#covid19

Water crisis hits Navajo community amid looming COVID-19 fears

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Recent COVID-19-panic shopping stripped store shelves of bottled water, leaving the 2,000 residents of To’Hajiilee without drinking water. Over the years, five of the six wells supplying the satellite Navajo Nation community 20 miles west of Albuquerque have run dry, with the last generating mineral and sediment-steeped water that looks like orange juice and smells like rotten eggs. “A lot of people don’t drink this water because it has bad taste, even when you make it with coffee,” said To’Hajiilee Chapter President Mark Begay. 

When the stores ran short after the panic buying in mid-March, the Albuquerque Bernalillo County Water Authority began sending water tankers to the community, which lies within the boundaries of Bernalillo County. Residents drove to them to fill water jugs, buckets, and anything else they can, congregating while trying to maintain social distance, Begay said. This situation comes as the state of New Mexico has ordered people not to gather in groups of more than five and to regularly wash hands.

2020 Legislative Session

Lawmakers: Budget excludes rural, tribal voices in education

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Bernalyn Via of the Mescalero Apache tribe visited the Roundhouse on Fb. 10 to lobby lawmakers. Photo credit / Trip Jennings

As the annual legislative session races to an end Thursday, think of the New Mexico Legislature as an industrial-strength strainer. Only a portion of bills will pass through. But some lawmakers are saying too many bills being filtered out come from communities that are home to students identified in the landmark Yazzie Martinez education lawsuit as shortchanged in the state’s public schools.The House of Representatives and Senate may be wrangling over last-minute changes to the state budget, but raging behind the scenes is a debate over whether the spending plan is responding to the court order that demands New Mexico educate its at-risk students better.

Food Stamps

Federal rules could cut food aid for up to 37,000 New Mexicans

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Up to 37,000 New Mexicans will lose food aid under stricter mandates approved Wednesday by the Trump administration, the governor’s office reported. Nearly 700,000 people will be affected across the U.S.

Currently, New Mexico waives work requirements statewide for able-bodied adults without children, but under the finalized rule change it will have less flexibility to do so going forward. Without that waiver, adults ages 18 to 49 can not receive SNAP benefits for more than three months in a three year period unless they work at least 20 hours a week or participate in a job training program. The number of recipients varies by month, but the state Human Services Department said 37,164 were eligible in October 2019. The change is likely to trim $5.5 billion from the federal food stamp program across the country over five years.

Economic Development

The prospect of more Airbnbs tempts a struggling New Mexico town

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From her office in Questa, New Mexico’s Visitor Center,
Lindsay Mapes can walk out the door, cross a vacant lot and peer through the
windows of several empty houses. Some look ready for their residents to return,
with photos still on the walls and chairs at the table. In others, the ceilings
have begun to sag. A cream-colored house with a peaked tin roof and a wooden
porch gazes eastward toward the Sangre de Cristo Mountains. With its dramatic
views and architectural charm, it has what real estate agents call great
potential.

child wellbeing
Samantha Sanchez, 10, reads for 20 minutes in Sharon Scarlott’s class at Gonzales Community School in Santa Fe on Dec. 20. The Martinez administration has proposed $13.5 million in the coming session to pay for remediation and intervention for students struggling to read in kindergarten through third grade. (Jane Phillips/The Santa Fe New Mexican)

Dismal Kids Count data tracks with Martinez administration

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Samantha Sanchez, 10, reads for 20 minutes in Sharon Scarlott’s class at Gonzales Community School in Santa Fe on Dec. 20, 2013. The Martinez administration had proposed $13.5 million for remediation and intervention for students struggling to read in kindergarten through third grade. The easiest number to understand in the just-released 2019 Annie E. Casey Kid’s Count report is that New Mexico ranks 50th overall in child well-being. That’s a stark ranking, the second year in a row New Mexico earned that distinction.

Poverty

Judge sees progress in state efforts on Medicaid, SNAP

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U.S. District Judge Kenneth Gonzales laid out the stakes in a long-simmering lawsuit over the Human Services Department’s record of denying food stamp and Medicaid benefits to eligible New Mexicans during a status hearing Thursday at the federal courthouse in Las Cruces. U.S. District Judge Kenneth Gonzales

He’d visited the HSD office on Utah Street in Las Cruces where he had looked over cases with a front-line worker there. One client was a single mom with two kids under 6. She’d lost SNAP benefits because she had not submitted documents that apparently were already in the system. Then her family lost Medicaid benefits, even though they weren’t up for renewal, because of the decision on food stamps — something that violates federal rules.

Children

What does your neighborhood say about children’s opportunity?

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We want to make sure you don’t miss a fascinating new interactive map that shows how different neighborhoods in our cities and states compare when it comes to poor children moving out of poverty in adulthood. Called the Opportunity Atlas, the Census Bureau announced it in a blog yesterday in which its ambitions are stated clearly in the form of questions the project hopes to answer. “How do children’s chances of climbing the income ladder vary across neighborhoods in America? Where is opportunity lacking and what can we do to improve opportunity in such areas?”

Created by the Census Bureau in collaboration with researchers from Harvard and Brown universities, the project is squarely focused on children. But it turns the normal approach to tracking childhood poverty on its head by visualizing how poor children raised in a certain geographic area fare economically as adults.

Children

How do you solve the brain drain in New Mexico?

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Searchlight New Mexico’s Amy Linn took a deep look this week at the state’s dismal record at persuading talented, educated young people to stay once they’re college graduates. The major stumbling block? There are plenty, but the one that appears to elbow all the rest out of contention for first-place honors is jobs, or, more precisely, the lack of them. To open the story Linn tells the story of an accomplished young man from Farmington who graduated from the University of New Mexico in 2014 with ample experience in his chosen field.  But he couldn’t find the “right job,” so he moved to Ventura, California, to pursue a career.

2018 New Mexico Election

Q&A: Apodaca says investing in NM will improve education, kids’ lives

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New Mexico In Depth is speaking with the candidates for New Mexico governor on the issues of early childhood, child wellbeing and education in New Mexico. Jeff Apodaca of Albuquerque is a former media executive and is one of three candidates seeking the Democratic nomination.  This Q&A has been edited for length and clarity. Sylvia Ulloa: What would early childhood education in New Mexico look like in an Apodaca administration? And what is your plan for offering early childhood care and education in rural New Mexico, where they often lack infrastructure and access to skilled early childhood educators?

child wellbeing

Child care ‘cliff effect’ jeopardizes working parents as incomes rise

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A couple of years ago a mother came to Ray Jaramillo, director of a childcare center in Las Cruces. She worked for minimum wage at Burger King, but was offered a supervisory position with better hours and a wage bump to over $9 an hour. She worried the extra money could cause her to lose childcare assistance for her two little girls. Between her and her spouse’s salary, their new earning power would push her family over the line for government-subsidized child-care. She had to figure out whether to take the promotion and risk paying thousands of dollars more each year for childcare, or forgo the extra family income.