Serving the High Plains
Serving the High Plains
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When new Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham fired her first education secretary, Karen Trujillo, in July 2019 after just six months on the job, I thought it was a rash decision. But to be fair, I was biased. Like many people in Las Cruces, I knew Karen a little bit, and liked her. Still, the governor’s explanation seemed weak. “It is absolutely imperative that we genuinely transform public education in this state,” she said. “We must identify a vibrant and ambitious new leader for the Public Education Department as soon as we can.” “She just didn’t ha...
Every two years New Mexico voters get the chance to make changes to our state constitution. Some years they’re big, fundamental changes, like scrapping the old state Board of Education in favor of a secretary appointed by the governor or ending the cash bail system. Some years they are just tinkering around the edges. This is one of those years. Voters will have four constitutional amendments on the ballot this year. Two of them will increase state support for disabled veterans and all veterans who have been honorably discharged. I don’t know h...
My best friend Kelly and I frequently had loud, boisterous arguments over politics that led folks to believe that we disagreed about everything. They were mistaken. His views were influenced by watching Fox News, and mine are influenced by watching CNN, so that’s where the arguments would start. But they didn’t end there. It usually didn’t take long for both of us to call BS on the TV talking points and get to the heart of the matter. That didn’t always lead to an agreement, but it almost always led to a common understanding. Of course,...
If you need assistance with your federal benefits, you can speak with staff members for U.S. Sens. Martin Heinrich and Ben Ray Lujan at their district offices. If you have issues with the city or county that need to be resolved, you can reach your representative on the city council and county commission at their offices. Constituent services are a vital part of the job for most elected officials. If, however, your problems are with the state, you can try reaching your state senator and representative, but they don’t have an office and there’s a...
For the past five decades or longer, the state Legislature has been planning for what we will do when the oil runs out. We’ve set up permanent funds to ensure we’ll be able to keep our schools open and provide other essential services, tucking away money that is not needed now. We haven’t planned nearly as well for the depletion of an even more precious resource — water. The state didn’t even have a water plan until 1987, and the one drafted that year led more to regional competition than conservation. Many of the plans submitted to the Inter...
Several years ago, when I was covering state government from Santa Fe, I attended the annual briefing given to reporters prior to the upcoming wildfire season. After going over the current conditions and expectations for the coming months, the discussion turned to reporters’ safety. We were warned about the unpredictable nature of fire and the importance of following their directions at all times. At the end, they talked about worst-case scenarios. The instructor pulled out what looked like an aluminum-foil blanket and explained that when a...
Expectations were sky-high in 2005 when British entrepreneur Sir Richard Branson inked a 20-year lease on a new spaceport that had yet to be built in southern New Mexico. The lease called for Virgin Galactic to pay $1 million a year for the first five years, with payments after that dependent on the company’s success in developing an industry for space tourism. There was no reason to believe that the venture would not be a huge success. Virgin Galactic reported that 38,000 people from 126 countries had already registered for the opportunity t...
The U.S. Supreme Court has just stripped away the final protections against gerrymandering. With a series of rulings in the 1960s, the court established that the 14th Amendment required political districts to be redrawn so that “the vote of any citizen is approximately equal in weight to that of any other citizen in the state.” The Roberts court has taken a two-step approach to dismantling those protections. In 2019, the court ruled that while gerrymandering intended to dilute the political strength of racial minorities was still a vio...
Here’s to the deep state, or, what we used to refer to as the federal government. With little fanfare, the Federal Trade Commission has leveled the playing field for millions of workers. The FTC freed an estimated 30 million employees who are now bound to their current employers through non-compete clauses. On a 3-2 vote, the commission found that the clauses are an unfair method of competition and therefore a violation of Section 5 of the FTC Act which prohibits “unfair or deceptive acts or practices in or affecting commerce.” There’s an exem...
The capital outlay bill passed by the Legislature this year provides just under $290 million for 136 projects throughout the state, including $20 million for steam tunnel and electrical infrastructure upgrades at New Mexico State University. NMSU will also get $10 million for facility construction in the Creative Media Institute and $1.575 million for road improvements on the Gadsden campus. All 136 projects will be funded without any kind of ranking system to determine what our top priorities are, or vetting process to ensure that the projects...
The geographic political divisions in New Mexico have become so entrenched that both parties have just stopped trying in areas of the state where the other side has the advantage. Of the 42 seats up for election in the state Senate this year, only 15 will be decided in the general election. Democrats will claim 17 seats and Republicans will win 10 without posting a yard sign, shaking a hand, making a campaign promise or kissing a baby. Democrats have apparently given up on the seat they held from 1989 to 2020 when John Arthur Smith was in...
I was driving through Colorado last summer when I encountered a series of electronic highway signs warning me to, “Slow the fast down.” Being a product of the Colorado school system, I was taken aback by the poor grammar and sentence construction. Then it occurred to me that “fast” was a four-letter word starting with “f” so I was supposed to think — well, you know. How edgy. Just what I want in my highway signs. Now, it’s posted alongside Interstate 25, next week it will be doing the opening set at Jimmy’s Chuckle Hut. There’s apparentl...
