alleged collusion with former employee, Pat Powers to engineer an ALEC-inspired red map strategy. 

In June 2012, Sen. Stan Adelstein formally asked Attorney General Marty Jackley to investigate the arrangement. Adelstein and critical journalists highlighted that Powers was running a private political vendor business, the Dakota Campaign Store, while drawing a $65,000 taxpayer salary to run the state's neutral election systems. Adelstein openly blasted the partisan weaponization of the office and went so far as to ask the Attorney General if impeachment or gubernatorial removal was warranted. Amid the mounting legal pressure and scrutiny over potential conflicts of interest, Powers resigned from his state post in July 2012.

Stan Adelstein gave generously to every cause, paid countless school lunch arrears and his estate probably still will. 

Leo and Smith on the ocean

The Order of the Presentation opened St. Mary’s in Elkton where I attended grade school but the nuns were from the Dominican and Benedictine Orders, too. They were Commies who taught us Pete Seeger, Woody Guthrie and Puff, the Magic Dragon.

Dad

Born fifth of eight, 29 December, 1919, on a rock-strewn, hilltop farm in Richland Township, straddling a glacial river divide in Brookings County, South Dakota Lawrence Kurtz's first memory was of an open motorcar trip from Elkton to Chicago and back again with Grandmother and Grandfather over dirt roads.

Milking cows, burning corn cobs for heat, sleeping three to a bed, taking turns at the outhouse with diarrhea, trudging behind a horse-drawn plow for what must have seemed like years, walking (or, if Gus didn't need it that day, two to a horse) a mile and a half uphill both ways to Richland School #48 maybe through blowing and drifting snow at -20, day followed humble day.

For sixteen years his greatest joys were the Christmases when each child was presented with an orange. A favorite story recounted a day in 1935, when, in the worst of the Dirty Thirties, he and brother Kenneth walked across a completely dry basin that had formerly held Lake Benton.

To attend school in Elkton, Lawrence lived with Grandfather and Grandmother Kretsinger, a stern household at the home in which sister, Leslie and husband, Dave, live today. Although he recalled a mostly unpleasant experience, Lawrence excelled in track, played the kettle drums in band and earned the move to Brookings to attend his final year of high school then graduated to the Aggie course at South Dakota State College. His favorite treat in Brookings? Nick's, of course. Burgers were a nickel.

Since world war came as no surprise to most, enlistment represented an odd deliverance to Lawrence. The Army Air Corps seemed like the logical assignment for a twenty one year-old man with the skill and patience to fix those things that were unfixable. During his deployment in Guam, while strolling on the beach near the base, he espied a young woman walking toward him. It was his sister, Irene, who had joined the nursing corps and was also stationed at Guam, unbeknownst to both.

Fairmont Army Air Field, Nebraska, and its close proximity to the Union Pacific Railroad hub at Columbus brought Sergeant Kurtz (whose friends were now calling Larry) where he met a sultry, sassy, stenographic superstar with whom he would fall inescapably head-over-heels, ass-over-teakettle. Having helped build the aircraft that carried the bombs that led to the end of that war in 1945, he flew in an identical aircraft to take photographs, not only of the results of his B-29s built at the Martin Plant in Omaha, but also circled the signing of the Emperor's surrender on the USS Missouri.

A bright, blue-eyed daughter born a few weeks later accompanied her parents to a post-war Canal Zone, the outpost critical to arming continents for a stewing Cold War. In 1947, Larry, Harriet, and toddler, Leslie were assigned to the Department of the Air Force, newly created to execute that mission.

In 1954, while stationed at Castle Air Force Base near Merced, California, Harriet and Master Sergeant Kurtz (much to the dismay of a pampered eight and a half year-old sister) presented a breathtakingly handsome boy, now taking vaguely artistic liberties with sacred family history.

Reassigned to Offutt Air Force Base, Nebraska, the emerging brain of the Strategic Air Command, Dad and Mom delivered a sweet little brown-eyed girl in 1956. In 1957, Senior Master Sergeant Kurtz was ordered to Torrejon Air Base near Madrid, Spain, the passage on the SS Independence a vivid family memory, and a year later, he was awarded the rank of Chief Master Sergeant, one of 620 elite non-commissioned officers.

Maintaining the B-52s flying the sorties while cradling armed nuclear weapons every day to the margins of the Soviet Union and to forward bases throughout Europe from Franco's Spain as attache to the Inspector General of the Air Force for three and a half years, Larry still found time to shower his family with a richness of travel experiences. He took us to Expo 58, the Brussels Worlds Fair, to Paris and Lisbon. We saw Pompei and climbed Mt. Vesuvius. We saw Rome, where Pope Pius XII blessed our rosaries just weeks before he died. We saw the watery streets of Venice in gondolas and watched glass being blown. We boarded cable cars and ascended to a castle in Bavaria. In Las Palomas, base-housing families stood along la calle to wave at President Eisenhower, Generalissimo Franco and my dad driving by in a motorcade.

Kurtz hob-nobbed with colonels and played golf with generals; his uniform emblazoned with citations, airmen snapped to attention. But, living out of a flight bag took its toll, so in 1961 he made the decision to fly us home and retire. After a year at Dow Air Force Base, Maine, Larry called it quits after 20 years, nine months. He bought a 9' plywood travel trailer and put a hitch on the '60 Mercedes Benz 220 that he had purchased from the plant in Germany, our drive through Quebec and on to South Dakota now just another delicious memory.

But, in about 1970 or so, my very furious retired Air Force, Republican father wrote the Sioux Falls Argus Leader after it ran a photo during the Vietnam War. Dad cited Senator George McGovern with what he believed was the unforgivable offense of a civilian wearing a USAF flight suit. The letters in the paper that followed afterwards accused Dad of nitpicking while he got volumes of support in the mail from the likes of the John Birch Society. Dad never forgot it and clearly I haven't either.

In '71, after I used Mom's Singer to sew an American flag upside-down on the back of a fatigue jacket from Korea that Dad had given me, he threw it into the burn barrel, poured gas on it and set it afire. That he didn't throw me in there too is testimony of his love for my mother. In the late 60s and through the 70s Dad won conservation awards for terracing the farm, planting trees and avoiding atrazine. He remained "inactive reserve" for ten years and somewhat later on a night of quiet reflection he quipped, "I'm finally free of the bastards."

1972 was my first time to vote. I was a stupid punk, had a very high draft number, ignored a Presidential appointment to the United States Air Force Academy (an entitlement for a dependent of CMSgt Lawrence E. Kurtz, USAF (Ret)) because Richard Fucking Nixon was Commander-in-Chief; besides my glasses prevented me from being a pilot. Filling in the oval for Gus Hall, the Communist Party candidate, was a protest to somebody else's failed democratic adolescence.

In the 80s when he visited us in Spearditch Dad was able to see how most of the fertile land in Lawrence County was being covered with concrete and housing for people from other states. In the 90s and 2000s he wept as shelter belts were being cleared for center-pivot irrigation and fossil water was being pumped from fragile aquifers for the industrial agriculture now killing his once-beloved Brookings County.

Lawrence the Elder, whose often-close proximity to B-24s saw history's remembrance of George McGovern's military service as fabrication, supported fellow Strategic Air Command alumnus Tom Daschle through his entire career but gave up on voting after his home state turned Senator Daschle out for Earth hater, John Thune. Dad died in 2010.