I am writing today to announce the closure of the New Mexico Independent. After three and a half years of operation in New Mexico, the board of the American Independent News Network, has decided to shift publication of its news…
While environmental activists played their part yesterday during demonstrations at the capitol building, going so far as to dress up as solar panels and to sing the tune of “You Are My Sunshine,” their counterparts, the anti-cap-and-trade contingency who has…
Roughly one quarter of University of New Mexico students are unimpressed with the state’s flagship public school, according to a survey that questioned college students about their higher education experiences.
The New Mexico Secretary of State’s Office (SOS) decided to build its own new campaign finance reporting database rather than spend upwards of $800,000 to buy an “off-the-shelf” product, Deputy Secretary of State Don Francisco Trujillo II said Friday.
“It came down to finances,” Trujillo explained the decision to NMI, adding that the off-the-shelf product would have invariably needed upgrades. “No one has pockets of money right now.”
The office used an in-house developer to build the database, supplementing those efforts with contractors, Trujillo said.
A link to that new database was leaked to a handful of people to preview the secretary of state’s new campaign finance and disclosure system on its Web site, but officials are saying now that problems have knocked out that new database and other systems that are necessary for the office to function.
Officials are trying to figure out how much work must be done to recover the database for the new campaign finance and disclosure system.
As Trujillo described it Friday, the secretary of state’s current campaign finance system is antiquated and consists of two separate programs that don’t talk to one another.
In computer lingo, they don’t interface well.
One component of the SOS’s current campaign finance reporting system, program houses campaign finance reports filed prior to 2004 by political candidates and elected officials.
The other program consists of campaign finance reports filed after 2004.
It’s clunky, and hard to use, Trujillo said, quoting members of the public and the media who have complained of the current system.
“No one likes the system,” Trujillo said.
