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.
New Mexico had one of the worst job loss rates in the nation for June, according to a new report by the New Mexico Voices for Children‘s Fiscal Policy Project.
“It used to be that New Mexico was not as deeply affected as the rest of the nation during a recession, but that’s not the case this time,” Fiscal Policy Project director Gerry Bradley said. “The run-up to this recession — the housing boom and high energy prices — had a significant impact on the state’s economy. Employment was up, revenue was up, and so was spending. But we ended up paying for the good times when those two economic drivers crashed.”
The state’s 8.2 percent unemployment rate continues to trail the national average of 9.5 percent, thanks to infusions of federal money — but New Mexico’s economy won’t improve until the national economy improves, the report says.
More …
New Mexico has of the highest rates of suicide in the nation but improving rural access to the Internet might change that, according to Radford University psychologist James Werth Jr.
Suicide rates in New Mexico and across the nation are higher in rural areas than urban areas, Werth said in a recent story in Mental Health Law Weekly. Better access to broadband could provide better access to suicide prevention and behavioral medicine resources for both patients and rural physicians and school officials, Werth suggested.
“Even though people live farther apart, there may be stronger connections — they need to rely on one another,” Werth said. More …
New Mexico ranks 47th among states in the number of 25 to 34 year olds with an associate’s degree or higher and 48th when it comes to students who graduate with a bachelor’s degree within six years, according to a new report from the College Board‘s Advocacy and Policy Center.
According to the organization’s 2010 Progress Report, roughly 28.5 percent of New Mexicans aged 25 to 34 possess an associate’s degree or higher, which compares unfavorably to the national average — 41.6 percent. Likewise, 41.8 percent of New Mexicans graduate college with a bachelor’s degree within six years, again substantially lower than the national average of 56.1 percent. More …
USA Today recently profiled some innovative approaches other states are using to meet the challenges of delivering healthcare. Some of them could help New Mexico plan for the more than 150,000 previously uninsured New Mexicans who will qualify for health coverage under the new federal health care law.
Some of those innovative approaches include using more nurse practitioners, communicating with patients over the phone or via e-mail, and using shared medical appointments.
New Mexico might have too few physicians, physician’s assistants, registered nurses and other medical professionals to respond to the influx of new patients, state officials said earlier this year. And many medical professionals are concentrated in three areas — metro Albuquerque, Las Cruces and Santa Fe, and not even spread around the state. More …
Nearly $1 million in federal stimulus dollars will go toward the purchase and delivery of “desperately needed emergency food” for New Mexicans, Gov. Bill Richardson announced today.
The New Mexico Association of Food Banks will use $775,000 of the $950,000 in federal dollars to purchase fresh produce and “other staples, such as beans, peanut butter and canned products,” according to a news release issued by Richardson’s office.
The remaining $175,000 will be spent on delivering the purchased food staples to six agency food banks around New Mexico that will then distribute the food to more than 650 charitable agencies in every New Mexico county, the release said. More …
More than 3,400 New Mexicans on Medicare will have more money to pay for prescription drugs after $250 rebate checks from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services arrive.
Those eligible for the federal rebate checks have reached the so-called doughnut hole in Medicare’s prescription drug program. They must pay out of pocket for their drugs until they reach the “catastrophic” coverage threshold, when the program again picks up the tab.
More than a quarter of beneficiaries hit the doughnut hole. The problem, experts say, is that when seniors’ drugs aren’t covered, they often stop taking their medicine. More …
Yes it is, according to a weekend story in Politico.
Politico attributes a vote scheduled for tonight in the U.S. Senate on a $26.1 billion aid package for states, including extra Medicaid funding, to a late-breaking push by the White House.
A congressional debate on whether to extend extra federal dollars for Medicaid, the government’s low-income health insurance program, has captivate a majority of states. The legislation would push the deadline for states receiving extra Medicaid funding to June 30, 2011, six months beyond the current deadline of Dec. 31.
If the extra dollars don’t come, New Mexico will be stuck with a $160 million hole in the state budget that started July 1. More …
The Navajo Nation Human Rights Commission has published a report about race relations in towns bordering the reservation. The commission conducted 25 listening sessions over the course of a year, hearing from anyone who chose to speak about racism and discrimination. Of the 25 towns highlighted in the report, 12 are in New Mexico. The process was described as an opening of “forbidden doors” against candid discussions of racism and discrimination, which the commission says will thrive among mankind until it’s collectively acknowledged and eliminated.
