Serving the High Plains
Serving the High Plains
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The city of Tucumcari will continue its contract with Monarch Properties of Albuquerque for the management of the Chaparral Apartments for another three years, the city commission decided during a special meeting March 31. Under the contract, the city pays Monarch $56 per unit per month, or $16,128 annually, to manage the 24-unit apartment complex at 800 W. Hancock Ave. as rent-subsidized housing. The city's share of management costs is subsidized as rent for the units by the U.S. Department of...
Yay. That’s about as much enthusiasm as I can drum up for New Mexico’s legalization of marijuana for recreational use by adults. If the Legislature had rejected the proposal so important to Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham that she called it back for three long and costly days to bring it about, my reaction would have been, “Oh, darn.” I approve of marijuana’s legalization, but with lots of reservations. Marijuana and other consciousness-altering cannabis products can be enjoyed safely in homes or in specially designated areas without causing a...
Organizers of efforts to revitalize Tucumcari’s Five Mile Park introduced a plan that has been more than three years in the making Thursday to the City Commission in a public work session before the regular commission meeting later that evening. The organizers did not ask for money. But Daniel Zamora, the next Quay County manager and organizer of disc golf activities at Five Mile Park since 2017, asked the commission to give the plan official recognition that would qualify the plan for grants from from various sources. The plan would a...
It is a valid question whether the civil rights bill the New Mexico Legislature passed in the usual flurry of legislation before its March 20 close protects individual rights or serves as a full-employment act for civil rights plaintiffs’ attorneys. Especially concerning is the bill’s end of “qualified immunity” for police officers, which has been a feature of similar bills across the country in the wake of Black Lives Matter activism since the death of George Floyd. Floyd died on May 25 after his neck was pinned to the street under the knee of...
I was opposed to attaching a national $15 minimum wage to the COVID-19 bill that President Joe Biden signed into law on March 11. I am still opposed to a national $15 minimum wage. I am in favor of raising minimum wage to provide a better living standard for our lowest-paid workers, but I think the issue needs study and perspective before such a law is enacted. That law should not set an arbitrary standard for the nation. That's because I think the new minimum wages should reflect realities of different regions. A $15 per hour minimum wage...
Tucumcari police have implemented most of the recommendations from a 2017 review of the city police department’s policies and procedures, Police Chief David Lathrom told the city commission Thursday at a public work session before the commission’s regular meeting. District 1 Commissioner Ralph Moya had asked for discussion at a work session of the department’s response to the 2017 report, compiled by former New Mexico State Police Lt. Nathan Wallace. “A lot of what’s in that report, we were doing anyway,” Lathrom said. The report had faulted...
I still haven’t recovered much of my sense of smell since having COVID-19, but I find I can live with limits on the sniffer, even if I can’t fully enjoy corned beef and cabbage on St. Patrick’s day today. I know I share this lingering post-COVID-19 symptom with many who have otherwise recovered from the disease. The scientific term for this condition is “anosmia,” which is pronounced “a NOSE mia.” It basically means “a nose, missing in action (mia).” There have been hundreds of thousands of words written about loss of smell, one of the most c...
Tucumcari could be poised to prosper from newly legalized marijuana, at least one city commissioner and City Manager Mark Martinez agree. Two factors work in Tucumcari’s favor, District 1 Commissioner Ralph Moya said Thursday during a regular Tucumcari City Commission meeting. One is Tucumcari’s location near the Texas border. The other is its convenience to Interstate 40, Moya said. As an owner of property on historic Route 66, Moya said he has received inquiries about possible retail locations for the sale of legalized cannabis. He said loc...
Tucumcari city commissioners considering changes to the city's zoning laws and their enforcement wrestled with issues that included poor landowners, lack of enforcement manpower and which aspects of zoning should receive priority. The discussion during a Thursday public work session that preceded the commission's regular meeting focused mostly on what to do about the city's abandoned homes and buildings. Connie Loveland, director of Tucumcari MainStreet, which focuses on revitalizing the city's...
I was fortunate to watch Texas’ power supply difficulties from afar. Tucumcari was far enough. I didn’t have to go to Cancun. In Tucumcari, the closest we got to Texas’ Texas-size electricity issues was one 45-minute “controlled outage,” on Feb. 16 after a weekend of deep-freeze temperatures and snow that we shared with most of the country. The power emergency that led Tucumcari into the “rolling blackout” circuit ended 15 minutes into the next 45-minute outage, which involved Santa Rosa. That one ended early as the emergency status that b...
OK, Ron Warnick, here it is. I am finally going to confess to the world that I have had COVID-19. I told Warnick, the Quay County Sun’s full-time journalist, about it, but very few others. Warnick, however, urged me repeatedly to tell my story. Others did, too. So here it is: I had a “mild to moderate” case in August, which made me feel like a one-man war zone for about three weeks. I went through a short stretch of fever and chills, an incidence of heart palpitations that sent me to the emergency room, chronic fatigue and long daily naps, and...
The Tucumcari City Commission is one meeting away from approving a donation of three baseball and softball diamonds to the Tucumcari Municipal Schools district after preliminarily approving the agreement Thursday. Three fields would be given to the district, including the diamond used for high-school boys baseball and two diamonds used for girls softball games. The Little League fields to the southwest of those diamonds will remain city property. The school district plans to build new baseball and softball fields, and add parking and a...
