Serving the High Plains
Serving the High Plains
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Tucumcari city manager Britt Lusk on Thursday evening announced his resignation from the city manager's post and gave the city commission his 60-day notice at a regular meeting of the commission. Lusk said his last day will be April 5. Lusk has accepted a position as the city manager of Pilot Point, Texas, a lakeside community north of Dallas that has seen strong growth in the past 10 years. Pilot Point has about the same population as Tucumcari, he said. Lusk said working for the city "has been a pleasure," and he was grateful for the...
Last week marked a turning point in the already strained (an understatement) relations between Democrats and Republicans. After the Republicans in the Senate ignored the Democrats’ thorough impeachment case against President Donald Trump and kept him in office, and after Trump’s made-for-Hollywood State of the Union address, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi ripped up her copy of Trump’s speech on camera. She made sure everybody in the room and watching on TV could see it. It was an act of rudeness and contempt for a president who has shown...
For your consideration, a little speculative fiction: It is 2030. The president is Sophia Borodin, a fifth-generation descendant of Russian immigrants who came to the U.S. in the 19th Century, narrowly escaping a death sentence from the czar for their advocacy of socialism. President Borodin is an avowed socialist who has been able to mesmerize audiences with her confidence, eloquence and charisma. As her constituents look on approvingly, she has created a $10 trillion government deficit by forgiving all college loans, making college free at...
"Miss Kristy" is the name of an orphaned pontoon boat that has haunted Tucumcari Streets for several years, and it produced heated accusations and rebuttals at Thursday's Tucumcari City Commission meeting as well as plans to reconsider the city's nuisance ordinance. Miss Kristy rests in crumbling condition, with peeling metal siding, exposed wood and faded interior upholstery, on city property off Whitmore Avenue. The exchanges Thursday began when Gilbert Pacheco, a Tucumcari resident, accused...
Well, are we going to have an orange president at the end of the impeachment trial? I say yes. Our orange-est president ever will keep his standing reservation to the Oval Office after the trial. With flying colors? I don’t think so. I think the orange paled and the MAGA red faded as House Democrats last week masterfully presented a detailed chain of fact-based evidence to support their accusation that President Donald Trump violated his oath of office by attempting to extort a personal, political favor from a vulnerable and valuable foreign a...
Robocalls are to cell phone ownership what mosquitoes are to fishing. They’re an unavoidable nuisance and can be dangerous. Mosquitoes carry disease; robocalls are dangerous to the vulnerable. I applaud the prospect of laws that will make robocalls illegal. I hang up on all of them. It’s the closest I can come to a Deet for robocalls. Unfortunately, I answer calls from Area Code 575 and 505. If you’re in journalism, your name appears on a story and the call could be something you should pay attention to. If I miss a call from an unknown numbe...
A landmark sign ordinance that could pit private property rights against historic preservation received approval for publication at 2020's first meeting Thursday of the Tucumcari City Commission. Thursday's meeting was the first for Paul Villanueva, who defeated incumbent Amy Gutierrez in November's elections to represent District 2. Villanueva was elected to a four-year term. The commission, with District 1 Commissioner Ralph Moya voting "no" on two votes, also reinstated District 3...
I used to work in public relations, even getting myself designated an APR — Accredited Public Relations — that required spending a day taking written tests and a 20-minute oral exam. A public relations what? We preferred the term “practitioner,” but if you said “professional” we would not object. We recognized the thin line between being factual and making our clients look good to specified audiences. I was accredited through the Public Relations Society of America, an honorable trade organization that even has a code of ethics. To PRSA, publi...
Young people have been dismissing us older folks over the past year by sneering “OK boomer” at us. Kids these days. They don’t even learn grammar. The right way to phrase that sneer is “OK, boomer.” It means, “keep on lecturing, old timer or Baby Boomer, even though I’m not listening because you don’t know what you’re talking about.” I think any older person can turn that around by becoming an “OK boomer” without the comma, a boomer who is OK to be around, even if he or she is slow and tires easily. We can do that by correcting our memories...
Happy New Year! The fact that today begins year 2020 makes one think in visionary terms. With that in mind, I will venture some predictions. The first: By the time next year rolls around, I will have forgotten these predictions as will my readers. My prediction record is terrible, anyway. For Quay County and New Mexico: n State coffers are swimming in oil and natural gas tax revenues. That means Tucumcari will get its capital outlay wish from the New Mexico Legislature’s 2020 session for repairs to east-side sewer infrastructure that could s...
Today is Christmas, the date on the calendar when we celebrate the earthly birth of Jesus Christ and the best of human nature. Exactly two months ago, on Oct. 25, an Amarillo couple experienced sort of an early Christmas along Interstate-40, about 11 miles east of Clines Corners. Carl and Carol Weiss were traveling to Santa Fe for a few days of recreation when, Carl said, the right front tire of the couple’s Ford Escape blew out. They pulled off the highway. Carl and Carol located the spare, the jack and the lug wrench, then Carl set out to d...
Some good news about a grant, painted dinosaur footprints and a few tears marked Thursday’s Tucumcari City Commission meeting. The commission accepted a grant for $600,000 for its Great Blocks program, heard a proposal to paint dinosaur footprints from Interstate 40's First Street exit to the Mesalands Community College Dinosaur Museum and bid a sometimes-tearful farewell to District 2 Commissioner Amy Gutierrez during her final meeting as a commissioner. Gutierrez was elected to her position in 2016 after being appointed to the commission i...