New hearings on an insurance company rate hike will continue after The New Mexico Supreme Court decided on Wednesday to deny Blue Cross and Blue Shield of New Mexico‘s petition to stop them.
The company had asked the court to halt new Insurance Division hearings to review a previously-approved but controversial health insurance rate hike.
“This paves the way for the public vetting of the factors underlying the rate increase,” Public Regulation Commission (PRC) Commissioner Jason Marks told The Independent at the Supreme Court. “The public can’t help but benefit from hearings.”
Blue Cross Blue Shield NM had petitioned the Supreme Court to reverse acting superintendent Johnny Montoya‘s order suspending the rate hike
After hearing oral arguments from Blue Cross attorney Paul Bardacke, Attorney General Gary King and Insurance Division attorney David Barton, justices retired to chambers for approximately 25 minutes Wednesday morning. They briefly emerged for Justice Petra Jimenez Maes to announce the court was denying the company’s petition.
Insurers should not be subject to repeated hearings after a rate hike has been approved by the insurance superintendent, Bardacke argued.
“Where is the finality for consumers, first of all?” he asked in oral arguments before the court.
But the Supreme Court was not the appropriate venue for the case, Maes stated Wednesday morning, echoing Barton’s oral argument that the high court’s intervention would only be appropriate if Blue Cross had no other recourse to appeal the Division’s decision. Under state law, Blue Cross can appeal a withdrawal of any rate hike approval in district court.
“We respect the finding of the Court and will be at the hearing August 25,” Bardacke, who represents Blue Cross Blue Shield NM, told The Independent. “We were pleased Attorney General Gary King indicated the (rate hike) settlement was fair and equitable, and in the best interest of all New Mexicans.”
The Attorney General’s office had helped negotiate and stood by the controversial rate hike settlement, but Gary King appeared before the Supreme Court to defend the Insurance Superintendent’s authority to hold public hearings and review the justification for the rate hike.
The Insurance Superintendent has discretion under state law to hold the scheduled hearings, Gary King argued.
“A final order reversing approval would not be discretionary,” Gary King clarified to The Independent after the Court’s decision. “There would have to be some reason for rejecting the rate increase. There would have to be some different or additional evidence presented at the hearing” to reverse the rate hike approval.
“It’s a new day for consumers in New Mexico,” PRC chair David King told The Independent, adding that Legislature should now empower the PRC to hear appeals of future rate hikes. Currently, appeals must be filed in district court.
“I’m happy New Mexicans will get a chance for new hearings and we’ll do things now that should have been done orginally,” PRC Commissioner Jerome Block Jr. said. “Hopefully the surpluses prove that the rate increases are not justified and New Mexicans can be spared this increase. They have a lot of nerve to come ask for an increase, frankly.”
The Public Regulation Commission (PRC) voted 4-to-1 Tuesday afternoon to appoint John G. Franchini as the state’s newest superintendent of insurance. Commissioner Jason Marks cast the dissenting vote.
Franchini has worked in the insurance industry for more than 35 years, since he joined his father’s insurance brokerage as a salesman, according to a letter to commissioners that accompanied his resume. He worked as vice president for government affairs at New Mexico Mutual, the state’s workers’ compensation underwriter, from 2002 until January 2010, according to his resume.
Franchini was appointed one day before the state Supreme Court is scheduled to hear a Blue Cross Blue Shield NM petition to reverse acting superintendent Johnny Montoya‘s order suspending the rate hike. More …
Despite bucking a national trend of increasing child poverty and a reduction in school drop-out rates, New Mexico ranks last or near-last in seven of 10 measures of child welfare, from teen deaths to proportion of children living in poverty, according to a report released today by the Annie E. Casey Foundation.
Overall, the 2010 Kids Count Data Book shows that New Mexico lost ground, slipping to 46th place from 43rd in last year’s report.
