Serving the High Plains
Serving the High Plains
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Students in House Municipal Schools will begin the school year Monday with remote learning only except for students in kindergarten through third grade whose parents opt to have their children start the year in classes. Students in K-3 grades who attend in person will be taught in groups of no more than five per teacher, House Superintendent Bonnie Lightfoot said. Parents have the option of using remote learning for these students, as well, Lightfoot said. Lightfoot learned Friday the New Mexico Public Education Department had rejected the...
It comes up again and again. Hydroxychloroquine (which I will refer to as HCQ to save space and keystrokes) as a potential treatment or cure for COVID-19. President Donald Trump, who has yet to admit error in any part of his life, let alone his chaotic presidency, still insists that HCQ is effective in treating COVID-19, even while doctors and medical studies worldwide repeatedly conclude it is not. HCQ combined with azithromycin, a powerful antibiotic, does not work either. Evidence that a combination of the two drugs might, emphasis on...
Two candidates for the job of Tucumcari city manager were interviewed Thursday by the city commission and interim city manager Mark Martinez, according to Martinez. Martinez said the commission set no timetable for the hiring of the next city manager. Martinez signed a 90-day extension on July 9 to stay on in his acting manager role. The next city manager will replace Britt Lusk, who left the job April 5 after serving for nearly two years in the position. Lusk's salary started at $82,500 per year. The next city manager will be the city’s f...
As of Friday, Albuquerque, without even having to ask, was supposed to get “help” from about 25 federal law enforcement officials in combating its admittedly major crime problem. Albuquerque is the largest city in the state I happen to live in, so I feel that, like my roughly 2 million fellow New Mexicans, I have a stake in this situation. While I do not fear a storm-trooper invasion like the one imposed on Portland, Oregon, I still feel President Donald Trump has directed an unwanted and unneeded intrusion on state and local authority. Tru...
The Tucumcari City Commission on Thursday approved a $25 million final budget for fiscal year 2021 that began July 1 and extends to June 30, 2021, and includes a deficit of $631,945. Documents show the budget calls for revenues of $24,725,932 in revenue and $25,357,877 in expenditures, leaving the deficit of $631,945. City Finance Director Rachelle Arias told the commission a $447,892 deficit in the city’s general fund budget accounts for most of the total deficit. Despite the budget deficit, however, end-of-year results show the general f...
The question of opening schools is one of the most troubling we have ever faced. On one hand, President Donald Trump and Education Secretary Betsy DeVos are pressuring states to pack the kids into classrooms right away. In support of that idea, pediatricians have said the danger in keeping kids out of school is potentially greater than the hazard of contracting COVID-19, and educators know kids learn better in classrooms. On the other hand, the nation’s most prominent expert on pandemics, Dr. Anthony Fauci, says that with COVID-19, we are not o...
Mark Martinez will be Tucumcari’s interim city manager for another 90 days, the city commission decided Thursday. An extension of Martinez’s contract received unanimous approval from the commission. Martinez again will be paid $19,000 for the 90-day period that began Friday, which is 15% higher than his regular salary as assistant city manager, according to the contract approved Thursday. At a work session before Thursday’s regular commission meeting, Commissioners noted the commission has set aside July 17 to interview candidates to becom...
Let’s cancel “cancel culture,” the idea that discussion that offends should not be allowed if offended parties must be exposed to it. Cancel culture cancels free speech, the freedom on which all other freedoms is based. Let’s say Tucker Carlson and U.S. Sen. Tammy Duckworth can call each other traitors. Let’s say Congressional representatives Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Devin Nunes can voice whatever unreasonable, fleeting half-thoughts support their blind-sided biases. Let’s say pop musician Kanye West can run for president based on whims th...
New Mexico’s Democratic Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham gave a scolding to residents Thursday as she announced the state would extend current COVID-19 restrictions instead of relaxing them more. New Mexico’s COVID-19 caseload rose at a higher rate during Phase 1 of reopening than before, as it did in most other U.S. states that eased restrictions. More mask-wearing and social distancing could have made the difference and allowed the state to push ahead in its quest to return to the normal. The governor let us know that in no uncertain terms. I don...
My introduction to the New Mexico version of centipede occurred a few years ago, while I was working in an office in Tucumcari. A sweet young thing who worked in an office nearby appeared in my doorway and said a centipede had gotten into the building. She said she hated them and asked could I get rid of it for her. “Sure,” I said. I walked out into the hallway and stopped. I wasn’t expecting a bug from an Indiana Jones movie, a 9-inch strand of brown segments and legs with an ill-tempered look on what passed for its face. Pincers never smile....
The city of Tucumcari will not cut any positions in fiscal year 2021, from July 1 to June 30, 2021, but will convert 10 positions to part-time jobs and allow two employees to transfer into new positions in other departments. Tucumcari acting city manager Mark Martinez announced this to the city commission Thursday during a discussion of the status of the city’s budget for the last quarter of the current fiscal year, which will end Wednesday. Rachelle Arias, the city’s finance director, said cutbacks in staffing budgets that made the per...
You hear it often: “Discretion is the better part of valor.” It’s a distortion of a Shakespeare quote. The Bard actually scripted Jack Falstaff to say, “the better part of valor is discretion,” to rationalize Falstaff’s pure cowardice. Today, the amended phrase can imply either that it’s better to mix caution and courage or that it’s better just to be cautious. I want to apply the first modern interpretation to former Ambassador John Bolton, who has fallen into disfavor from all corners over “The Room Where It Happened,” his tell-all book about...