Tucumcari District 1 Commissioner Ralph Moya said he stands by statements about the decline of Tucumcari since he served on the commission in the 1980s and ‘90s. Moya said he served as a commissioner for eight years and as mayor for eight years during that time, he said. Moya responded Thursday during a regular Tucumcari City Commission meeting to criticisms leveled against him in a Dec. 10 meeting of the Tucumcari Economic Development Corp. board of directors. Moya was criticized at the EDC meeting for statements he made in response to a Q...
Despite regional housing authorities’ apparent intent to take control of managing federally funded housing in Tucumcari by June 30, the board of the Tucumcari Housing Authority decided Thursday to remain independent rather than voluntarily relinquish management. New Mexico Housing Authority director Floyd Duran told the THA board in a letter received Dec. 12 the state authority will draw up an action plan that will transfer control of Tucumcari’s U.S. Housing and Urban Development-funded housing operations to a regional housing authority bas...
By the time this column publishes, President Donald Trump will, in all likelihood, be impeached. In other words, formal charges will be filed against him by the U.S. House of Representatives to be tried in the U.S. Senate. The probability that the Senate will remove Trump is a few points below negligible. I am left with two questions. The first I share with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who reluctantly agreed to proceed with impeachment inquiries. What will impeachment accomplish? The short answer: Very little and it could backfire...
An ordinance designed to encourage preservation of Tucumcari’s neon-lit Route 66 history was rejected before it could receive further consideration Thursday as Tucumcari City Commissioners voted to scrap it without first publishing it and holding a public hearing. The ordinance was rejected on a 3-2 vote, with District 5 Commissioner Todd Duplantis, District 4 Commissioner Chris Arias and District 2 Commissioner Amy Gutierrez voting to reject the ordinance. Mayor Ruth Ann Litchfield and District 1 Commissioner Ralph Moya voted against the r...
At the workshop before the Thursday meeting of the Tucumcari City Commission, Ralph Lopez, a project manager in the city’s Community Development Department, announced it costs $138,835 per city block to resurface streets. Assuming eight blocks in a mile, that would mean about $1.1 million per mile. City Manager Britt Lusk pointed out that figure does not include the cost of replacing or repairing utility infrastructure like water and gas lines that lie under some streets. In its Infrastructure Capital Improvement Plan for years 2021 to 2025, t...
Are you “woke?” I keep hearing this word on late-night television, daytime talk shows and especially in commentary about left-of-center candidates for president on the pundit pages that carry the opinions of very smart writers who keep current on everything. I’ve obviously been asleep for a while, because in its current usage, “woke” has even been defined by Merriam Webster, which means it has been around longer than I thought. Our favorite dictionary people define it as “aware of and actively attentive to important facts and issues (esp...
The Tucumcari Housing Authority board Thursday delayed a decision on whether to turn over the management of the city's public housing to federal Housing and Urban Development regional authority or to keep it local. The board, which consists of the Tucumcari City Commission and Timothy Durkin, a public housing resident, decided to table the matter Thursday to weigh pros and cons of the move a little longer. Board members agreed they needed more time to take into account new information that had...
If you’re going to visit family for Thanksgiving in Denver or Dallas, about six hours away each, don’t leave on Wednesday. (I apologize if you’re reading this for the first time on Black Friday.) This according to Mental Floss magazine. Better to be in motion before 6 a.m. on the actual holiday, Mental Floss says, because traffic is lighter both in the country and city on the actual holiday. When I was a commuter in the Los Angeles area, the home-bound Wednesday-before drive could take three hours. The distance was 35 miles, and now I know...
Impeachment was on just about everybody’s mind last week as the House of Representatives’ hearings on the subject went live. But the idea of impeachment is likely misunderstood. Some understand it to mean “kicked out of office.” Others see it as the trial about whether to kick someone out of office. With that understanding, it can be confusing. The U.S. Constitution says the House has the power to impeach, and the Senate has the right to try impeachments. In 1787, when the Constitution was hammered together, “impeachment,” according t...
The Tucumcari City Commission on Thursday gave final approval to arrangements to fund a $5.5 million project that will divert treated water from the city’s wastewater treatment facility to a nearby field to irrigate crops. The commission authorized a package that includes $770,000 in local funds and a $4.7 million, no-interest loan through the New Mexico Environment Department’s Clean Water State Revolving Loan Program. The loan will be repaid from wastewater treatment plant revenues, Lusk said at an earlier meeting. The city will pump the tre...
I don’t know what to conclude from looking at voter turnout statistics from the New Mexico Secretary of State’s office for the Nov. 5 local elections. Quay County generated a turnout of 21 percent of registered voters — 1,219 voted out of 5,798 eligible. That’s just over one-in-five who voted. It seems the lower the population of surrounding counties, the higher voter participation was on Nov. 5. Guadalupe County to our west had a turnout of 33.4 percent — 1,088 voted out of 3,255 eligible. That’s a little better than one out of three. Unio...
Facebook and Twitter are social media platforms that set the world-wide gold standard for their particular brands of dialogue-inducing software. Their inventors set them up as neutral media for communicating and disseminating information. In that way, the platforms are like the printing press, broadcast airwaves and the internet. As with the older media, anybody can put anything on them — informative stuff, warm stuff, cold stuff, funny stuff, good stuff and very bad stuff — anything short of criminal stuff. That’s what freedom looks like...
Two of the three positions for the House school board on the Nov. 5 ballot are contested with challengers facing off against incumbents in both races. William “Clint” Runyan, Position 4, is facing opposition from Wendy Green-Grigsby and Phillip Runyan, Position 5, is being challenged by Dyron Gray. William Noland is unopposed for Position 3. The remaining two board positions are not up for balloting in this elections. The terms for Calvin Downey (Position 1) and Rachelle Moon (Position 2) will expire in 2021. The candidates seem to agree tha...