Serving the High Plains
Serving the High Plains
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Tucumcari has a new city manager. Britt Lusk, 38, who was the director of administrative services for Hobbs, was named Tucumcari’s new city manager Thursday on a unanimous city commission vote. His salary will be $82,500 per year. Lusk was hired on a “strictly at-will basis,” according to his one-year contract with the city. He began his duties on Monday, according to the contract, which is good through May 14, 2019. In comments at Thursday’s commission meeting, Lusk said in Tucumcari he sees not a city but “a community.” Lusk has a master of...
How do you know you’re reading news and not propaganda? If it sounds too good or evil to be true, it’s probably propaganda. If it is important and urgent, you’re probably going to see it in more than one publication or broadcast medium. Luckily, online media makes that easy, these days. You have to be careful when perhaps the best funded and most easily accessed current information outlets are almost unashamedly putting out propaganda and calling it journalism. Unfortunately, this is also a time when even the most reliable of our basti...
A major Union Pacific Railroad track maintenance project through Quay and Guadalupe counties was just finishing up, a UP spokesperson said Wednesday. The project, which began in February, involves 100 miles of track between Tucumcari and Vaughn, Jeff DeGraff, media relations director for UP's Southern Division said. The Southern Division includes the states of New Mexico, Arizona, Arkansas, Kansas, Louisiana, Missouri, New Mexico, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Texas, according to the railroad's website. The railroad spent $19 million on the project,...
I’ve got to admit that as much as I dislike having Donald Trump as my president, some good is likely to come out of his presidency. He just might pull off a real settlement with Kim Jong Un that will significantly lessen hostilities with North Korea, or at least keep Kim from issuing empty threats and ending the childish playground shouting between Kim and Trump. Trump’s corporate-friendly tax code, too, might bring more jobs back to America, or at least more corporate profits to be taxed. It doesn’t matter to me that a corporation gets more...
Water line improvements designed to allow business expansion on Mountain Road near Interstate 40 received one of their final approvals Thursday from the Tucumcari City Commission. The commission approved a $909,963 package of grants and loans from Drinking Water State Revolving Loan Fund of the New Mexico Finance Authority. The finance package will buy new, higher-capacity water lines to replace deteriorating water lines under Mountain Road from Historic Route 66 to I-40, as well as new valves, fire hydrants and water meters. Three-quarters of...
Little boxes on the hillside, Little boxes made of ticky tacky ... Little boxes all the same. — Malvina Reynolds When Pete Seeger recorded this song in 1963, it applied to housing developments in the heyday of suburbia. Today, it could apply to sport utility vehicles and pickup trucks, which are mostly boxes on wheels. They have become so popular that Ford has decided to phase out sedans. I don’t understand this decision. I am sold on sedans. I admit that in rural eastern New Mexico, pickups are often a necessity on farms and ranches, and an...
Great Britain is one-third the size of Texas, but contains more than twice Texas’ population. That might explain why Texans think everything should be big, whereas the English think compact, or so it seems based on my recent visit to England. An English Range Rover, for instance, appears to be about half the size as the U.S. version. Roads in England are mostly narrow with little to no shoulder. Each lane is wide enough to hold a car or one of England’s big trucks, which are narrower than their U.S. equivalents, but no wider. I guess this saves...
Jolly old England was mostly old to my wife and I on our second visit last week to the nation that spawned ours. It’s hard to be jolly when the temperature seldom rises above 50 under black-and-gray skies that regularly deposit rain on the ancient land. But then, this is April and even London in southern England is about even with Calgary, Alberta, Canada in latitude. T.S. Eliot’s “The Wasteland” starts with “April is the cruelest month/breeding lilacs out of the dead land.” What Eliot meant was that in April it is spring, and plants star...
I must congratulate the local editorial policy makers of Clovis Media Inc. — owners of this newspaper and the one in Clovis — who are officially and staunchly libertarian in their editorial views. It turns out that researchers have found that, by and large, libertarians are smarter than Republicans or Democrats. This is not to deny the Harvard credentials of Stephen Bannon (business) or Ted Cruz (law), or the Yale credentials of Bill Clinton or the Harvard Law credential of Barack Obama. On average, researchers have found that liberals are a l...
Gas prices mystify me. I have been traveling regularly from Tucumcari to Santa Rosa. It used to be that Santa Rosa’s gasoline prices at its three truck stops (I’m sorry, travel centers) was reliably 10 cents higher per gallon, but that’s not true any more. If I travel back and forth regularly, every third leg, either from Tucumcari to Santa Rosa or vice versa, as I have been, I try to arrange it so I’ll buy gas in the cheaper location. The price differential is no longer reliable, nor does it favor one community over the other. For a few wee...
Tucumcari MainStreet Director Gail Houser said the city is “poised to go forward” with street, sidewalk and greenery improvements to three main blocks of the city's downtown. The $1.3 million Great Blocks program will include roadway improvements, narrower streets and wider, leveled sidewalks, he reported the the Tucumcari City Commission Thursday, as well as lighting and containers for greenery that will be be able to draw storm drainage for watering. The three blocks include single blocks of Main Street east and west of Second Avenue, and...
When I ordered a part online to fix my lawnmower, every website I visited after that, including Facebook, for a few weeks threw ads for lawnmower parts at me. When I ordered a part for a bicycle repair online, the same thing happened. I could have built 50 bikes with the advertised parts that flooded every website I visited after that. My latest: I ordered a musical keyboard case online. Now I’m inundated with ads for keyboards, cases and other musical accessories from three different musical equipment suppliers every time I venture onto a w...
