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.
ProPublica, the nonprofit investigative news organization, has updated a chart that examines how transparent states are with federal stimulus dollars in their respective jurisdictions.
New Mexico gets an underwhelming rating for the website created to keep track of funding from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, aka the federal stimulus package. Here’s ProPublica’s description of the Land of Enchantment’s efforts:
New Mexico’s recovery site includes links to other economic stimulus-related pages — mostly federal — as well as a few news items. There is a page for submitting project proposals, but no portal to transparency information, such as spending or contracting data.
This isn’t the first time New Mexico’s federal stimulus website has taken a hit.
A group in D.C. last month gave New Mexico’s efforts a failing grade in a 25-page report. NMI’s Marjorie Childress wrote about that knock against the state’s website. Childress in a separate story quoted economists in New Mexico who said that it was impossible to know the effect of stimulus dollars at this point given the data provided on the state’s website.
UPDATE 11 a.m. Thursday: It should be pointed out that while the 25-page report cited in this post shows that New Mexico scored 30 out of a possible 100 points on the state’s main federal stimulus website, the state tied for 19th place among all the states.
