A self-described “center right” Hispanic Republican group announced its two New Mexico state coordinators on Thursday.The Hispanic Leadership Network named Jamie Estrada, a former Bush administration official, and Christopher Saucedo, an Albuquerque attorney, to run the group’s grassroots outreach efforts in the state.

In September, HLN kicked off its efforts in the Southwest by holding a conference in Albuquerque having as keynote speaker Gov. Susana Martinez, one of a group of high-profile Hispanic Republican leaders elected in November 2010 that also includes Nevada Gov. Brian Sandoval and U.S. Senator Marco Rubio (Fla.), urged those in attendance to “have a conversation” with Latinos in their communities.

National HLN co-chairs, former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush and Bush administration Commerce Secretary Carlos Gutierrez, were unable to attend but sent videos. Both praised Martinez’s leadership and argued that Democrats had failed Latinos.

Stringent immigration policies enacted by Republican-controlled state governments, as well as rhetoric on the issue that many perceive to be anti-Hispanic, have alienated many Hispanic voters from the GOP.

Lauro Garza, the head of Somos Republicans, a Hispanic GOP group in Texas, recently announced he was leaving the party after presidential candidate Herman Cain said he wanted an electric fence on the border that would kill potential unauthorized migrants, which Garza pointed to as evidence that the party had been “infiltrated by nativist ideas.”

The founders of HLN are hoping that it can reverse the trend of Southwestern Hispanic voters rejecting the GOP. But according to Jose Armas of the Hispanic Link News Service, the HLN conference received a mixed to negative reaction from Latinos in attendance. One particular grievance was that the Corrections Corporation of America, a private prison company which lobbied in favor of Arizona’s restrictive immigration law S.B. 1070, was a sponsor of the conference.

Here’s video of Gutierrez and Bush addressing the conference:

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 been testifying before the Environmental Improvement Board during hearings on repealing a year-old law to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions, did the same.

In a Manichean battle pitting good versus evil, one of Wednesday’s key witnesses was none other than a man labeled in 2002 as the “Clean air villain of the month,” who was testifying on behalf of Tri-State Generation and Transmission Association, an oil, gas and utility interests seeking to overturn the EIB’s 2010 measure.

As outlined in an earlier New Mexico Independent story, Governor Susana Martinez has been seeking a repeal of the EIB’s 2010 edict that the state require its utility industries and other large emitters of carbon dioxide to cut their emissions of the gas by two percent a year beginning in 2012 and running through 2020.

Martinez has argued — along with the representatives of the Public Service Company of New Mexico, the New Mexico Oil and Gas Association and other oil and gas and utility companies — that the measure harms these businesses, incurs unjust fees on them  and that any climate change regulation ought to take place on a national, not state level.

The hearings started on Tuesday and are set to finish up next Tuesday.

Yesterday’s star witness for the anti-cap-and-trade activists was former U.S. Environmental Protection Agency administrator Jeffrey Holmstead, who said that the likelihood of any national cap-and-trade program is lower than ever — despite repeated actions of the EPA. Holmstead also said he believes that the state’s rule would have little to no impact on climate change and that costs would outweigh benefits.

In 2002, after refusing requests from former Senator Jim Jeffords of Vermont to reveal internal documentation on the Clean Air Act, the Clean Air Trust named Holmstead its “Clear air villain of the month.” Holmstead came in as a hired lobbyist working on behalf of Tri-State, a wholesale electric supply utility company that runs 44 systems in Colorado, Nebraska, Wyoming, and New Mexico.

Later, in 2010, Senator Lisa Murkowski of Alaska and lobbyist Roger Martella Jr. enlisted Holmstead to help craft legislation intended to disable the EPA’s ability to regulate greenhouse gasses. Just before doing so, Holmstead,  his employer and two of their major clients donated over $125,000 to Murkowski.

Holmstead has also worked as an “adjunct scholar” for Citizens for the Environment, a spinoff of Citizens for a Sound Economy.

Citizens for the Environment, according to a report in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, has “labeled most environment problems—including acid rain . . . as myths.”

Citizens for a Sound Economy was founded and funded by the Koch brothers, Charles and David, the notorious right-wing and libertarian billionaire duo who have been linked to the Tea Party movement and who, according to Kert Davies of Greenpeace, have since 1997 given close to $55 million to climate change deniers.

Among the group’s opposing the opposers is the New Energy Economy, the Santa Fe-based clean-energy advocacy organization established in 2004. Along with WildEarth Guardians and other environmental activist groups, the NEE sees the about-face by the IB has essentially politically motivated.

“A party is not supposed to take one position in front of a body and then adopt a different position later on,” said its executive director Mariel Nanasi. “Courts don’t generally favor that sort of switch. Unless there’s some actual basis for that change, it’s very unusual. The EIB can’t just turn on a dime like that.”

While the solar-paneled protestors, who’d been organized into action by the NEE, sang their songs, their opponents gave the EIB estimates on costs of the board’s 2010 regulations — both to their companies and their customers. The figures ranged from $840 million to $1.6 billion over the 20 years. Representatives of New Mexico’s electric cooperatives then presented the board with more than 16,000 petition signatures in favor of repeal.

Nanansi said that the claims of exorbitant retrofitting and higher heating bills for those who can least afford it and lost jobs all amount to shell games.

“It’s a ruse — all these arguments,” she said. “This is the most important issue of our time, and they’re externalizing their costs for decades. It sounds good that they care about their customers, but PNM has raised its rates three times in the last four years. And that’s not because of the EIB’s new regulations. That’s because PNM made the risky decision to invest in coal.”

