Most of the new money — $2 million – will help thousands of children stay in childcare services administered by the New Mexico Children, Youth & Families Department for a couple of more months, according to a news release Richardson’s office issued Wednesday.

But Voices for Children New Mexico, while applauding Richardson’s decision, said his action ”amounts to using an aspirin when what’s needed is a transfusion.”

Without the money thousands of low-income parents who earn just above the federal poverty level would have lost child care services, an important resource for low-income workers who couldn’t otherwise afford the service and likely would have to scramble to find someone to watch their children while they worked, which isn’t always easy, officials say.

“It helps 5,000 families that would have been disenrolled Nov. 1,” Romaine Serna of the Children, Youth and Families Department told The Independent of the federal dollars. “They will be receiving he subsidy until further notice.”

Richardson was quoted as saying he was “responding to families and child care providers who are understandably concerned about these budget cuts. We are losing $24 million in federal money and the Legislature mandated across-the-board cuts that unfortunately affect our most vulnerable families. I’m doing everything possible to minimize those cuts and protect New Mexico families.”

“The state Children, Youth and Families Department is facing a significant shortfall that could result in 7,000 children losing child care before the Legislature meets again in January,” read the statement from Voices for Children.

“Additionally, deep cuts in provider rates are likely to force some providers to close their doors,” it continued. “Child care providers are small businesses. They not only provide a critical service, which allows parents of young children to earn a living, they also provide jobs, which is especially important at a time when unemployment is high. It’s time New Mexico made young children a priority.”

In addition to the $2 million for child care services, $250,000 of the federal stimulus dollars “will restore the elementary school breakfast program to all schools; and $210,000 will restore funding for the GRADS program,” the news release from the governor’s office said.

Roughly $2 million of the total will go toward helping 33,400 teachers and school employees across the state pay their insurance premiums, according to a news release issued by the governor’s office Monday. The stimulus dollars will reduce insurance premiums by an average of 2 percent for the 2010-11 school year.

The remainder of the money — $500,000 — will go toward professional development for roughly 2,000 educational assistants in Albuquerque Public Schools.

“New Mexico’s teachers and school employees are dedicated public servants and I am committed to helping them through the current recession,” Richardson is quoted as saying in the release. “Our teachers, educational assistants and support staff are on the front lines of school reform every day, and they’ve been subject to rising health care costs in recent years. I am pleased that these Recovery Act funds will help us offset some of those costs.”

The award comes from a discretionary fund made available to the governor as part of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, the release said.

The $2.5 million is separate from and in addition to the $65 million New Mexico is supposed to receive in additional federal education dollars after Congress passed a $26 billion bill last week to help state out during the recession.

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.

“New Mexicans are turning more and more to food pantries to help supplement their families’ meals,” Richardson was quoted as saying in the release. “This funding will help ensure there is fresh produce and other necessary staples at those pantries when New Mexicans need them.”

Kathy Komoll, Executive Director of the NM Association of Food Banks, welcomed the windfall.

“This generous allocation by Governor Richardson will be a welcome relief for the food banks who rely on donations and assistance from the state to help serve so many New Mexicans in need,” Komoll was quoted as saying in the release.

The $950,000 to purchase and deliver the food staples came from the governor’s discretionary stimulus fund, the news release said.

Photo by Peter Shanks

The future of the Internet could hinge on a decision by the Federal Communications Commission on how the government can regulate the Internet. For New Mexico, the decision could affect tens of millions of dollars in federal funds earmarked for expanding broadband access. Both Harry Teague and Steve Pearce say  the FCC’s proposed regulatory change would be the wrong one, though for different reasons.

“The best approach is the one that gives American consumers the power to determine the success or failure of an Internet service,” Teague told The Independent.

Pearce took a more hands-off approach to the Internet, telling the Independent in an e-mail, ”The success of Internet has come through investment, innovation and entrepreneurship. This attempt to implement so-called ‘net neutrality’ through FCC regulations is in direct opposition to these principles and will potentially hurt broadband expansion and investment in places like Southern New Mexico.”

