New Mexico Madness Investigations | Project Apollo | Part Two of Three
How a Revolving Door, a Captured Nonprofit, and $3.1 Million in Taxpayer Money Created the System That Nearly Handed New Mexico's Nuclear Backyard to a Chinese National
Part One of this investigation documented what happened with Project Apollo — the $942 million bond authorization for a Chinese-controlled solar company yards from Kirtland Air Force Base, the federal government's quiet intervention on national security grounds, and the silence of every elected official involved when the deal collapsed.
Part Two is about how it was possible in the first place.
The answer is not incompetence. It is architecture. Over the course of the Lujan Grisham administration, a specific set of institutional structures was built — or captured — that allowed a deal of this magnitude to move from a Chinese boardroom in Shenzhen to a unanimous vote of five Bernalillo County commissioners without a single meaningful checkpoint. A nonprofit funded almost entirely by taxpayer money. A utility CEO simultaneously chairing the body that recruited the deal she stood to profit from. A board member who became a cabinet secretary twenty days before the decisive vote. Campaign contributions that flowed before the announcements came.
This is not a story about one bad deal. It is a story about a machine. And in New Mexico, the machine is still running.
The Architect: Rob Black and the Twenty-Day Window
Start with the appointment that should have disqualified itself.
Rob Black served on the board of the New Mexico Economic Development Corporation — the nonprofit operating under the trade name New Mexico Partnership — the organization officially designated by the state as New Mexico's primary business recruitment and attraction operation. The New Mexico Partnership was, by any practical definition, the organization that identified, recruited, and advanced Ebon Solar's Project Apollo from initial contact through the governor's August 7, 2024 announcement.
On September 4, 2024 — twenty days before the Bernalillo County Board of County Commissioners voted unanimously to authorize $942 million in Industrial Revenue Bonds for Ebon Solar — Governor Michelle Lujan Grisham appointed Rob Black as Cabinet Secretary of the New Mexico Economic Development Department.
Read that sequence carefully.
The man who had been sitting on the board of the nonprofit that recruited the deal became the cabinet officer overseeing state economic development — including the Local Economic Development Act grant framework under which Ebon Solar had received a $10 million public commitment — with twenty days remaining before the most consequential vote in the entire Project Apollo process.
No recusal was announced. No conflict of interest disclosure was made public. No statement was issued by the Governor's office explaining how the administration had evaluated the conflict. The appointment press release described Black's background in economic development and his commitment to New Mexico's prosperity. It did not mention Project Apollo. It did not mention the New Mexico Partnership. It did not mention Ebon Solar.
The Bernalillo County commission voted on September 24, 2024. Cabinet Secretary Rob Black's agency — the New Mexico Economic Development Department — was the issuing authority for the $10 million LEDA commitment that had already been made to Ebon Solar before the commission vote. The man overseeing that commitment had helped build the deal from the other side of the table weeks earlier.
When New Mexico Madness submitted a formal media inquiry to Cabinet Secretary Black's office requesting comment on this timeline, his office did not respond before publication of Part One. His office has not responded since.
The Governor's Communications Director, Michael Coleman, was contacted again before publication of this installment. No response was received.
The Nonprofit: New Mexico Partnership and the Government Money Machine
To understand how Project Apollo was possible, you have to understand what the New Mexico Partnership actually is — and what it is not.
The New Mexico Partnership presents itself publicly as a private nonprofit organization — a business-friendly, public-private partnership dedicated to recruiting companies and jobs to New Mexico. That presentation is accurate in its legal form and misleading in its practical substance.
According to the organization's most recent Internal Revenue Service Form 990 filing, the New Mexico Partnership received 91 percent of its total revenue from a single government grant — listed on the filing as "RESTRICTED." The source of that grant, based on New Mexico Sunshine Portal records, is the New Mexico Economic Development Department — the same state agency now headed by Rob Black. Between fiscal years 2022 and 2024, the department issued purchase orders to the New Mexico Partnership totaling $3,104,000 in taxpayer funds.
