New Mexico In Depth (https://nmindepth.com/prominence/homepage-featured/)
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This is New Mexico In Depth’s mid-week newsletter. We think it’s crucial to stay in touch and tell you what’s on our minds every week. Please let us know what’s on your mind as well. Or, got tips? What do we need to know?
Kim Wright has spent hundreds of hours on the phone with neighbors.Wright, a retired nurse, volunteers with the Cimarron Watershed Alliance, a nonprofit focused on watershed and forest health on the eastern edge of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains. The 2022 Hermits Peak-Calf Canyon fire made the fears of a catastrophic fire feel all the more real. So when she learned a year ago that the federal government was awarding more than $8 million to the alliance to help nine northern New Mexico communities better defend themselves against wildfire, she said, “We couldn’t believe it. We were so excited.”Creating defensible space around a house and structures, thinning nearby forests, and hauling away wood can cost up to $4,000, Wright said, “So this is a huge opportunity for everybody in these communities.”But people needed to know about the opportunity. She found and reserved places for three community meetings that later drew between 40 and 90 attendees each.
In July 2022, a partially paralyzed and “nearly bedridden” 75-year-old man in a wheelchair fell in his bathroom at Albuquerque Uptown Assisted Living, fracturing his hip, according to court filings.
But instead of staff immediately calling an ambulance for the man, who “required assistance in all aspects of his life,” he remained at the facility “in significant pain” for three weeks, his estate’s wrongful death lawsuit alleges. Eventually, the lawsuit says, he was taken to Presbyterian Hospital, where the elderly man was diagnosed with blunt pelvic trauma and a broken hip. He subsequently developed severe bed sores and infections. He was taken home, where his obituary says he died on October 1, 2022, his wife of 35 years at his side.
When the family’s attorney sought the man’s medical records, court documents claim, Uptown administrators said they did not have them. The man’s family could not be reached before publication of this story, and an Uptown official refused to answer New Mexico In Depth’s questions.
If the man’s case prompted scrutiny from state regulators, their report doesn’t appear in the health department’s health facilities inspection reports database.
With all the hand wringing focused on the twin threats of misinformation and disinformation this election year, the country got welcome news Monday: Couy Griffin can’t ever hold public office in New Mexico again. That’s thanks to the U.S. Supreme Court rejecting Griffin’s request to lift a lifetime ban on holding office placed on him by a New Mexico state district judge.You remember Couy Griffin? The former Otero County commissioner and Cowboys for Trump founder who participated in the January 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol. The purveyor of wacky conspiracy theories and articulator of provocative statements such as “the only good Democrat is a dead Democrat.” The man who encouraged Otero County to part with tens of thousands of dollars to pay for what supporters called an audit of the county’s election 2020 results — even though Donald Trump won the county by more than 25 percentage points.That Couy Griffin.Griffin rose to national political fame for his theatrics, leading horseback caravans in support of the former president.Now he is famous for different reasons: He’s the only elected official thus far to be banned from office in connection with the Capitol attack, the Associated Press reported Monday.
This reporting was supported by the International Women’s Media Foundation’s Fund for Indigenous Journalists: Reporting on Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women, Girls, Two Spirit and Transgender People (MMIWG2T). Attorney General Raúl Torrez plans to establish a task force focused on the disproportionate rates at which Indigenous people experience violence and go missing, the New Mexico Department of Justice announced Tuesday. The agency also launched the initial phase of an online portal for tracking cases of missing Indigenous people. Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham’s administration in mid-2023 dissolved a group dedicated to addressing a crisis of missing and murdered Indigenous people. Advocates and affected families spoke against the decision, saying their work was just beginning.
The Legislature seemed to agree, unanimously passing Senate Joint Memorial 2 last month calling on Torrez to convene tribal representatives, survivors and families, and law enforcement officials to update a state response plan created by the defunct task force in 2022 and offer legislative recommendations.
The state budget includes $200,000 for that purpose.
A spokesperson for Torrez, Lauren Rodriguez, said he’ll follow the Legislature’s guidance outlined in the memorial as he figures out the task force’s membership.
The public portal unveiled on Tuesday — which includes 201 missing Indigenous people, with an average time missing of 2,886 days, or nearly eight years — comes two years after lawmakers mandated it.
Lawmakers in 2022 passed a bill requiring the attorney general’s office to develop an online portal for cases of missing Indigenous people.
This reporting was supported by the International Women’s Media Foundation’s Fund for Indigenous Journalists: Reporting on Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women, Girls, Two Spirit and Transgender People (MMIWG2T). Attorney General Raúl Torrez will have $200,000 at his disposal to create a new task force focused on the disproportionate rates at which Indigenous people experience violence and go missing. Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham kept the funding allocated by lawmakers in the $10.2 billion state budget she approved today. It will be available in the next fiscal year starting in July, but it’s unclear if Torrez plans to use it.