Some Internet providers want to slow service to some users

Net neutrality refers to the idea that in order to be most useful, the Internet shouldn’t discriminate among users. Some Internet service providers want to be able to decide who gets access to faster Internet and who has to use the slow lane; critics say that isn’t fair.

If you think of the Internet as a highway, right now all users right now can choose to use the slow lane or the fast lane — if they have access to a high-speed Internet connection.

But a battle is playing out in Washington, among congressional candidates like Teague and Pearce, and between regulators and those regulated, over whether consumers will continue to have the freedom to choose to use the fast lane or the slow lane.

The battle comes at a time when more New Mexicans – and Americans — are getting online and states are working to expand access to high-speed Internet thanks to the federal government.

Federal stimulus helps to expand access to high-speed Internet in New Mexico

Congress has dedicated more than $7 billion of the federal stimulus package to expanding access to high-speed Internet across America in hopes of making the nation more competitive in a global economy, supporters say. Advocates also point to potential improvements in how health care is delivered and to other services, like public safety and education, as a result of wiring more of the country.

New Mexico already is seeing some benefits. Earlier this year the Navajo Nation, which straddles three states, including New Mexico, won a $32 million federal grant to expand broadband across its jurisdiction, potentially bringing thousands of people online.

Meanwhile, the New Mexico State Library won $1.5 million to help fund various initiatives, including one that will help pay for training programs at public and tribal libraries meant to increase the skills of citizens using the Internet.

Also the state Department of Information Technology won a $1.8 million federal grant, part of which paid for a grant manager who is working to map areas of the state that are in need of high-speed Internet access.

“He is working to compile information on mapping of the state’s current telecom infrastructure, and that info will be added to other states’ data to create a U.S. map that shows, state by state, where the needs are, for future broadband investment,” Deborah Martinez, spokeswoman for the New Mexico Department of Information Technology, said via e-mail.

FCC wants to regulate Internet delivery service as it does television, radio

How those investments are made, and where, may well be determined by what’s going on in Washington right now, Art Brodsky of Public Knowledge, a Washington D.C.-based public interest group that works to defend citizens’ rights in the emerging digital culture, told The Independent.

He says that the fight has moved on well past net neutrality and into broader questions of what the Federal Communications Commission can regulate.

“This is a whole support system for anything the government wants to do with high speed Internet access,“ Brodsky said in a phone interview. “Including getting it out to rural areas.”

A new discussion over net neutrality, and the broader issue of what the FCC can and cannot regulate, came about after a federal appeals court decision in April that the FCC has no authority over broadband issues, meaning, for example, that Internet service provider Comcast could slow cable customers’ access to BitTorrent, a file sharing service.

The FCC had unsuccessfully argued that it could regulate broadband just as it regulates “common carrier” phone companies and other industries. The court disagreed in a decision that could have far-ranging effects.

For example, the FCC has already had to change its approach on the national broadband plan because of the ruling.

Since then the FCC has looked at a number of options, including reclassifying broadband as a “Title II” telecommunication service, lumping it in with older mediums like TV and radio, over which the FCC has regulatory authority. Currently, Google is a “Title I” information service status, meaning the FCC cannot regulate it, while over-the-air TV is a “Title II” telecom service.

The FCC took a step toward the reclassification plan last week when it voted 3-2 to take public comment on whether or not to reclassify broadband Internet access, with one caveat; proponents of the reclassification process say they would not use the full regulatory power of a “Title II” service.

Brodsky says telephone and broadband don’t have to be regulated any differently.

“What the FCC is talking about regulating is the connection from a user’s house to the Internet, which is a traditional telecommunications service. Nothing wrong with it, nothing different with it,” he said.

“In order for the FCC to say, ‘OK we’re going to convert universal service support from basic telephone service to broadband to high speed Internet access to make sure that everybody can take part in the 21st century economy,’ then we have to have authority over that high speed Internet access in order for it to work,” Brodsky said.

Congress takes issue with FCC’s potential action

The agency’s plans aren’t popular with Teague or Pearce, though.

“The FCC’s proposal would institute net neutrality by subjecting the Internet to regulation designed for land-line telephone service over the past fifty years, instead of developing regulations better suited to Internet technology,” Teague said before the FCC voted last week.