Only for infant mortality did the state rank better than the national average, at 13th place, with 6.3 babies dying per 1,000 live births, compared to a U.S. average of 6.7 deaths per 1,000 births. Here are some of the other major findings:
NM teen birth rate is highest in the nation
New Mexico continues to rank worst in the nation for teen birth rates, with 2007 numbers (the most recent available data) showing no change from 2000 in New Mexico; 66 girls aged 15 to 19 gave birth for every 1,000 girls in New Mexico, compared to 43 per 1,000 nationwide.
Teen death rate also high
The state continues to have one of the worst teen death rates in the U.S. Although New Mexico’s teen death rate dropped slightly — 3 percent — between 2000 and 2007, at 96 deaths per 100,000 teens, the state’s rates are markedly higher than the national average of 62 per 100,000.
Single-parent families growing faster than average
The percentage of children in single-parent families grew seven times as much from 2000 to 2008 in New Mexico as the rest of the U.S., the report states. The percent of New Mexico children living in single-parent families grew from 33 percent in 2000 to 40 percent by 2008, compared to 32 percent nationwide in 2008.
The Kids Count report includes single-parent households as an indicator of child welfare because children in households with one adult do not have access to the same economic or human resources as children in two-parent families, the report states. In 2008, nearly a third of single-parent families lived in poverty, compared to just 7 percent of children in households run by married couples, according to the report.
Poverty affects one-fourth of NM kids
Nearly a quarter of New Mexico children, 24 percent, live in poverty (defined in 2008 as a four-member household income below $21,834). The situation is much worse for the state’s Native American (39 percent) and Hispanic children (30 percent), according to the report.
Nationwide, 18 percent of children live in poverty, according to the study.
Drop-out rate dips, but NM still ranks 47th
The percent of 16 to 19 year-old New Mexicans who were not in school dropped from 16 to 10 percent between 2000 and 2008, but that still placed the state in 47th place nationwide.
The U.S. average drop-out rate was 6 percent in 2008, the report states.
Child death rates rise while national rate drops
New Mexico’s number of deaths per 100,000 children under age 15 increased between 2000 and 2007, while the U.S. average child death rate declined. For 2007, New Mexico’s child mortality rate was 24 deaths per 100,000 children, compared to a U.S. average of 19 deaths per 100,000 according to the report.
The new report comes on the heels of a report in May that New Mexico children rank low on reading ability and school performance.
New Mexico built its current state budget on the assumption that Congress would extend stimulus funding for Medicaid through the end of the fiscal year, next June. Right now the extra funding ends Dec. 31, 2010.
Sen. John Arthur Smith, D-Deming, told The Independent he’s already preparing for the possibility that Congress, even if it acts, won’t cover the full $160 million the state budgeted in anticipation of the federal dollars.
But in Georgia, Gov. Sonny Perdue has already ordered leaner state agencies to cut another 4 percent in spending starting next month because the state’s new budget relies on federal stimulus dollars that might not come, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution is reporting.
New Mexico is $160 million in the hole three weeks into the new fiscal year, state officials learned Wednesday.
And that hole could double in size if Congress fails to send extra stimulus dollars New Mexico’s way to help pay for Medicaid, the government’s low-income health insurance program.
It’s not exactly the kind of political climate gubernatorial candidates would prefer.
“The next governor is going to have her hands full,” Sen. John Arthur Smith, D-Deming, and chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, said Wednesday, confirming the challenges ahead for the next occupant of the governor’s mansion.
The two women running to become New Mexico’s next chief executive responded Wednesday to news of the worsening financial news with plans on how to address the problem that varied in degrees of specificity. But not before taking swipes at each other.
“While my opponent has put forward thin one-liners and platitudes, my plan tells New Mexicans exactly how I propose to cover the budget gap,” Democratic Lt. Gov. Diane Denish said in a statement.
Republican District Attorney Susana Martinez shot back: “Diane Denish’s scheme is just more of the same Enron accounting that created this budget mess.”
Both candidates pledge to cut political appointees
Three and a half months before Election Day, Denish’s and Martinez’s plans to address the state’s budget woes reflected a mixture of gritty realism and pie-in-the-sky election-year promise-making at a time when New Mexico finds itself foundering financially.
Martinez, whose campaign sent out a 364-word statement, promised to implement zero-growth budgets at most state agencies and rid state government of waste and fraud. She said she could find 5 percent to cut, but didn’t go into too much detail about how to accomplish that goal.