Boy, it sure is hot today. How hot is it? It’s so hot I bought a loaf of bread and by the time I got home it was toast. It’s so hot my grandfather’s chicken laid an omelet. It’s so hot his cows are producing evaporated milk. It’s so hot the catfish are fried by the time you reel them in. It’s so hot the Statue of Liberty disrobed. It’s so hot I went to Congress just to be around some shady characters. It’s so hot I intentionally leave the toilet seat up to get icy stares from my wife. It’s so hot my children’s crayons are now watercolors. It...
District Judge Fred Van Soelen of Clovis has until Oct. 1 to decide if the redistricting map that allowed Democrats to wrest control of the 2nd Congressional District will still be in place for the 2024 election. Recently the state Supreme Court sent a lawsuit filed by Republicans seeking to overturn the new map back to District Court, while also giving Judge Van Soelen guidance on what he should consider in making his decision. The order instructs that “a reasonable degree” of partisan gerrymandering is permissible, so long as it’s not “egre...
My unsolicited advice for this year’s graduates is simple: Move slow and fix things. In 2014, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg coined the phrase “move fast and break things” to describe the mentality of our new 20-year-old tech-sector corporate leaders who believed all human knowledge gained over the centuries had been made obsolete by quantum computing. “The idea is that if you never break anything, you’re probably not moving fast enough,” Zuckerberg explained. He expounded on the idea during a college lecture. “A lot of times people are ju...
In 1981, Sally Field won a Golden Globe for her portrayal of an ambitious and reckless newspaper reporter in the film “Absence of Malice.” The reporter uses information leaked by a federal prosecutor for a front-page story wrongfully accusing the character played by Paul Newman of the murder of a union boss. The evil newspaper gets away with it because of a 1964 Supreme Court ruling. The film’s title comes from the standard set in the case of New York Times Co. v Sullivan. Former Public Safety Commissioner L.B. Sullivan successfully sued the T...
Do we have the right to see Donald Trump’s mug shot? Do we have the right to see anybody’s mug shot if they haven’t had their day in court yet? The second question came up during this year’s Sunshine Week event, which featured an outstanding panel of local journalists talking about crime reporting. The consensus was that, while we all have the right to view any public document, the media also has a responsibility as to what it publishes. Bob Moore, the former editor of the El Paso Times who is now heading El Paso Matters, noted that it is ofte...
I had hoped that legislators would take advantage of the unprecedented $9.4 billion budget this year to begin the transition away from an economy that is dependent on oil and gas revenue, but I don’t think that was ever on the agenda. The governor had promised before the election that we would all get checks in the mail if she won, so that was a given. Legislators also passed new tax credits for the film industry, and a phased-in reduction of the gross receipts tax. Those moves will help, but seem inadequate to the challenge that everybody s...
I’m not at all comfortable with my new position to the right of Republican leaders on foreign policy. As a child who grew up watching the Vietnam War on the nightly news and fearing it would still be raging when I turned 18, I have always opposed the military adventurism of Republican leaders, whether it was Richard Nixon in Vietnam and Cambodia, Ronald Reagan in Central America or George W. Bush in Iraq. We all knew our roles back then. Republican leaders saw the world as a threat to be neutralized and an economic opportunity to be e...
Term limits can be incredibly liberating, as former Republican Gov. Gary Johnson demonstrated when he professed his love for marijuana shortly after winning reelection in 1998. Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham has the twin advantages of not having to run again, and going into her second term with financial resources that are beyond the wildest dreams of her predecessors. The state exceeded revenue estimates by $3.6 billion during the last fiscal year. The proposed $9.44 billion budget now under consideration is up by $4 billion from when Bill...
The last time the New Mexico State University Board of Regents set out to pick a new leader, after having unceremoniously ridded themselves of Garrey Carruthers, they had a hard time picking between the two finalists for the job. And so they hired both of them. At a combined salary of almost $1 million. Let’s hope there’s a clear frontrunner this time. The decision in 2018 to hire both Dan Arvizu, at a yearly salary of $500,000, and John Floros, at $450,000, came as a complete surprise to NMSU faculty, staff and students. Carruthers had bee...
If we were to randomly pick a time, date and place to throw a party, I doubt many people would choose midnight on Jan. 1 outdoors. It’s way too cold. Our forecast often calls for below-freezing temperatures, though we’re usually better off than in other areas of the country. The weather forecasts for celebrating on the East Coast often see freezing rain or snow as midnight approaches on Jan. 1. And sometimes it’s worse. It was minus 24 degrees a few weeks ago in my original hometown of Denver. You just never know this time of year. Then there...
I was disappointed to learn that filmmakers plan to resume production on “Rust,” and urge state regulators to keep a much closer eye on that set this time. I can’t imagine why anybody would want to see the film now, other than for morbid curiosity. Every time there is a scene where an actor pretends to get shot, viewers will know that a real person was shot and killed during filming. Cinematographer Halyna Hutchins was shot by the film’s star and producer, Alec Baldwin, who believed he was firing a prop gun loaded with blanks. Director Joel So...