New Mexico Mercury

What’s happened to Albuquerque? Part 3: Police trust

If there’s anything city residents need to hear about during this mayoral season it’s how the candidates plan to give Albuquerque a police force it can trust and admire, and is no longer afraid of?

How would a mayor accomplish that turnaround? I know many of us would like to learn in detail how that could be done.

Living in a city where one worries about the police going rogue, killing people, beating them up, drawing guns at routine traffic stops, and the like makes doing business and going about one’s daily life even harder than it already is...

Prejudice looks like this

Santa Fe has seen in the last month an act of unique and open-hearted political courage and an example of dumbfounding intolerance when it comes to same-sex marriage and the civil rights of all persons in our state.

Governor Martinez’s vetoing of a bill to help same-sex domestic partners of military personnel expedite acquiring professional licenses to carry on their careers when they return to the poorest state in the union is so blatantly bigoted it’s hard to fathom in the 21st century...

Insight New Mexico - Bennett Hammer

V.B. Price speaks with longtime civil rights activist, former National ACLU Board Director and founder of the Bennett A. Hammer LGBT Archives Project.

What’s happened to ABQ?  Part 2: Think tank city

Albuquerque’s economy has fallen into a big hole.  It’s lost sight of itself. It’s floundering in the dark. The l950s don’t work anymore. The city needs new perspectives to help it find its way. Wouldn’t it be useful if this year’s mayoral race gave voters an arena in which to ponder and assess new economic models and plans, ones designed to rescue us from these doldrums?

What’s happened to Albuquerque? Part 1: Growth uninhibited by water supply

Should Albuquerque be allowed to grow in size and population without tying its growth directly to its projected water supply over the next 50 to 100 years?

Should any big city in New Mexico permit sprawl development on the basis of “dedications,” which means, in the world of water, mere promises to find water after the developments have been built and populated?

Insight New Mexico - Laura Paskus

This week V.B. Price talks with independent environmental journalist Laura Paskus about New Mexico's water situation.

Housebreaking fossil fuels

While Heather Wilson was losing her Senate bid to Martin Heinrich last year, her campaign team must have been drunk on PR from the Fossil Fuel lobby. The rhetoric tipped them off the bar stool.

She accused then Rep. Heinrich of being supported by not only “radical environmental groups,” but also by “the radical environmental industry” with their “extremist agenda.”

I wonder what a “radical environmental industry” might be. Does it sell camping gear and sleeping bags or manufacture trail mix? Does it produce energy without polluting ground water and without using taxpayer dollars to clean up its excreta? Does it actually believe in free enterprise without a governmental crutch?

A systems approach to understanding water in New Mexico

Because everything is connected to everything else, water crises have a cascading affect all along a water system, even one as huge as that of the Southwest and Mountain West United States.

A constitutional crisis

Suffering through this epic drought with the grim prospect of getting a mere tenth of its normal water allocation, members of the board of the Carlsbad Irrigation District voted unanimously last week to make a “priority” call on the Pecos River.

This may seem like an obscure event in an obscure region of what many consider the Nation’s most obscure and foreign state. But it is a drastic measure...

IAN MCLEOD – 1935 to 2013

A message came this morning that Ian McLeod, a beloved friend, valued member of our extended family, and long time transplant New Mexican, died of heart failure, on April 5, in Aberystwyth, Wales.

Ian lived his life by his own standards. He was both frugal and philanthropic, an investor and a saver and a risk taker. He was a cosmopolitan traveler and a deeply rooted person, a violinist and a maker of violins, a stone in the shoe of mindless bureaucrats and a person of self-amused and elegant eccentricities...