Mark Martinez became Tucumcari's interim city manager during a special meeting of the Tucumcari City Commission Thursday, agreeing to serve in that position until a new city manager is hired. The commission also appointed Mayor Ruth Ann Litchfield, District 3, and Mayor Pro Tem Robert Lumpkin. District 4, to another two-year term in those positions. Thursday's meeting also marked new terms for Lumpkin and District 5 Commissioner Todd Duplantis, who maintained their commission seats after the...
The fates of Russian ex-spy Sergei Skripal and of both U.S. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and U.S. Deputy FBI Director Andrew McCabe in recent weeks illustrated what happens when elected government leaders want to be bosses, not leaders. Skripal’s poisoning in England by a chemical agent you can only find in Russia, a country ruled by an ex-KGB mob boss, and President Donald Trump’s ugly firings of Tillerson and McCabe were meant as warnings. The lesson is you don’t mess with the boss, whether the boss has manipulated himself into one-m...
City Project Manager Mark Martinez is expected to be named Tucumcari’s interim city manager at Thursday’s Tucumcari City Commission meeting. Thursday also marks the end of current City Manager Jared Langenegger’s tenure in that position, a job he has held since October 2014. Langenegger’s last day was “accelerated” at a special meeting of the commission on March 5. Langenegger said moving the date up from April 11 to Thursday was not his idea. The discussion that led to changing his date of leaving was held in executive session, and neither...
Tucumcari’s city business will resume with no changes in the city commission after the two incumbents who faced challengers easily kept their commission seats in the March 6 elections. In District 4, Mayor Pro Tem Robert Lumpkin retained his commission seat with 49 votes. His challenger, Keith Hayes, who organized a recall effort that ended unsuccessfully when voters retained all three commissioners by wide margins. Lumpkin retained his seat with 49 votes versus 23 for Hayes. In District 5, Commissioner Todd Duplantis retained his seat, garneri...
I’ve been doing some reading about psychopaths. I’m not sure how that got started, but it might have been a referral in an article about working in President Donald Trump’s White House. I think he’s a psychopath, but I think Bill Clinton is one, too. Politicians and business leaders are more likely to be psychopaths than the rest of the population, and some who have studied psychopaths say some presidents are right in there. Psychopaths don’t have to be criminals. They represent about 1 percent of the population as a whole. Many end up in pri...
The need for low-priced locally-grown fresh fruits and vegetables in Quay County was a given, but enticing more area growers to devote more land to food crops dominated discussion Thursday at a meeting of the Quay County Food Shed Co-op Exploration group. The session attracted farmers, agricultural and community leaders interested to explore developing a food co-op for the county. Susann Mikkelson, a Socorro-based co-op development specialist for the Rocky Mountain Farmers Union, presided over...
In last week’s Quay County Sun, I led a story about the Tucumcari City Commission with an account of a dispute between the city manager and a city commissioner at the commission’s Feb. 25 meeting and its aftermath — a move to end a final discussion by commissioners before adjournment, which has been always been a part of regular meeting agendas. Granted, it’s a cheap journalistic trick to exaggerate the importance of a disagreement just because it makes for a fun read. I had my reasons for leading with the controversy, however, includi...
Tension between District 1 Commissioner Ralph Moya and City Manager Jared Langenegger Thursday resulted in the Tucumcari City Commission suspending its “Items from Commissioners” segment and adjourning on a 3-2 vote. The vote came at the end of a meeting in which Moya and Langenegger quarreled about two incidents in which Langenegger said the city would not pay to correct situations Moya had brought to the commission’s attention. Distict 2 Commissioner Amy Gutierrez called for the suspension of “Items from Commissioners,” in which commissio...
TUCUMCARI — To make schools safer, we should consider locking doors, installing security cameras, tightening procedures and protocols, planning and drilling for active shooters, and maybe even hiring armed security guards. Please, do not arm teachers. Having taught for a year at Tucumcari High School and a year at the Guadalupe County Correctional facility, I am speaking from experience — only a year of it, but from experience. Teachers have a hard enough time maintaining working relationships with students without students knowing the tea...
There were 17 victims and six heroes, three of whom were also victims, in last week’s shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High in Parkland, Florida. Theirs are the names we should know, so I’m going to repeat them. All but three were teenagers who will never see the adulthood they were approaching. Victims who were also heroes, from the New York Times, CNN and Fox News: Peter Wang,15, was last seen in his Junior Reserve Officer Training Corps uniform, holding a door open so others could escape the gunfire. Football coach Aaron Feis threw him...
The Tucumcari City Commission voted on Thursday to pursue demolition of three abandoned houses among its five high-priority sites for tear-down and clean-up, but abandoned a fourth due to lack of sufficient funds. The fifth, a collapsed building at 101 E. Main St., will require consultation with a structural engineer, because it shares a wall with another business structure, City Manager Jared Langenegger said. The commission also decided on Thursday to seek a grant of up to $600,000 toward establishing a city-owned tire-recycling plant. The...
The 2018 Winter Olympics have started. South Korea put on a lavish, spectacular show to open them, and the games are on. I’m not a great sports fan. On the day before the Super Bowl I had to go to Google to know the match-up. I still have to Google “World Series” for a reminder of who played last year. The Olympics still carry some weight with me, however. That goes back to the 1960s. Credit Jim McKay and Roone Arledge and the approach to sports they developed with ABC’s Wide World of Sports. Starting with that pounding tympani setting down th...
Alida Brown’s retirement as coordinator of the Quay County Health Council after 25 years of improving local health may pass unnoticed by too many people. Brown worked quietly, persistently and persuasively to garner government money and grants for programs that help Quay County residents deal with issues like obesity, diabetes, child health and substance abuse. She has always celebrated results more than recognition Even at the well-attended “come-and-go” reception in her honor on Jan. 18, there was no ceremony. Brown even opened the healt...