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 first two tax increases to reach the floor of the House made it through on Friday, but not before some strong words on both sides. One bill would temporarily raise the gross receipts tax by .5 percent; the other would raise taxes on the state’s highest earners by 1.5 percent. Both bills could bring in $300 million to state coffers.
The House of Representatives could vote as early as Friday morning to raise $380 million in new revenue to help close next year’s budgetary shortfall. A half-cent hike in the state gross receipts tax and a 1-percent surtax on the state’s wealthiest residents are in the mixture of tax increases and targeted closure of tax deductions and loopholes. House Speaker Ben Lujan, D-Santa Fe, said Thursday afternoon he thinks he has the votes to push through the tax package.
The House Taxation and Revenue Committee on Tuesday passed a measure that would temporarily raise the gross receipts tax (GRT) by one-half percent. The measure is sponsored by Speaker of the House Ben Lujan, D-Santa Fe. In a straight…
Worried that their bill may be doomed to die in an unsympathetic committee, activists from the Sierra Club and Animal Protection of New Mexico are mobilizing their members to ask House Speaker Ben Lujan to remove House Bill 73…
On Friday House members recalled former Republican Rep. Eric Youngberg, who died this week.
Youngberg, 42, served 2003 through the end of 2008 in the House. A low-profile lawmaker with a puckish sense of humor, Youngberg never really spent much…
The House Rules Committee temporarily tabled a measure that would add video to the audio already streamed from the state House. Rep. Keith Gardner, R-Roswell proposed the measure, and for a time it looked like it would…
Soft drinks, medical marijuana, even that book you want to buy online could get taxed under various proposals filed this week in the early days of the 2010 legislative session. Meanwhile, buying a pack of cigarettes may get a lot more costly, too. Lawmakers have dropped roughly 280 bills in the opening days of the session–and quite a few of those proposals are tax bills.
Last week Gov. Bill Richardson left the door ajar on the idea of raising the rate on what the state’s highest earners pay in the state’s income tax.
He did it again today.
Just days before New Mexico House Speaker Ben Lujan launched the 2010 legislative session, Adam Kokesh, a Republican primary candidate in the 3rd Congressional District, accused the powerful speaker of helping put his son Ben Ray Lujan in Congress through his “ability to make bribes and promises from the statehouse.” But the SEC has charged Kokesh’s own father for allegedly misappropriating $45 million from investors in four businesses.
A budget that largely protects K-12 education, while cutting deeply into most state agencies, won approval from the Legislature Friday evening. The bill, which trims more than $200 million in spending, now goes to Gov. Bill Richardson.
More than two dozen state lawmakers have stepped into a fray over whether churches, nonprofits and the such can help generate renewable energy, the Santa Fe New Mexican reports today.
New Mexico House Speaker Ben Lujan angrily denounced state Sen. John Arthur Smith today as a “racist S.O.B.” and “full of shit” because Smith questioned Lujan’s efforts to slip an amendment into a bill to benefit a private developer.
A breakdown of the votes shows that the opposition to embryonic stem-cell research was a bipartisan affair.
Fourteen Democrats, including House Speaker Ben Lujan, Majority Leader Ken Martinez and Majority Whip Sheryl Williams Stapleton, joined Republicans to…
Just like that, it appears the legislative standoff – at least for the moment – is over.
“Earlier this morning I had the chance to visit with the speaker (House Speaker Ben Lujan) and he told me the chairman of…
The reforms include consolidating the seven regional housing authorities into three, designating an agency to oversee regional operations, strengthening conflict-of-interest language, permanently eliminating the authorities’ ability to issue bonds, and requiring that transactions of over $100,000 be reviewed and approved by the mortgage finance authority.
The budget bill scrapped $94 million for projects like domestic violence shelters and pre-K classes, but largely spared an equestrian center backed by Gov. Richardson. The vote led one Senator to declare, “Much of what we do in the Senate is indefensible.”
Batman was in the Roundhouse.
Or was it Doc Holliday?
Val Kilmer, the actor and possible aspiring New Mexico politician, was seen skulking around the state Capitol on Wednesday.
This reporter only got within 20 feet of the…
State House Speaker Ben Lujan just named members to the House Rules subcommittee that is charged with studying whether to webcast in House committees and on the House floor.
The subcommittee is composed of three Republicans and three Democrats…
The revolution at the New Mexico Capitol on Monday involved a webcam, a computer and a videostream of a legislative committee meeting. It was the Roundhouse’s first webcast. Pretty harmless stuff you’d think. But for some it might as well have been revolutionaries storming the Bastille.
Rep. Edward Sandoval, D-Albuquerque and chairman of the House Taxation and Revenue committee, twice asked Rep. Janice Arnold-Jones, R-Albuquerque, to not broadcast today’s meeting over the Internet. But Arnold-Jones refused.
Sandoval then said that a legislative committee would review…