Denish, whose campaign sent out a six-page report issued earlier this year, touted a voluntary one-time buy-out she would offer to state government workers and a thorough review of tax credits to make sure they create jobs. If they don’t, Denish would push to have them eliminated. What she didn’t mention is that such a review likely would take months, and wouldn’t save money this year.
Reducing the state’s vehicle fleet by 10 percent and merging several state agencies, thereby eliminating several cabinet-level positions and salaries, were other ideas Denish offered while Martinez talked of shrinking the state’s payroll through attrition.
While the two candidates played up their differences, there were similarities. Both promised to eliminate the hundreds of jobs across state government held by political appointees – a measure expected to save $8.8 million a year.
Both in the past also have mentioned reforming how the state doles out money for brick-and-mortar projects, also known as pork, an often-touted goal that somehow never found enough support among state lawmakers to become a reality during the past 7 1/2 years.
Everything is on the table—including education
Both gubernatorial candidates made clear Wednesday that while they were ready to cut expenses while eschewing major tax increases, they were prepared to protect the most basic services, including education.
It’s a scenario some lawmakers have questioned: keeping K-12 education untouched in future budget cutting. Education has suffered cuts in the past, but K-12 education is a big target, representing roughly half of the state budget.
“We can’t hit agencies” like the state transportation department any more, Sen. Steven Neville, R-Aztec, said Wednesday. “We might have to talk about wholesale elimination of functions. We may have to say we can’t provide XYZ anymore. Or the big taboo – education. We are going to have to re-look at education – at administration and overhead.”
Agreed Smith: “Everything on the spending side is on the table, including education.”
Sen. Dede Feldman, D-Albuquerque, however, said she was hard-pressed Wednesday to name where the state could cut in education.
“All I can tell you is I just finished talking to a … school nurse,” Feldman said. “People (at Albuquerque Public Schools) are really worried about what will happen this school year. We have a school principal covering two schools. School nurses who are covering more and more kids.”
Feldman also wondered if the state’s health system could take any more hits.
Funding for 33 county and community health councils and five Tribal Health Councils around the state already has been slashed this year because of the state’s budget troubles. The councils coordinate different agencies, organizations, in a community or county, that are addressing health needs at the local level, advocates have said.
“Doing away with these planning councils … it’s like your plane is about to crash and you are ripping out your control system,” Feldman said. “If we are looking to make a safe landing … we cannot afford to keep cutting those vital programs.”
No first-year governor will want to sign tax increases
“We have to look at what the situation is during the regular session,” Feldman said.
Smith ruled out a major tax increase as impractical, saying a first-year governor wouldn’t want to sign off on a tax increase to start off her tenure, he said. Smith acknowledged, however, that lawmakers would discuss – and likely would be open to– closing certain tax credits, deductions or exemptions.
Wednesday’s news wasn’t a surprise to him, Smith said. He and other senators had predicted that the Richardson administration’s projection that revenues would grow by 6 percent was overly optimistic. In the end revenues have grown by about 3 percent.
He also said the news could get worse.
New Mexico is one of 21 states without a contingency plan if Congress doesn’t pass legislation approving extra Medicaid dollars to shore up state spending plans.
Congress is currently debating whether to extend extra federal dollars for the government’s low-income health insurance program through June 30, 2011, six months beyond the current deadline of Dec. 31. If the extra dollars don’t come, however, New Mexico will be stuck with a $160 million hole in the state budget, meaning the current $160 million hole could double in size. That’s because this year’s state budget assumed the extra Medicaid dollars from the federal government.
Governor has authority to cut now
Martinez and Denish might have one saving grace. This year’s state budget gives Gov. Bill Richardson the ability to cut monthly allotments to agencies across state government, meaning some of the hard work of balancing this year’s budget actually might occur before the next governor takes office.
“Agencies have been preparing for a potential shortfall and, as a precautionary measure, were instructed to reduce spending by as much as 5 percent at the start of this fiscal year,” said Nicole Gillepsie, spokeswoman for the Department of Finance and Administration, the governor’s budget arm. “Agencies are hard at work finding ways to achieve maximum efficiency with the aim of avoiding reductions to services or additional cuts focused on state employees.”
