Serving the High Plains
Serving the High Plains
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In some recent summers, it seemed that Tucumcari was surrounded by a dome that allowed us to see storms developing all around us but kept the water away from our city. This summer, however, I think we’ve gotten our share. The weeds in my yard have gotten huge, and my half-hearted efforts at yard work have been inadequate to keep up. The parts of the yard I can’t get to with my lawnmower and weed whacker are beginning to look like they could shelter whole herds of deer. On the other hand, cool rains the past week have made the difference bet...
City Manager Jared Langenegger Thursday proposed a city government reorganization plan to the Tucumcari City Commission but did not seek action on the plan. Mostly, he said, he would want to hire an assistant city manager to help him oversee the operations of 18 city departments. “Ideally,” he said, “the span of control for any manager should be no more than five to seven direct reports.” Hiring the assistant, he said would cost the city $97,000 a year in salary and benefits. The salary would be about $66,000 a year, he said. Langene...
City Manager Jared Langenegger introduced two new city department heads at Thursday’s Tucumcari City Commission meeting. He introduced Fire Chief Doug Hogan and a new parks department superintendent, Tomas Gallegos. Hogan brings 22 years of firefighting experience to the fire chief’s position. He comes from San Antonio, Texas, where he was logistics manager and an instructor at the San Antonio Regional Fire Academy. Previously he was an assistant fire chief for the Williamson County fire department north of Austin, Texas. Gallegos was most rec...
The Tucumcari City Commission on Thursday approved an application for funding of a water line along South Mountain Road to accommodate expanding businesses near Mountain Road and Interstate 40. The application seeks grants and loans totaling nearly $910,000 from the New Mexico Financial Authority’s Drinking Water State Revolving Loan Fund. The grant portion is more than $682,000 and the loan would total $227,500. The loan would be paid through revenue increases from water bills. The total proceeds the cost of installing nearly 4,900 feet of 1...
By Steve Hansen QCS Correspondent The 2017 Quay County Fair showed again what happens when the efforts of a few hundred kids combine with the time and patience of parents and other adult volunteers and a carnival for summer's last event before school starts. For the kids, high school age and under, it culminated a year of watering, feeding, weeding, cleaning, and dozens of other chores. The fair is where their fruits and vegetables, but mostly their animals, come to judgment. Judges turned...
If I were African-American, I would think slavery was the only significant issue of the Civil War, because everyday experience would demonstrate that the racism that began with slavery is alive and well in the U.S.A. Honoring the Confederacy would only be honoring racism, if I were African-American. Being white, and therefore not a daily victim of racism, at least in the U.S.A., I am able to take a broader view of the Civil War. I can see there were other issues besides slavery, chief among them the sovereignty of the individual states. The...
Tucumcari Police Department employees will receive a $2.50-per-hour raise across the board in a move Police Chief David Lathrom says will save money in reduced overtime and training expenses. The city commission on Thursday unanimously approved the raises. Lathrom said the raises were needed to help retain existing police officers and recruit new ones. The department is down two officers at present and is at nearly double the amount budgeted for police overtime pay, he said. Police departments in surrounding communities, including Santa Rosa...
I was never as much a Glen Campbell fan as I was a devotee of some of the people he was associated with. Glen Campbell’s death on Aug. 8 was significant to me, though. I followed his hits during my young adulthood and eventually recognized what a consummate musician he was. Early on, I was impressed with the songs he performed, and their writers. Mostly for me that was Jimmy Webb. Aside from Campbell’s megahits, “By the Time I Get to Phoenix,” “Wichita Lineman,” and “Galveston,” Webb also wrote “Up, Up and Away,” and “MacArthur Park,” a...
The Tucumcari City Commission Thursday decided to purchase a “hot mix” paving machine that city officials say will result in more permanent repairs of potholes in city streets. The machine’s $94,000 price will come from city capital outlay funds, City Manager Jared Langenegger told the commission. It will be able to combine aggregate rock with old millings and chunks of old asphalt to produce “hot mix” asphalt to repair potholes. Langenegger said hot mix seals better to create a more permanent patch than “cold mix” patching material. The...
The city of Tucumcari wants to explore the tire-recycling business. The Tucumcari City Commission Thursday unanimously authorized a task force of business people to study the feasibility of a city-owned tire recycling plant. Task force members include Jim Hudson, owner of Hudson’s Auto Supply; Nittin Bhakta, who operates several motels in the city; and Leif Gray, owner of Quality Lube and Tire. Fifth District Commissioner Todd Duplantis, who proposed the idea to the commission, is also on the task force. Duplantis proposed the idea during a w...
I don’t know what it is with these U.S. senators from Arizona. They keep turning out to be mavericks. First, Sen. John McCain, a Republican, cast one of the deciding votes that wrecked the GOP’s “skinny” Obamacare repeal/replace. He’s now being called a traitor. Now comes Rep. Jeff Flake, with sterling conservative credentials, who has published a book that lambastes President Donald Trump. He’s being called a traitor, too, even though he titled his book “The Conscience of a Conservative,” which far from accidentally echoes the title of a book...
About a year ago as I was visiting California, my cell phone was stolen. It took a tense week or so to make sure bank accounts, etc. were safe and to get a new phone. Since then, however, my cell phone has plagued me with five or more junk calls a day. They offer things I neither want nor need or that are too good to be true. Usually they start with a commanding voice saying something like, “Attention!” or “Stop what you’re doing now!” Then they offer to fix your credit score today or ship you up to $5,000 in cash with no credit check, or somet...