Since recent current protests, rioting and sometimes extreme police responses affect just about everyone, they should be viewed more as phenomena of human behavior than of politics. And psychologists are weighing in. Demonstrations have been triggered by recent deaths of African-Americans at the hands of whites and the police, especially the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis, whose neck was pinned under a white police officer’s knee. “That all these things happened literally within days may have created a perfect storm,” said James Jones...
Construction should start in “a week or two” on the long-awaited Second Street improvement project in downtown Tucumcari after the city commission on Thursday signed a contract with J&H Services of Albuquerque for construction of the project. Vicki Strand, director of Tucumcari’s Community Development Department, said arrangements are in process to start construction on the nearly $1.8 million project, and it should start in a week or two. According to contract documents, work will include installation for a new sidewalk, asphalt pavement, curb...
The Second Street improvement project in downtown Tucumcari is a contract signing from the start of construction after the city commission voted unanimously Thursday during a special meeting to accept a nearly $1.8 million construction bid for the project. An Albuquerque construction firm, J&H Services, submitted the winning bid, beating another firm, Lone Mountain Contracting Inc., to win the contract. In accepting the bid, the commission followed the recommendation of Bohannon Huston, the project’s engineers. The commissioners are expected t...
Four Minneapolis police officers are justifiably facing murder or aiding and abetting charges in the death of George Floyd, an African-American man who died after enduring nearly nine minutes of Officer Derek Chauvin’s knee on his neck as he lay on the ground. The protests — non-violent, destructive and even deadly — that have followed across the nation have received ample coverage in all media. Media reports also signal a new period of introspection as the nation again confronts racism and again reaches out for ways to end it. I think we are c...
The case of Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn now has the clarity of a mud bath. First, his court case. Flynn pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI. Then, Attorney General William Barr, his ultimate prosecutor, decided to drop charges, even after Flynn had confessed to lying to both the FBI and to Vice President Michael Pence. Barr thought the investigation that led to Flynn’s charges was begun on faulty grounds. Barr’s motion to dismiss the case was so unusual that the judge, Emmet Sullivan, followed with his own oddity. He called in a retired federal jud...
The Tucumcari City Commission on Thursday passed a preliminary city budget for fiscal year 2021 that will leave a $489,000 deficit in the city’s general fund, which is covered by reserve allowances and cash expected to remain at the end of this fiscal year. Fiscal 2021 begins July 1 and ends June 30, 2021. The budget calls for laying off one full-time employee and two part-time employees and converting eight full-time positions into part-time jobs, said Rachelle Arias, the city’s finance director, to the commission. The city must make the per...
Wear the darn mask, Mr. President. You are not above the law, and no, you are not the law, as much as you want to be. It’s not manly to go maskless in public. It’s dumb. You are an obviously overweight guy in your 70s. You are at risk. You don’t drink or smoke, I understand, but reports say your diet is a nutritionist’s nightmare, French fries, diet soda, fast food, bacon and eggs. You’re richer than Croesus and surprised even yourself by getting elected president. That makes you lucky, not more than human. As a human, you are vulnerabl...
Tucumcari city administrators found a “silver lining” that could mean as few as two full-time city employees lose jobs next fiscal year and others who would have been dismissed would be made part-time, acting city manager Mark Martinez told the city commission Thursday during a public work session. At an April 23 work session, administrators presented options that would have meant as many as 17 full-time positions lost, along with three part-time and five current openings unfilled for fiscal year 2021 that begins July 1, as the city deals wit...
Going quietly amid the noise of Congressional grandstanding, shouting pundits and a bombastic president, a bipartisan group of 50 members of the U.S. House of Representatives has been preparing the way for politics post-Trump. They call themselves the Problem Solvers Caucus, and they have been preparing the way for more bipartisan cooperation since 2017. There are 25 Democrats, including New Mexico Rep. Xochitl Torres Small, and 25 Republicans in this caucus. They get little notice because they work with each other instead of shouting insults...
The Chaparral Apartments in Tucumcari will be placed under the jurisdiction of the federal Eastern Regional Housing Authority based in Roswell, like the rest of Tucumcari’s other public housing units. The transfer of the 24-unit Chaparral complex had been delayed as Tucumcari city officials explored its status as property of the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Rural Development arm. The Tucumcari Housing Authority’s board of directors, consisting of all five Tucumcari city commissioners, decided Friday since Chaparral was managed on behal...
President Donald Trump has lied repeatedly to the American people in order to enhance his chances for re-election. Shocked? Presidential lying shouldn’t even be news any more, but catching presidents in lies is media’s favorite blood sport. The game is to pretend to be shocked and to convince readers that the public is shocked, because they think presidents don’t lie. One of my COVID-19 isolation binge-watching projects was Ken Burns’ history of the Vietnam War. Trump’s lies have plenty of precedent. While Burns’ series made me remember my...
The COVID-19 pandemic is as big as planet Earth, but it’s because of what it does at the individual level that is interesting and a little frightening. Most of what follows is freely translated from an article entitled “How does the coronavirus work?” in the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Technology Review. For starters, a coronavirus could run a lap around a human hair and it would be the equivalent of a three-mile run. COVID-19 viruses are usually portrayed as little balls crowned, that’s the “corona” part, with nubs made of stick...
In the first test of the Tucumcari’s new ethics ordinance, Tucumcari City Commissioners Ralph Moya and Paul Villanueva were cleared Thursday of charges they had improperly aimed criticism a city employee in public after a public hearing. City Finance Director Rachelle Arias filed the charges in March based on events that allegedly occurred at the Feb. 13 and Feb. 27 meetings of the commission. The commissioners decided in two 3-0 votes Thursday to exonerate Moya and Villanueva. District 4 Commissioner Christopher Arias abstained in both votes,...