The Legislature unanimously passed a memorial last month calling on him to convene a group made up primarily of tribal representatives, survivors and affected families, and law enforcement officials to update a state response plan delivered in 2022 and provide legislative proposals for confronting what’s been identified as a national crisis. But memorials, unlike bills, don’t have the force of law.
Torrez’s office hasn’t responded to New Mexico In Depth’s requests for comment about whether he plans to fulfill the Legislature’s request.
Lawmakers introduced Senate Joint Memorial 2 in response to Lujan Grisham’s quiet disbanding last year of a task force dedicated to finding solutions to the crisis.
The governor’s administration has argued the group finished its work and the state is now carrying forward its recommendations.
This reporting was supported by the International Women’s Media Foundation’s Fund for Indigenous Journalists: Reporting on Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women, Girls, Two Spirit and Transgender People (MMIWG2T).The state budget awaiting Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham’s signature contains $200,000 for Attorney General Raúl Torrez to create a new task force concentrated on a crisis of missing and murdered Indigenous people.The money adds weight to the Legislature’s non-binding request that he take such action. Senate Joint Memorial 2 (SJM 2) passed on the last day of the 30-day legislative session.
The task force’s fate now falls to Lujan Grisham and Torrez, in that sequence.The governor could eliminate the $200,000 appropriation using her line-item authority, which would leave Torrez to decide to form the task force anyway, without funding, or ignore the state Legislature’s request.
Torrez’s office did not respond to New Mexico In Depth’s request to comment on his plans.The dollars are included in a special section of the budget that was added in the final days of the session. That section contains allocations by individual lawmakers. Which lawmakers provided $200,000 for the proposed task force is unknown, but will be published on the legislative website 30 days after Feb. 15, the day the session ended.
Sponsors introduced SJM 2 — which, unlike a bill, doesn’t have the force of law — in response to Lujan Grisham’s decision last year to disband an earlier task force dedicated to finding solutions to the crisis, “leaving questions unanswered,” the legislation reads.
The governor’s staff argue the previous group met its objectives and the state is now executing its numerous recommendations.
New Mexico In Depth reporter Bella Davis joined Executive Director Trip Jennings and Managing Editor Marjorie Childress on Tuesday for a chat about the 2024 legislative session, which ended Feb. 15.
Childress began by reminding everyone that all bills passed by the Legislature are still subject to vetoes from Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham. Jennings added that the $10.2 billion dollar state budget and $1 billion dollar capital outlay legislation are subject to line item vetoes. That’s because they appropriate money and the state constitution gives a governor the power to eliminate words, passages and individual appropriations in any bill that spends state money.
The audience asked what New Mexico In Depth was least happy about coming out of the session. “I’m upset that I don’t know more about how much money lobbyists spend on lawmakers,” Jennings said.
This reporting was supported by the International Women’s Media Foundation’s Fund for Indigenous Journalists: Reporting on Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women, Girls, Two Spirit and Transgender People (MMIWG2T). The New Mexico Legislature has asked Attorney General Raúl Torrez to create a new task force focused on a crisis of missing and murdered Indigenous people after a memorial containing the request passed in the final hour of the legislative session, which concluded at noon today.Senate Joint Memorial 2 cleared the House on Thursday morning after passing in the Senate last week.
A spokeswoman for Torrez didn’t respond to a question from New Mexico In Depth about whether he plans to act on lawmakers’ request. Unlike a bill, the memorial isn’t enforceable. Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham quietly dissolved a task force dedicated to finding solutions to the crisis in mid-2023.
Her staff said the group achieved its objectives and the state is carrying forward its recommendations. But some task force members believed their work was just beginning, and a handful of impacted families protested the governor’s decision in October.
An effort to fix the state’s anti-corruption statute after the New Mexico Supreme Court barred prosecutors from bringing criminal charges under several of its provisions died in the state Senate. The legislation languished in a committee after clearing the House 66-0 with two weeks to go in the legislative session, which ended at noon today.
Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham greenlighted the effort to fix the ethics law as the session kicked off in January. House Bill 8, sponsored by Rep. Kathleen Cates, D-Rio Rancho, would have fixed the Governmental Conduct Act, which provides standards for ethical conduct on the part of public officials, employees of state or local agencies, and lawmakers.
The New Mexico Supreme Court ruled that three of the statute’s four provisions used by prosecutors were too vaguely written to result in criminal charges.
Justices considered the statute in a consolidated case involving a county treasurer who offered money to an employee for sex; a district attorney who used her position to intimidate officers investigating her use of a public vehicle for personal reasons; a judge who illegally recorded private conversations in a courthouse; and a state cabinet secretary who used her position to access the tax records of a previous employer. In the latter case, prosecutors alleged she was trying to prevent an audit of that employer because she had embezzled money from them. (Her embezzlement conviction was later overturned on appeal with the court saying the statute of limitations had run out.)
After the Supreme Court ruling, prosecutors couldn’t criminally charge these public officials for state ethics violations.
The proposed fixes to the ethics law included barring partisan political activity while on duty or undertaking it in a way that uses public resources.