Posts by Marjorie Childress

The Hispanic Education Act’s next move in the House is a floor vote, after the House version of the bill, HB 150, cleared the House Education Committee this morning on a seven to three vote.  On the Senate side, the final committee for SB 132 is Senate Finance.  The Hispanic Education Act has gained momentum [...]

One of the big-ticket items on the agenda for the legislative session is the Hispanic Education Act, which passed its first committee hearing on Monday. The legislation has come to the fore as one way to focus attention and resources on closing the “achievement gap” between Anglo and Hispanic students.

Almost 40,000 New Mexicans look for help in getting enough to eat each week, according to a study by the New Mexico Association of Food Banks and an organization called Feeding America. Forty percent of the folks getting help are children under the age of 18;  13 percent are elderly. That [...]

A 25 percent excise tax on medical marijuana could potentially raise about $1.2 million dollars for the state,  according to the Legislative Finance Committee’s fiscal impact report of Sen. John Sapien’s bill, SB 56. But in a response to that figure, the state’s Tax and Revenue Department says the tax could cause patients to turn [...]

A long-simmering bill that would require multi-state corporations to pay income tax on their earnings in NM  lived another day as the House Business and Industry committee came to a close Thursday night. Rather than being tabled, as several other tax bills were, the combined reporting bill sponsored in the House by Rep. Ray Begaye, [...]

New Mexico’s unemployment rate spiked at the end of 2009–from 7.8 percent in November to 8.3 percent in December 2009—marking a 22 year high. The rate was 4.7 percent last year. Only four of the state’s 13 industries have seen job growth over the past year: education and health care, government, and the film industry.

In order to close the ‘achievement gap’ between students of color and their Anglo counterparts, the state should provide adequate funding for education, curriculum that integrates languages other than English and that is culturally relevant,  engagement of students in planning and aligning their education with their future goals; and more meaningful involvement of parents, students, [...]

As New Mexico grapples with the largest budget deficit anyone seems to remember,  the federal budgeting process for next fiscal year is about to get underway. It’s possible that  there will be more state fiscal relief or other measures that would funnel resources to states or municipalities to create jobs. But reform measures currently pending [...]

A bill introduced by Sen. Jon Sapien, D-Corrales, would apply a 25 percent excise tax and gross receipts taxes on the drug. But the founders of a new medical marijuana patients’ group say that to force patients to pay tax on their medicine would “hurt them a lot.”

A proposal by the State Land Office to swap over 14,000 acres of public trust land in northern New Mexico’s White Peak area for 9,650 acres of land owned by several big ranchers in other parts of the state has raised the ire of sportsmen who use the area to hunt and fish and attracted [...]

Albuquerque’s suburbs have a poverty rate of 13.6 percent, which ranks at number 10 in a study of 95 metropolitan areas by the Brookings Institution, a Washington D.C. think tank. That’s a pretty high number, but at the same time, that rate has dropped slightly since 2000, when it was 14.5 percent.

Albuquerque may be feeling the same deficit pain as every other governing body these days, but the good news is that the city comes out on top in a national list of the “best places to make movies and to call home.” That’s some high praise from Movie Maker Magazine. In its 10th Annual list, [...]

Indigenous people are the world’s poorest, and “suffer alarming conditions in all countries,” according to a United Nations report released yesterday. Indigenous people make up 5 percent of the world population, but constitute 15 percent of the world’s poor and are about one-third of the world’s 900 million extremely poor rural people. There has been [...]

Reforming a state law that allows landowners to kill wild game that cause property damage will be a priority issue for environmental groups at the state Legislature this year.

Jemez Pueblo is about to build a utility scale solar-plant, the Associated Press reported Wednesday. Other tribes around the country have developed wind farms, but this would be first commercial solar plant on tribal land.