Ninety-one cents of every dollar the New Mexico Partnership operates on comes from the government. The New Mexico Economic Development Department — a cabinet agency of Governor Lujan Grisham — is its primary funder. And yet the New Mexico Partnership operates as a nonprofit, outside the full transparency requirements of a state agency, with board members who face no public disclosure obligations comparable to those of government officials.
This structure creates a specific and significant problem: it allows the state to conduct economic development recruitment — including the recruitment of foreign-controlled companies — through an entity that is functionally a government operation but legally a private nonprofit. The decisions made inside that structure, the companies recruited, the deals built, the relationships cultivated — none of it is subject to the same public records requirements that would apply if the Economic Development Department were doing the same work directly.
Project Apollo was recruited through that structure. The public never saw it coming because the structure was specifically designed to operate outside their line of sight.
The Utility CEO: Patricia Collawn's Dual Role
If Rob Black's appointment represents the revolving door at its most direct, Patricia Collawn's position in the Project Apollo ecosystem represents something more structural — and in some ways more troubling.
Collawn is the Chief Executive Officer of TXNM Energy, formerly PNM Resources — New Mexico's dominant electric utility. A photovoltaic manufacturing facility of the size Ebon Solar proposed at Mesa del Sol — running industrial-scale equipment around the clock — would have been one of PNM's largest new industrial power customers in years. The financial benefit to PNM from Project Apollo landing in Albuquerque was direct, measurable, and material.
At the same time Collawn led the utility that stood to profit from the deal, she was serving as Board Chair of the New Mexico Partnership — the organization whose explicit mission was to recruit deals like Project Apollo to New Mexico.
The chair of the recruiting organization stood to benefit financially — through the company she led — from the deal her organization recruited.
That conflict was never publicly disclosed in any announcement, press release, or public statement connected to Project Apollo. When Governor Lujan Grisham stood at the podium on August 7, 2024 and declared Ebon Solar's arrival a transformational moment for New Mexico, there was no mention of the fact that the board chair of the organization that recruited the deal ran the utility that would have powered it.
The campaign finance dimension compounds the conflict. According to New Mexico Campaign Finance Information System records, Collawn personally contributed $31,800 to Governor Lujan Grisham's campaigns. PNM's political action committee — the PNM Responsible Citizens Group — contributed an additional $50,607 net to the governor. The combined total from the CEO and the corporate PAC of the utility whose chair ran the recruiting organization: $82,407.
None of these relationships were disclosed at the August 7 announcement. None of them were raised at the September 24 commission vote. All of them are documented in public records.
The Commission Vote: What Five People Decided Without Asking
On September 24, 2024, five members of the Bernalillo County Board of County Commissioners voted unanimously to authorize $942,000,000 in Industrial Revenue Bonds for Ebon Solar LLC.
Not one commissioner voted no. Not one commissioner abstained. Not one member of the public signed up to speak on the item. The bond authorization — the largest single economic development commitment in recent Bernalillo County history — passed without debate, without a dissenting voice, and without a single question from the dais about the company's finances, its parent corporation, its chairman's location, or its relationship to the Chinese government.
What the commissioners did not ask — and what the record shows they were never told — includes the following:
They were not told that Ebon Solar LLC had incorporated in New Mexico just fourteen days before their vote, on September 10, 2024.
They were not told that Ebang International Holdings, the Nasdaq-listed Chinese parent company, had reported total global revenue of $5.9 million in its most recent annual filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission — a figure that made the claimed capacity to finance a $942 million facility implausible on its face.
They were not told that Dong Hu, the chairman of Ebang International and the sole officer of Ebon Solar LLC, was a Chinese national operating from Shenzhen, China — subject to the People's Republic of China's Military-Civil Fusion law requiring cooperation with the People's Liberation Army upon demand.
They were not told that Dong Hu was a named defendant in a federal securities fraud class action in the Southern District of New York, filed by the Rosen Law Firm on behalf of Ebang investors.