Gillepsie also said the governor is “working to develop a plan for reducing agency budgets, and will present the plan for Legislative Finance Committee review and Board of Finance approval.”
Smith said he doesn’t hold out much hope that much cutting will occur before the next governor takes over.
“I don’t think this governor is going to move quickly enough,” Smith said.
The governor’s office did not respond to an e-mail from The Independent asking for a response to today’s news of the state’s worsening financial situation.
The president of California’s Anthem Blue Cross resigned Tuesday after months of controversy over her efforts to impose a 39 percent health insurance rate increase for 800,000 policyholders.
Leslie Margolin, 55, ran Athem for just 2 1/2 years. She has faced intense criticism from California lawmakers and the Obama administration, including U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius, who questioned the rate increase and described it as excessive. More …
People seeking unemployment benefits wait in the lobby of an Employment Development Department office in California. (EPA/ZUMAPRESS.com)
On Tuesday, the Senate plans to vote on a federal extension of unemployment benefits, blocked by Senate Republicans for an unprecedented two months. The swearing-in of Carte Goodwin, the temporary replacement for the late Sen. Robert Byrd (D-W.Va.), will give Democrats the crucial 60th vote to overcome a GOP filibuster and restore unemployment insurance to 2.5 million Americans.
But that poses a real challenge to the state unemployment insurance agencies. They are already overextended, dealing with the massive expansion of the unemployment insurance system to grant up to 99 weeks of benefits to those eligible among the 38 million people who have been unemployed at some point over the course of the recession. Now, with the Senate on the verge of action, states are scrambling to figure out how to retroactively disburse seven weeks of benefits worth more than $10 billion to the 2.5 million people needing them, as quickly as possible.
Part of the problem is that the high unemployment rate has already overloaded state systems. Last month, the National Association of State Workforce Agencies completed a survey of the unemployment insurance providers in all 50 states and the District of Columbia. In the report, 46 of the 51 providers said they had difficulty managing the work flow. And states cited congressional inaction as one source of the headaches. Oregon, responding to the NASWA inquiry, named Congress as its biggest problem: “[Lawmakers’] inability to complete legislation to extend [emergency unemployment compensation] in a timely [manner] has created a substantial amount of work in our UI Call Centers answering inquiries from concerned and panicked UI beneficiaries.”
Those “panicked UI beneficiaries” number in the millions and need answers as to what they are getting, how and when. Expecting the extension to come through, most state agencies have continued to update their files through the lapse. Though unemployed workers have not received checks, they have continued to file with their state agency to affirm that remain out of work and are searching for new jobs, a requirement to receive benefits. The decision to keep that information current through the Senate’s dithering means that the states will not need to work through a 2.5 million-person backlog of paperwork once the benefits are extended.
But unemployment benefits are allocated using a complicated multi-tier system, with dozens of rules about qualification. Nobody — neither the state agencies nor the unemployed — knows just what Congress will approve and how that will comport with state systems. Will the Senate vote on the House bill? Will the House have to take up the Senate version? Will Congress approve the $25-per-week Federal Additional Compensation funds, tacked onto unemployment checks? How will states deal with disbursing the money? Will they go claimant by claimant, or week of dropped claims by week? Confusion over what is happening means that state unemployment agencies are already receiving thousands of questions, overloading call centers.
One issue is that if a worker has had an intervening period of work during the eight-week lapse, he or she needs to inform the state and might qualify for a new tier of benefits. “Say you were a construction worker who got a week-long gig on a project during the lapse,” explains George Wentworth, an analyst at the National Employment Law Project. “Maybe before you qualified for $600 a week in federal extended benefits. You might requalify for a $150 state benefit rate because of those intervening earnings, even if you had weeks of federal benefits left. Congress is, in this legislation, probably saying you can stay on your federal benefits. But all of those people need to be reprocessed, and there is no sense of scale as to how many people that might be.”
Communication — simply getting news about about changes and processes — might be the biggest challenge. “You will hear lots of claims from workers, claims that will be accurate, that it will be difficult to get through to staff in the unemployment insurance agencies,” Wentworth says. “The infrastructure has really been operating beyond maximum capacity for some time. This is the most weeks [of benefits] for the most people that states have ever had to manage. Frankly, the systems were designed in terms of capacity based on historical previous high levels of unemployment. And this is the highest level of unemployment since the early 1980s.”