After being contacted by The Independent for this story, Pearce, in a parable of sorts, wrote on his campaign blog about how deregulation can spur innovation.

“When Ma Bell was deregulated, competing companies had tremendous incentive to manufacture new products,” Pearce wrote. “Competition drove the old, stale products out of the market. They were replaced by ever changing, every improving phones. In fact, the cell phone is such an innovative tool that many young couples do not even have home phones anymore.”

Unlike some states, including Colorado, New Mexico has no law requiring hospitals to publicly report rates of hospital-acquired infections, despite the recommendations of a 2009 Healthcare-Associated Infections Advisory Committee report.

The lack of public disclosure, supporters of such openness say, means that New Mexicans don’t have a way to measure the quality of care they receive at the state’s medical facilities.

The authors of the 2009 report recommended that such reporting be required in the future, even counseling New Mexico officials to look to other states for guidance on how to write legislation to accomplish that.

But so far there hasn’t been an all-out push to require such public disclosure even as other states are moving in that direction.

Nineteen incidents of hospital infections associated with a central line (similar to an IV), were recorded at six New Mexico hospitals from July 1 2008 to May 31, 2009, according to a 2009 state report. Those are infections that patients didn’t have when they came into the hospital.

We know about the 19 incidents because six hospitals– three from Albuquerque and one each from Alamogordo, Las Cruces and Farmington — volunteered the information to the Department of Health as part of a pilot program.

The rate of so-called central line-associated hospital infections at the six participating hospitals was lower than national rate, the report says. But it wasn’t clear where the incidents took place. The incidents were reported in the aggregate, and not assigned to the facility where they happened. Such infections are dangerous and can lead to death in some cases, the 69-page report notes.

Even supporters of public disclosure of such infection rates acknowledge they’d have a big fight on their hands if a big push came to require hospitals to share such data with the public.

“I would support opening this up to the public, but do you want you to spend your time having a fight with them about reporting this to the public or work with them on improving best practices?”  Sen. Dede Feldman, D-Albuquerque, told The Independent. Feldman sponsored legislation that created the advisory committee that created last year’s report.

“With no money, I think the answer is clear. I am working with them but we need to find out how far they are going on this important measure of health care quality,” Feldman said.

Federal funding helps expand monitoring

Since New Mexico’s 11-month pilot program, 15 New Mexico hospitals, up from the original six, are expected to share data on central line-associated hospital infections this year, thanks to an infusion of $1.5 million in federal stimulus dollars.

The federal money has allowed health officials to expand monitoring central line-associated bloodstream infections beyond adult Intensive Care Units to pediatric ICUs at the 15 participating hospitals, Dr. Joan Baumbach said via e-mail Tuesday.

Baumbauch is an epidemiologist and is the infectious disease epidemiology bureau chief for the state health agency.

The data on infection rates during the 2008-2009 pilot program came from only adult ICUs at the six hospitals.

The federal money also may prompt New Mexico to add another category to its hospital-reporting regimen. Participating hospitals now report two events: the central line-associated bloodstream infections; and the number of health care workers who are vaccinated against influenza.

About 55 percent of health care workers at the six participating hospitals during the pilot program got flu shots, important for reducing the possibility that patients will get the flu at the hospital.

Approximately 36,000 deaths and over 200,000 hospitalizations occur annually in the United States from influenza and influenza-related causes, according to the report.

The question, along whether this data should be required to be publicly reported, is what happens to New Mexico’s program once the federal money runs out at the end of calendar year 2011.

“I don’t know if we have any money to do this,” Feldman said of state funding.

A spokeswoman for the state health agency said Tuesday that the department would do its best to continue the program.

“We are committed to trying to prevent health care associated infections, and we’ll continue the program as best we can when we no longer have federal funds,” said agency spokeswoman Deborah Busemeyer.

National movement pushes hospitals to become more transparent

The move to tamp down on hospital infections has dovetailed with a national movement for medical facilities to become more transparent about the quality of care they provide patients.

The movement got much of its impetus from a 1999 Institute of Medicine (IOM) report “To Err is Human,” which estimated that up to 98,000 deaths and hundreds of thousands of injuries occur annually in the U.S. because of medical errors and infections.