The Tucumcari City Commission approved the funding of street resurfacing, sidewalk repairs and utility line relocation for two blocks of Second Street in downtown Tucumcari. The commission approved the spending of $274,711 for the work on Second Street, including about $206,000 in grant funds from the New Mexico Department of Transportation matched by just under $68,100 in city tax funds. The commission also voted to allow to extend the deadline for completing the 800,000- gallon Center Street water tank near downtown Tucumcari to Sept. 21, 51...
The Republicans are still running against Obama, even though the GOP has dropped the ball for the second time on repealing and replacing Obamacare. Meanwhile, the country waits with bated breath to learn what the Republicans will do, now that they have both the presidency and Congress. Since they can’t seem to agree among themselves, they fill the vacuum by blaming Obama for problems, real or imagined, that they feel they have a mandate to fix in some way they can’t decide upon. President Donald Trump is looking at economic stability, a sto...
Jordan Walker of Tucumcari has been named in a civil wrongful death lawsuit in the 2015 shooting death of Patrick Gonzales, 17, of Tucumcari. The suit was filed July 5 in Second Judicial District Court in Albuquerque before Judge Nancy Franchini. Neither Walker, identified as the shooter in the suit, nor anyone else has been criminally charged in Gonzales’ death. On Monday, New Mexico Attorney General Hector Balderas affirmed Tenth Judicial District Attorney Tim Rose’s conclusion that felony charges were not warranted in the case. Balderas in...
Tucumcari’s Senior Citizen Center is operating its meal programs and other activities that assist seniors 60 and older on a little more than $315,400, according to terms of an agreement between the city and the North Central New Mexico Economic Development District Non-Metro Area Agency on Aging. The Tucumcari City Commission on Thursday approved the agreement. Of that amount, $219,597 comes from a grant from the Agency on Aging. The city is contributing nearly $61,900 in money and $47,800 in in-kind services. Another nearly $31,000 comes f...
I have been reading two works of literature lately, one of which is considered serious literature and the other pure, addicting entertainment. A few months ago I completed “Infinite Jest,” by David Foster Wallace. I consider it an achievement to have read its 1,000-plus pages, which, of course, pales in comparison with Wallace’s feat in writing this work. While this work has enough humor, mostly dark, and fantasy elements to be quite entertaining, the novel is considered to be serious literature. The entertainment hides very serious theme...
To Sen. Tom Udall, D-N.M., the waste-to-energy facility planned for Tucumcari's old ethanol plant is part of the solution to the current economic depression of New Mexico and rural America. On July 5, Udall toured the facility with Tucumcari's Bob Hockaday, the scientist who plans to develop the waste-to-energy plant, and local officials. In an interview after the tour, Udall said the planned waste-to-energy facility is a prime example of the kind of action that could pull New Mexico and the rur...
I have recently visited parts of New Mexico that have evaded me in the nine years I have lived here. For the most part, I have concluded most of New Mexico is gloriously diverse in climate and geography and sometimes gloriously, sometimes disturbingly empty. Only the Rio Grande Corridor, the green strip running down the middle of our huge state’s western half, seems to contain enough humanity to host economic diversity. Most recently, I have driven through the desert from the pistachio orchards southwest of Tularosa to Las Cruces, where the d...
Scotty Parker, 13, stopped in Tucumcari Thursday on his way across the country to raise money for a cause he has been helping with since he was 7 years old. Scotty pedaled into town aboard a lightweight road bicycle, accompanied by bike-riding family, friends and local cyclists, and escorted by Tucumcari police and Quay County sheriff's deputies. He started June 8 on the Santa Monica Pier in Santa Monica, California, on his route to North Charleston, South Carolina, on a journey called "Scotty's...
It will never be 1962 again, but there are some highly placed people who want it to return or have never left that year. Our current president, Donald Trump, wants to return manufacturing jobs to the U.S., return Cuba to its Communist enemy status and rebuild the military to Cold War levels. Just like things were in 1962. Even the president cannot reverse globalization and automation, the two forces that have had the worst effects on U.S. manufacturing jobs, which made the U.S a great place to live in 1962. We should keep looking for ways to...
Much has been made in the news lately about the division between urban and rural citizens, and what motivates them to do things like vote for Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump in an election of bad or worse choices. I’m hoping some of the observations listed below might help you understand the differences: • Cities are full of glass-and-steel monuments to the religion of management. In this peculiar religion, the credit and pay don’t go to the worker who puts the O-ring in the hose to make it leakproof. It doesn’t even go to the engineer who des...
In a public work session before the regular meeting, Tucumcari city commissioners discussed using a “tax income funding” (TIF) district as the way to finance downtown improvements under the Metropolitan Redevelopment Area program. In a TIF district, increased property tax revenues, resulting from increased property values due to downtown improvements, would finance the downtown improvements over time. Sites Southwest, the consulting firm that drew up the plan for downtown improvements under MRA, lists projects totaling up to $2.6 million that i...
From April 8 to May 20, Quay County residents took more than 6 million steps toward improving their health. They participated in the Quay County Health Council’s Step into Spring, an informal six-week competition to find out if some friendly challenges could get more people off couches and into walking shoes. It seems to have worked. About 30 teams, comprising 134 individuals, took the challenge, according to Brenda Bishop, program director of the Quay County Cooperative Extension Service and chair of the health council’s fitness and nut...
We’ve reached full employment, but whether that’s good news is debatable. Both the New York Times and Wall Street Journal reported last week that unemployment has bottomed out at 4.3 percent nationwide, which is about as low as it can go. It has not been that low in 16 years. Both newspapers, however, balance this apparent cheer with some sobering realities. Workforce participation is low. About 63 percent of the population participates in the workforce, three percentage points below the 66-percent level recorded before the 2008 recession. Als...