Other problems are state-specific. Some states, such as Georgia, have had no official policy of retroactive payment, but are planning to make make an exception this time — posing a logistical challenge as they update their systems. And in Florida, more than 200,000 unemployed persons might not get their benefits at all. The state included a June 5 expiration on the extended benefits in a state statute. That means that when Washington re-ups the program, hundreds of thousands of Floridians won’t be able to resume receiving their benefits if current law stands, the Florida Independent reports.
“Almost 35,000 workers are losing their only real source of income each week while Congress continues to stall the re-authorization of the extended benefits program,” Florida AFL-CIO President Mike Williams said in a statement. “The fact that these workers and our economy will continue to suffer when Congress does act because of a single line in Florida Statutes is appalling. This program costs the state next to nothing and does not raise unemployment insurance rates for businesses.”
Other states have prepared for the congressional reauthorization but still face an enormous logistical challenge. Norm Isotalo, a spokesperson for the Department of Labor in Michigan, the state with the second-highest unemployment rate at 14 percent, said the state had been working overtime to ensure the more than 120,000 persons in need of retroactive benefits get them quickly. “We’ve been holding meetings in anticipation that the Senate will pass some legislation next week that will restore these federal benefits,” he said. “We will probably make a lump sum payment to people who are owed retroactively. Then, we are going to reach out to people who have exhausted state benefits and never had a chance to apply to [federal extension programs].” He noted the department was preparing for the deluge by keeping additional workers on overtime, but that planning remained ongoing.
Labor experts say that unemployment insurance recipients should expect some hiccups as their states send all of those checks out. “It’s unfair to the states,” Wentworth says. “It is very difficult to manage these situations when you have a long gap in reauthorization, even in terms of just explaining it to unemployment insurance recipients.”
Federal prosecutions of undocumented immigrants have jumped this spring, flooding courtrooms in New Mexico and other border states, according to a Syracuse University study released Thursday.
Case loads at the U.S. District Court in Albuquerque have jumped by 54 percent this spring, according to the Associated Press. More …
As of Monday only three New Mexicans had enrolled in a federal high-risk insurance pool that launched July 1, but more are expected, state officials said this week.
The federal high-risk pool is the first high-profile program to launch from the recently passed federal health care law.
The slow start appears to belie interest in the federal program, which provides access to health insurance for hard-to-insure individuals who often are turned away from the private markets due to several reasons, including preexisting conditions.
“We’ve received over 500 calls in interest,” said DeAnza Sapien, senior administrator at the New Mexico Medical Insurance Pool, which is helping to run the federal program in the state. “And that doesn’t include a Blue Cross Blue Shield line.” More …
New Mexico collected $115.4 million in child support payments, a record, for the fiscal year that just ended June 30, including $8.2 million from unemployment checks, the Santa Fe New Mexican is reporting.
A majority of the $115.4 million, about 60 percent, was gotten through withheld wages, according to the paper.
The striking figure here is the amount of money the state took in from unemployment checks. The state’s net of $8.2 million from unemployment checks easily bested collections through that method in the previous fiscal year — $3.8 million — and $1.2 million in the fiscal year before that, the paper quoted a spokeswoman for the state’s Human Services Department as saying. More …
A planned public hearing on Blue Cross and Blue Shield of New Mexico‘s controversial health insurance rate hike may be delayed until September.
The company filed a motion July 2 with the state Insurance Division, saying the public hearing and division review of the rate hike should be delayed until the Supreme Court has ruled on the matter, because preparing for the public hearing would be time consuming and the court may toss the PRC’s decision to reverse approval of the hike. More …
Around 2,500 New Mexicans will be affected by Congress’ inability to extend an unemployment extension for jobless Americans who have already or will soon exhaust their eligibility for the aid, state officials said Monday.
Last week the U.S. Senate was unable to pass legislation that included an extension through November of the jobless benefits.
Around 1,100 New Mexicans already have lost jobless benefits since June 2 and another 1,400 are expected to lose them through the end of July, Carrie Moritomo, spokeswoman for the New Mexico Department of Workforce Solutions, told The Independent on Monday. More …