Meanwhile, early results from hospitals with active surveillance programs, including at Veterans Administration facilities, have shown marked reductions in different types of infections – the invasive MRSA infections. That heightened surveillance is accompanied by a campaign to improve medical practices, including checklists that exhort health care professionals to wash hands more often and disinfect the patient’s skin before attaching a central line to a patient.

Beyond improving quality of care, such reductions in infection rates lower medical costs, patient advocates and others have insisted. Some medical researchers estimate that hospital-acquired infections add billions of dollars a year to health care costs because it lengthens patients’ time in ICUs.

With all that in mind, some states have begun to require public disclosure of everything from “adverse events” at hospitals – where people get sick or die due to medical errors — to hospital-acquired infections and vaccination rates.

Consumer Reports recently released a list of the best and worst performing hospitals as measured by the number of central line-associated hospital infections in their ICUs from 10 states that disclose such data, including Colorado.

Colorado is one of the states the authors of the 2009 New Mexico report pointed to as having a potential model for future legislation requiring public reporting of hospital infection rates.

Colorado requires hospitals and their units, as well as ambulatory surgery centers and dialysis treatment centers, to report “health facility-acquired infections data as a condition of their state licensure,” the 2009 report noted.

Tennessee also was another state held up as a potential model for New Mexico. That state requires facilities with so many inpatients or outpatients to join the National Healthcare Safety Network, which reports health care-associated infection rates from 2,200 hospitals across the country.

New Mexico makes progress in reducing hospital infections

Before New Mexico’s 11-month pilot reporting program, no New Mexico hospital had enrolled in the national health care safety network, the report noted.

There was also a drop in the number of central line-associated bloodstream infections from the first six months of the pilot at the six hospitals – 13 – compared to six events over the final five months of the pilot program.

The authors noted:

“While not statistically significant, the apparent decrease in CLABSI events did prompt discussion among the pilot hospitals. Several questions were posed to determine if any quality initiatives had been instituted or changed during the 11 months of data collection that could account for a decline.”

Five of the six hospitals that participated in the pilot reported that they had changed policies and increased educational in-services during the pilot program to reduce central line-associated bloodstream infections, noted the report.

But the funds, which would have come from federal stimulus money, appear headed elsewhere after Gov. Bill Richardson decided last week to line-item veto the provision directing the money to education.

“The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act gave governors the authority to allocate the ARRA money, not legislatures, and the Supreme Court has ruled that the ability to allocate federal funds is beyond the Legislature’s appropriating power,” Nicole Gillespie, a spokesman for the governor’s budget office, said Wednesday in a statement, explaining the governor’s reason for vetoing the provision.

The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act is the official name for the federal stimulus program.

News of Richardson’s decision to veto the educational funding has left advocates flummoxed at a time when local school districts already are confronting economic difficulties.

“For him to veto supports for public education … makes a bad situation more incomprehensible,” said Christine Trujillo of American Federation of Teachers.

Added Rep. Mimi Stewart, D-Albuquerque, who is a frequent defender of funding for public education: “I am just disheartened in general over what the Legislature and the governor have done to education.”

The governor’s veto will contribute to school districts having “larger class sizes and we will not produce the kind of improvement the public is clamoring for,” Stewart said.

The $15 million in federal funds that would have gone to school districts, and another $5 million on top of that, will instead go to agencies across state government, Gillepsie said. The governor has committed to “using $20 million of his discretionary (federal) funds to balance the budget” after deciding last week to veto a food tax provision in legislation — an action that left a $68 million hole in next year’s state budget.

“State agencies have seen more than $700 million in budget cuts since FY09 and the Governor plans to use these funds where they are needed most to prevent additional reductions,” Gillepsie said in the statement.

It is unclear how much each school district would have received if the $15 million in federal dollars had been dispersed, but the extra money, however small,  likely would have been welcome given the economic woes many school districts face.

Albuquerque Public Schools is staring at a multimillion-dollar shortfall that may require the elimination of hundreds of jobs, superintendent Winston Brooks announced last week.