I've been watching bits and pieces of former President Donald Trump's impeachment trial, and it is plain to me that partisanship is overwhelming reason and any semblance of jurisprudence. The trial will be over before this column is published. If it were a criminal case, not just a decision on whether Trump will be allowed to run for office again, I would be impressed with the Democrats' prosecution and their appeals to the emotions of the jury, who also happen to be the victims of the Jan. 6 mob attack on the Capitol at the center of Trump's i...
There is widespread despair over the impact of remote learning due to the COVID-19 pandemic, likely because kids do learn better in close quarters. Not all educators agree that isolation is a critical factor. One of those is Erika Christakis, an early childhood educator. Christakis reminded us in a December Atlantic article that American public schools weren’t doing such a great job before the pandemic. Christakis says that’s because remote learning is actually worsening things that make current classroom learning ineffective now. The cla...
The reason-defying rise of video game retailer GameStop’s stock price seems to combine the psychology of the “housing bubble” of the 2000s and the populism that gave us four years with Donald Trump at our nation’s helm. GameStop looks like a struggling giant when seen through the usual Wall Street lenses of financial performance, annual reports and quarterly conference calls with investment analysts. It’s a $9-billion corporation with 6,000 stores. To gamers of a certain age — that is, millennials and those who are entering adulthood after them...
Tucumcari City commissioners seemed to agree Thursday to pursue funding from capital outlay funds through the New Mexico Legislature to continue repairing and replacing sewer lines and facilities along Route 66 on the east side of town. After discussion at a public work session Thursday, the commissioners and City Manager Mark Martinez, along with Community Development Director Vicki Strand and project manager Ralph Lopez, seemed to agree to pursue $723,000 in capital outlay funds from the 2021 Legislature to advance the sewer line project....
I almost got a lump in my throat (not really) to see things return to normal 24 hours after President Joseph Biden took the oath of office. With COVID-19 preventing the parties and parades that usually occupy a new president’s first day, Biden instead marched resolutely to the Resolute Desk and signed 17 executive orders, the most significant of which undid many of former President Donald Trump’s most controversial directives. He undid Trump’s ban on travel to the U.S. from some Muslim-majority nations and Trump’s release of many square...
Despite some protests from neighboring homeowners, the Tucumcari City Commission on Thursday approved a club liquor license for the Tucumcari Zia Club at its proposed location on Second Street just south of downtown. The club's site is the former Cooper Cleaners location at 428 S. Second St. The Zia Club plans to use it as a site for live Hispanic music shows and other occasional events and use the proceeds to benefit the community, according to Jerry Lopez, one of the partners in developing...
We’ve had the attempted insurrection of Jan. 6. Washington now hosts more U.S. troops than global hot spots to defend against threats related to President-elect Joe Biden’s inauguration. And now, only now, the time has come to pile on the president. Suddenly, Congress and the media cannot find enough ways to mount retribution against President Donald Trump. Neither, so it seems, can corporate America. I don’t feel sorry for the president. I have been wanting him relieved of office since it became plain that with arguably less knowledge of th...
I had a column written about President Donald Trump’s second impeachable phone call, this time to Georgia’s secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger. Then Jan. 6 happened. That’s when organized democracy prevailed after a delusional mob, presumptuously assuming they represented a majority, which they did not, was thwarted in an attempt to force their will on Congress. Congress then acted to officially validate the will of both the voters and the electors by certifying the election victory of President-elect Joe Biden and Vice Presi...
This week, we gleefully put behind us a year of closings, cancellations and isolation, and enter a year that gives us hope that at least some social life will return as we chip away at the COVID-19 pandemic. I have tried to make the best of a year spent mostly at home with my wife, our cat and my trusty desktop computer. The computer hosted just about all of my work and leisure life in 2020. I got pretty good at Zoom, interacting with images of others trapped in offices or living rooms, and my work has consisted mostly of covering meetings I...
For what it’s worth, here are my public affairs resolutions for 2021: I will take the COVID-19 vaccine as soon as I can get it. I will continue to wear masks as much as possible in public, wash hands and maintain distance as long as is necessary, which is likely to be long after the shots. I will continue to treat the pandemic the same as I would an invasion by a foreign power Would COVID-deniers stand on London streets defending their rights during the Nazi bombing in World War II? I don’t think so. How can they see mounting death rates, ove...
Merry Christmas. The year is almost over. President Trump will soon be free to watch right-wing TV and overload Twitter without the burden of responsibility. The best thing he will leave us with, however, is Operation Warp Speed, which just might make the COVID-19 pandemic manageable without economic shutdowns by the end of 2021. The vaccines alone make 2021 worth looking forward to. The end, or at least the weakening, of COVID-19 will bring an economic explosion that has seldom been matched, I think. When the planet-size river of pent-up deman...
Two wastewater projects received action Thursday from the Tucumcari City Commission, along with agreements for monitoring the city’s old and current landfills. The commission also approved a change order that reduces the cost of the Second Street reconstruction and remodeling by more than $135,000. The commission acted unanimously to approve an agreement with CDM Smith of Albuquerque for $347,679 for evaluation and survey services for a city’s wastewater reuse project. The $5.2 million project would channel treated wastewater to a spr...
I used to think lawyers had to have above-average intelligence and more than their share of common sense. Now, I see an army of attorneys spouting mindless conspiracy theories and ignoring mountains of evidence to the contrary as they file more than 50 doomed lawsuits in an attempt to overturn an election their client, President Donald Trump, lost fair and square last month. Lawyers have never had the reputation for operating ethically, although most attorneys I know do conduct their affairs with honor. The cynic in me, and I assume in...