Enter The Metrc: Emergency Hearing Set For Sept. 1st
A second legal challenge is now hanging over New Mexico’s transition to NMS2S. filed on August 31st, 2026 at 2:29PM, at 1st judicial court in Santa Fe New Mexico, Metrc LLC has an emergency hearing scheduled for September 1st at 9:00 a.m. in the First Judicial District Court in Santa Fe before Judge Kathleen McGarry Ellenwood.
The case, Metrc LLC v. New Mexico Regulation and Licensing Department, D-101-CV-2026-01459, is separate from the lawsuit filed by Oasis, CANM, and The Grow NM challenging the operational rollout of NMS2S.
Metrc’s case targets the underlying procurement decision that awarded the State’s new seed-to-sale contract to Albuquerque-based Real Time Solutions. At the hearing, the court will consider two requests from Metrc - a Verified Application for Temporary Restraining Order and a Motion for Stay of Agency Decision Pending Appeal.
While the operators lawsuit argues that the transition itself is rushed, disruptive, and potentially inconsistent with existing rules. Metrc’s case appears to go deeper, challenging the administrative decision behind the RTS contract itself.
The timing could hardly be worse. September 1st is also part of the scheduled retail migration into NMS2S, placing the hearing directly in the middle of the statewide cutover.
If the court grants a stay, the impact will depend heavily on exactly which agency decision is frozen and how broadly the order is written. A ruling against RLD could potentially create complications beyond delaying a software rollout, particularly if it affects the legal foundation of the RTS contract while operators are already being migrated into the new system.
For now, there are at least two separate legal fights surrounding NMS2S, one over how the State is implementing the transition, and another over how the State selected the company behind it. The September 1st hearing may determine whether that second challenge becomes a real obstacle to the rollout or simply continues in the background while NMS2S moves forward
Metrc Reloaded
METRC Yearly Cost Proposal
Metrc’s proposal was not built as a low-cost state-funded replacement. It relied heavily on recurring license/subscription revenue and per-plant/per-package fees.
On top of those subscription costs, Metrc proposed charging:
$0.40 per plant per month in Year 1
$0.41 per plant per month in Year 2
$0.42 per plant per month in Year 3
$0.44 per plant per month in Year 4
And package fees of:
$0.40 per package in Year 1
$0.41 in Year 2
$0.42 in Year 3
$0.44 in Year 4
Those plant and package charges are especially important because the total cost cannot be determined from this proposal alone; it scales with the number of plants and packages generated statewide. So for an industry just starting to standardize case packs, this would have felt like an efficiency tax.
There is also an interesting procurement detail on the last page. The RFP apparently warned:
“Responses that list any cost as TBD will be disqualified from further consideration. All costs must be listed…”
Metrc did provide definite unit prices for plants and packages rather than labeling them TBD, but the actual statewide total remained variable because it depended on usage.
That helps explain one of the arguments CCD made in Bulletin 26-11. CCD specifically emphasized that some competing proposals would have imposed continuing costs on licensees, including individual plant and product-tag costs, while RTS was presented as substantially more economical.
The $1.8 million attached to Metrc’s proposal only reflects the State’s subscription costs over the life of the contract. It does not account for the additional fees that would be pushed directly onto licensees who are required to use the system.
With starting fees of roughly $0.40 per tracked package, the true statewide cost becomes much harder to calculate. At New Mexico’s scale, those recurring charges could potentially add tens of millions of dollars in costs over the life of the contract. Unlike a fixed contract price, plant and package fees rise with production volume, meaning operators have no way to guarantee what their long-term compliance costs will actually be.
Metrc’s financials also appear to show that roughly 65–70% of company revenue comes from subscriptions and tags. If that holds true here, licensees would effectively be carrying a significant portion of the cost of a system they are legally required to use.
Plastic Straws
If the judge grants Metrc’s motion to stay the agency decision, the practical effect is that the challenged RLD procurement decision is temporarily frozen while the appeal is litigated. Under New Mexico Rule 1-074, a district court may stay enforcement of an agency decision during an administrative appeal; that does not automatically decide the underlying case, but it can stop the agency from relying on the challenged decision in the mean
If yesterday’s operator case was the pocket sand, today’s case could be the low blow that potentially attacks something deeper, not just how NMS2S is being rolled out, but the agency decision that put RTS in the chair to begin with.