Rio Rancho schools, meanwhile, likely will confront hard decisions for next year’s budget in addition to millions of dollars already trimmed over the past year, a spokesman said.

“We’re still waiting for the real numbers,” Kim Vesely, spokesperson for Rio Rancho Public Schools, said Wednesday of the state budget and its effects on local school district budgets.

With the governor’s veto, state educational funding would be cut by close to 2 percent, which could mean “$2 million out of the (Rio Rancho schools’) operational budget,” Vesely said.

Legislators had hoped that that the $15 million in federal dollars would soften a reduction in state education funding from 1.8 percent to a 1.2 percent reduction, state lawmakers said during this month’s special legislative session.

“After a while you run out of things to cut. It’s going to be tough for everyone around the state,” Vesely said.

The cuts to education contained in next year’s state budget come on top of past reductions, including the loss of $29 million school districts around the state had counted on but won’t see.

During a separate special legislative session in October the Legislature included a provision that would have paid school districts’ annual insurance premiums to the tune of $29 million. The thinking was that by the state covering that expense, local school districts could direct money normally earmarked for that to other areas.

The Legislature repealed that provision during this year’s regular session.

“The Governor has always fought to protect funding for schools, which is why he signed a bill in the 2009 special session that appropriated $29 million to pay schools’ property insurance premiums,” Gillespie said. “This session policy makers advocated repealing that appropriation as it was thought to create a disparity problem in which school districts would receive inequitable distributions.”

The provision – Section 12 — that would have given local school districts the $15 million in federal funding is tucked away on page 244 of the 247-page state budget. The vetoed language directed $25 million in federal stimulus money — $15 million to school districts and charter schools and $10 million to state agencies – to cushion the pain of budget cuts made to services and programs.

In the meantime, dozens of New Mexico state representatives must balance election-year calculus with fiscal responsibility when next month’s legislative session gets underway. New Mexico faces a huge budgetary shortfall — some estimates put it at $1 billion — at a time when lawmakers from the House are facing re-election next year. But imagine if you were up for re-election at the same time you were staring at a $20 billion budget hole. That’s what California lawmakers are up against, reports the San Jose Mercury News.

Economic conditions are bad pretty much everywhere, including Pennsylvania, which will send 2,000 prisoners out of state to correctional facilities in cash-strapped Michigan and Virginia in February to ease overcrowding in its state prisons, the Philadelphia Inquirer reports.

Meanwhile, federal inspectors are discovering slipshod work at homes targeted for weatherizing, which is intended to cut energy use and utility bills. The discovery comes as the federal government plans to spend $5 billion in the next few years to weatherize homes across the country and underscores the challenges in taking a government program and supersizing it with stimulus cash, the New York Times reports.

Reflecting on the year that’s almost over, here’s a list of the Top 10 stories of 2009 as selected by members of the Associated Press.

And from the tech world, monetizing the real-time web in 2010 will develop as a big trend. Evidence of this comes from One Riot, which just announced the launch of a new advertising product for real-time apps, according to the geeks over at ReadWriteWeb.

Here’s an excerpt:

RiotWise Trending Ads will give OneRiot’s partners a feed of ads related to currently trending topics on the Web. These ads can, for example, be integrated in a user’s stream of updates in Twitter apps or displayed as regular mobile ad units.

While Massachusetts recipients of federal stimulus money collectively report 12,374 jobs saved or created, a Boston Globe review shows that number is wildly exaggerated. Organizations that received stimulus money miscounted jobs, filed erroneous figures, or claimed jobs for work that has not yet started. The paper’s finding is based on the federal government’s just-released accounts of stimulus spending at the end of October. It lists the nearly $4 billion in stimulus awards made to an array of Massachusetts government agencies, universities, hospitals, private businesses, and nonprofit organizations, and notes how many jobs each created or saved.

Connecticut Gov. M. Jodi Rell announced Tuesday she wouldn’t run for re-election, throwing next year’s gubernatorial race into chaos, the Hartford Courant reports. Now Democrats and Republicans are suddenly scrambling for front-runner status as they prepare for primaries next August.