They were not told that the proposed facility site at Mesa del Sol shared a boundary with Kirtland Air Force Base — home to the Air Force Nuclear Weapons Center, Sandia National Laboratories, and the largest nuclear weapons storage complex in the United States.
Every one of these facts was publicly available. Every one required nothing more than a basic records check. The Securities and Exchange Commission filings are free and public on EDGAR. The New Mexico Secretary of State incorporation date is a thirty-second lookup. The federal court filing is on PACER. The proximity to Kirtland is visible on any mapping application.
The question is not whether the commissioners could have known. The question is why the apparatus that presented the deal to them — the New Mexico Partnership, the Economic Development Department, the Governor's office — did not ensure they knew before the vote.
Section 7 of Ordinance 2024-20 contains the answer to what the commission thought of its own safeguards. That section, passed in the same unanimous vote, waived the county's own Economic Development Policy for this specific transaction. The rules the county adopted to protect taxpayers from exactly this kind of risk were set aside — by the same people, in the same meeting, without a word of public discussion.
The LEDA Framework: A System With No National Security Screen
New Mexico's Local Economic Development Act — the legal mechanism under which the $10 million public commitment to Ebon Solar was made — contains no national security screening requirement.
None.
Under current New Mexico law, the LEDA framework allows state and local officials to commit public funds as incentives for business recruitment with no mandatory review of a company's ownership structure, no requirement to assess whether a foreign parent company is subject to a foreign government's legal demands, and no trigger for federal coordination on national security grounds — regardless of the proximity of the proposed facility to a military installation.
The Economic Development Department's own program guidelines focus on job creation metrics, wage levels, and geographic targeting. They do not include a checkbox for "is this company controlled by a national of a country designated as a foreign adversary by the United States government." They do not require disclosure of parent company ownership chains. They do not mandate coordination with the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States before a public commitment is made.
This is not a bug in the New Mexico system. It is the system. And Project Apollo exposed it completely.
Other states have moved to close exactly this gap. Following the Grand Forks, North Dakota episode — in which a Chinese company proposed a corn processing facility twelve miles from a major Air Force base — multiple state legislatures enacted laws requiring national security review of foreign investment incentive packages, mandatory notification to federal defense authorities when proposed facilities are within defined distances of military installations, and explicit prohibitions on public incentives for companies controlled by nationals of designated foreign adversary nations.
New Mexico has enacted none of these measures. As of the date of publication, no legislation has been introduced in the New Mexico Legislature to add national security screening to the LEDA framework. No interim committee study has been requested. No task force has been announced.
The machine that approved Project Apollo is operating today under the same rules it operated under when it approved Project Apollo.
The Silence Continues
When New Mexico Madness published Part One of this investigation on May 7, 2026, every major official connected to Project Apollo was given the opportunity to respond.
As of the publication of this installment, the silence from those offices is unchanged.
Governor Michelle Lujan Grisham's office — specifically Communications Director Michael Coleman, to whom a formal media inquiry was directed on May 7 — has not responded.
Cabinet Secretary Rob Black of the New Mexico Economic Development Department has not responded.
The Bernalillo County Board of County Commissioners has not responded.
Mayor Tim Keller's office has not issued any statement beyond the City of Albuquerque's initial response confirming CFIUS involvement, which was provided to this publication before Part One was published.
The only on-the-record acknowledgment that Project Apollo ended on national security grounds — the most consequential fact in this entire story — came from a City of Albuquerque communications staffer responding to a direct media inquiry. It has never been voluntarily disclosed by the governor's office, the Economic Development Department, or the county commission.
The people of New Mexico paid $3.1 million to the organization that recruited this deal. They were promised 911 jobs. They were never told why the jobs never came. They are still waiting for an explanation from the officials they elected.
Part Three of this investigation will examine what was actually at risk — the nuclear installations, the defense workforce, the intelligence vulnerabilities, and the communities surrounding Kirtland Air Force Base that were never asked whether they consented to having a Chinese-controlled industrial operation placed on their perimeter. That story belongs to the residents of Albuquerque's south side. We intend to tell it and our source, formerly of the military nuclear community, shared some 'concerns.'
This investigation is not finished.
Sources & References
Corporate and Government Records
- New Mexico Secretary of State — Ebon Solar LLC registration, September 10, 2024; sole officer Dong Hu, Shenzhen, China
- Ebang International Holdings Inc. — SEC EDGAR Annual Report Form 20-F, fiscal year 2023; total revenue $5.9 million; chairman Dong Hu
- Rosen Law Firm v. Ebang International Holdings Inc. et al. — U.S. District Court, Southern District of New York; federal securities fraud class action
- Bernalillo County Ordinance 2024-20 — September 24, 2024; Section 7 (waiver of Economic Development Policy); Section 12 (180-day bond issuance deadline); $942,000,000 authorization
Appointments and Personnel
5. New Mexico Economic Development Department press release — "Governor appoints Rob Black as Secretary of Economic Development," September 4, 2024
6. New Mexico Partnership (New Mexico Economic Development Corporation) — board composition records, 2023–2024; Rob Black board membership
Nonprofit and Financial Records
7. New Mexico Economic Development Corporation (New Mexico Partnership) — IRS Form 990, tax year ending June 30, 2024; EIN 20-0100129; government grant dependency 91% of total revenue
8. New Mexico Sunshine Portal (SHARE) — New Mexico Economic Development Department purchase orders to New Mexico Economic Development Corporation, fiscal years 2022–2024; total $3,104,000
Campaign Finance
9. New Mexico Campaign Finance Information System (CFIS) — Patricia Collawn personal contributions to Governor Michelle Lujan Grisham; PNM Responsible Citizens Group contributions; combined total $82,407
10. New Mexico Campaign Finance Information System (CFIS) — Steve Chavez and Rudy Guzman contributions to Governor Michelle Lujan Grisham; combined total $81,000
Utility and Energy Records
11. TXNM Energy (formerly PNM Resources) — corporate filings and executive biographical records; Patricia Collawn, Chief Executive Officer
12. New Mexico Partnership — board officer records, 2023–2024; Patricia Collawn, Board Chair
Legislative and Policy Records
13. New Mexico Local Economic Development Act — NMSA 1978, Section 5-10-1 et seq.; program guidelines, New Mexico Economic Development Department
14. New Mexico Economic Development Department — LEDA Program Results, fiscal year 2025 commitments; Ebon Solar $10 million commitment
15. North Dakota Legislative Assembly — foreign investment screening legislation following Grand Forks Air Force Base episode, 2023
16. U.S. Treasury Department — CFIUS jurisdiction expansion rule, foreign land acquisition near military installations, 2024
On-the-Record Statements
17. Sara Mannal, Community Outreach Manager, City of Albuquerque Economic Development Department — email correspondence, May 6, 2026; confirms CFIUS-related considerations ended Project Apollo; confirms no public funds expended
18. Media inquiry to Michael Coleman, Communications Director, Office of Governor Michelle Lujan Grisham — submitted May 7, 2026; no response received as of publication
19. Media inquiry to Cabinet Secretary Rob Black, New Mexico Economic Development Department — submitted May 7, 2026; no response received as of publication
20. Media inquiry to Bernalillo County Board of County Commissioners — submitted May 7, 2026; no response received as of publication
News and Public Sources
21. Atlantic Council — "China's ability to buy U.S. land near military bases just got more restricted," July 2024
22. Heritage Foundation — "China's Dual-Use Ambitions Could Severely Threaten America's Force Posture," April 2026
23. PV-Tech — "New Mexico approves $942 million bond for Ebon cell plant," September 2024
24. Energy and Policy Institute — utility political contribution analysis, New Mexico, 2018–2022
New Mexico Madness will continue its investigation into Project Apollo. Tips, documents, and source contacts: reidrothchild@newmexicomadness.com