A federal judge this week handed down a defeat for several senior creditors that had hoped to buy Philadelphia’s newspapers by bidding the amount that they are owed, the Wall Street Journal reported. The judge reversed a ruling that would have allowed Philadelphia Newspapers LLC’s lenders to bid the more than $300 million they are owed at a coming auction for the newspaper company, the paper reported.

The paper goes on to explain:

Unless they are willing to pay cash, the lenders are now blocked from participating in a coming auction for the company, which publishes the Philadelphia Inquirer and Daily News. The setback for the lenders marks a victory for a group of local investors who are aiming to buy the company. The local investors are supported by the publishing company’s chief executive, Brian Tierney.

John Allen Muhammad, the sniper who kept the Washington region paralyzed by fear for three weeks as he and a young accomplice gunned down people at random, was executed Tuesday night by lethal injection, the Washington Post reports. This story brings back memories of those horrible days. I didn’t live in Virginia or Maryland, the areas most terrorized in 2002 by the randomness of death, which came unexpectedly to individuals as they pumped gas or walked out of a store. I watched from afar, transfixed, in Connecticut, a state that at the time was coming out of the stupor and disorientation of losing more than 100 residents in the 9/11 terrorist attacks only to imagine the possibility of biological terrorism two months later when anthrax snuffed out the life of a woman who lived 10 miles from me. Yes, the sniper shootings happened hundreds of miles away and nearly a year after 9/11, but all the events blur together for me now.

“As the state prepares to release about 1,000 inmates from prison up to a year early, parole agents across Illinois are making unannounced visits to select homes, checking for overcrowding, drug paraphernalia and vicious dogs that could hamper future inspections,” according to the Chicago Tribune. “After determining there is adequate space for an inmate, the agents stress to residents that their homes are in for a drastic change.”

Meanwhile, the economic news seemed a little brighter Friday in Washington, where it was announced that the nation’s economy grew by 3.5 percent during the last quarter, according to the New York Times. Part of that may be the federal stimulus, says the White House says, which reported that the federal stimulus saved or created 650,000 jobs nationally.

More states lowered their standards for academic proficiency in recent years than raised them, and nearly all used exams that fell short of federal testing benchmarks, the Wall Street Journal reports today. Specifically, a report issued by the U.S. Department of Education has called into question the rigor of tests that states select to comply with student-improvement mandates of the federal No Child Left Behind law.

Ethics investigators for the U.S. House of Representatives, meanwhile, have been scrutinizing the activities of more than 30 lawmakers and several aides in inquiries about issues including defense lobbying and corporate influence peddling, the Washington Post reports today. The Post learned of the scrutiny after a confidential House ethics committee report prepared in July was inadvertently made public.

Oklahoma Sen. Tom Coburn sees himself as a one-man treatment center helping Congress beat its bipartisan addiction to misguided spending, the New York Times writes. He also may be one of the major speed bumps on Congress’ road to passing health reform legislation.

From the media world, the nation’s largest circulation paper, The Wall Street Journal, is closing its Boston bureau. As FishbowlNY noted, if the nation’s largest paper is doing this, what hope do other papers have. I don’t view the move as the end of the newspaper world, but it is sad. Meanwhile the Wall Street Journal reports the the British Broadcasting Corp. plans to cut the salaries of top managers and axe more than 100 senior posts as part of a broader overhaul to cut costs.

It appears the Obama administration overstated how many jobs federal stimulus dollars have created or saved a few weeks back. An Associated Press review shows that the 30,000 number used by the administration cited exceeds reality by at least 5,000 jobs. The administration said it won’t make the same mistake tomorrow when it announces a more comprehensive tally.

Meanwhile, Iowa will begin laying off state workers and more layoffs could come if public employee unions don’t agree to open up their contracts to make cost-saving changes requested by Gov. Chet Culver, the Des Moines Register reports.

The Asian longhorned beetle is infesting stands of trees in New England, causing alarm and apocalyptic scenarios among arboreal experts. A U.S. Department of Agriculture study projects the damage from potential ALB damage at $650 billion. Meanwhile, the federal government has spent in excess of $250 million on eradicating the beetle, and more than $24 million alone in Worcester, Mass. alone, according to Smithsonian Magazine.