“It’s an ideological game,” added Nanansi. “The problem is, there are real consequences. Governor Martinez is doing her damnedest to tear everything down. But we’re going to continue to build momentum for clean energy. And if the EIB buckles to these utility and oil and gas interests, we’re going to appeal. There are a lot of legal opportunities to oppose this.”

Officials in the Martinez administration say they are considering cutting taxes on small business gross receipts and corporate income as a means of creating jobs in the state.

The tax on gross receipts averages at about 7 percent throughout the state. One proposal being considered would eliminate gross receipt taxes for business with a tax liability under $200 a month, which could benefit about 40,000 businesses in the state.

Finance and Administration Secretary Tom Clifford said revising the state’s corporate income tax code was also an option under consideration, including changes to rules governing how much of mult-istate corporations’ income is taxed.

Using state-level tax cuts that aren’t offset with other taxes as a way to create jobs sometimes backfires, particularly at a time when state budgets are already considerably weakened.

As a June report from the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities says, “in the early 2000s, as in the early 1990s and early 1980s, state fiscal problems lasted for several years after the recession ended.  The same will undoubtedly be the case this time, since the current recession is more severe…than the last one, and state fiscal problems have proven to be worse and are likely to remain so.”

The report estimates that New Mexico’s total budget shortfall this year has been about 9.1 percent of the $5.5 billion general fund, about $492 million, which is proportionately smaller than most other states’ shortfalls. Of that, $333 million was closed in the budget adopted by the Legislature earlier in the year, and the remaining $159 million has arisen since then.

Taxes on gross receipts supply about a third of the state general fund, much of which goes to fund public education. New Mexico’s public schools are disproportionately funded by the state government, as most other school systems primarily rely on property taxes at the local level.

And although total government employment in New Mexico has actually increased since the start of 2007, in the past two years the state has lost some 3,600 government employees, according to Bureau of Labor Statistics estimates. Further spending cuts to offset business tax cuts will most likely cause additional loss of government jobs.

But Clifford suggested that tax reform could be phased in over time so as to minimize its impact on revenue.

New Mexico’s budget was initially protected from the worst of the recession because a large proportion of the state’s general fund comes from gas and oil revenue. But economists have said that the revenue from energy taxes is likely to be smaller than initially projected, which has meant that the Legislature will have less “new money” to work with during next year’s session than originally thought.

On the same day that Governor Susana Martinez’s administration went before members of the Legislature’s Economic and Rural Development Committee in Santa Fe to again propose merging the Tourism and Cultural Affairs agencies, state Tourism secretary Monique Jacobson was down in Albuquerque telling attendees of the Tourism Association of New Mexico’s Research and Marketing Conference about her desire to rebrand New Mexico as a top-ten tourist destination — despite popular perceptions of the Land of Enchantment as dull, artsy, arid, and barren.

“We suffer from low awareness and damaging misperceptions,” Jacobson told attendees, after showing the tourist association a video of reactions about New Mexico from focus groups in Chicago, Houston, and Los Angeles.

Reactions among members of an interim legislative committee were hardly more encouraging, despite Gregory Baird of the Department of Finance and Administration, the governor’s budget arm, saying that the merger would save the state an estimated $1.2 million over the next three years by reducing management positions.

Sounding like one of the focus-group members, Sen. Mary Jane Garcia (D-Dona Ana) said, “I’m trying to understand the rationale behind putting these agencies together.”

It’s that type of quizzical resistance that has dogged one of Governor Martinez’s major restructuring proposals — all as a way to increase efficiency and trim state spending. The governor pitched the idea to the legislature last January during its 30-day session, and again during its special session in September and she plans to bring it up again this next January. In her two previous attempts to gain traction for it, though, the idea didn’t even get brought up for a vote. Despite the two agencies already sharing legal counsel and an administrative services division directory.

Secretary Jacobson has argued that the merger makes sense philosophically, in that the new agency could capitalize on the state’s rich cultural traditions as a way to market New Mexico to potential tourists. At the tourism conference in Albuquerque, she talked about rebranding the state as an “adventure steeped in rich culture.”

As it now stands, the tourism industry serves as a major state employer and economic engine, employing some 55,000 people and contributing about $5.5 billion to the economy in 2009. But despite whichever “distinct but complementary missions,” in Baird’s words, the two agencies currently appear to share, House Speaker Ben Lujan, D-Nambe, characterized the two as very different nonetheless, perhaps foreshadowing a level of continued resistance among lawmakers that has long plagued the governor’s proposed merger.

Merger or no merger, Jacobson vowed to forge ahead with her plans for reformulating her department from a “tourist service agency” to a “tourism generating agency.” “Putting the traveler first,” she stressed to the tourism crowd. “That’s the approach we all need to take.”

In an effort to stem the tide of controversy and criticism leveled at her since being designated earlier this year by Governor Susana Martinez as state education secretary, Hanna Skandera sent out a letter last week to the New Mexico Coalition of School Administrators asking for their help in reshaping the state’s social promotion bill, among other requests.

Most recently, Skandera’s department has been taking a beating in radio ads sponsored by Michael Corwin and his Independent Source PAC, in which the liberal political action committee took her, the governor and the state’s public education administrators to task for alleged conflicts of interest.

Skandera, though, seems to brush aside such indiscretions, nor does the fact that she’s still unconfirmed worry her either, having told the New Mexican in an interview yesterday, “I don’t care.”

Instead, she’s lobbying for the new A-F grading system, which lawmakers passed in last February’s legislative session. Toward that end, she’ll be holding a public meeting in Santa Fe October 31. She’s also hoping to gather more support for her controversial plan to revamp the social promotion bill.

Her plan, which she wants to rename the reading intervention bill, would jettison the practice of sending those third graders who cannot read at a proficient level onto the next grade. It’s an idea Corwin, among others, has argued against, citing sociologist and longtime member of the National Academy of Sciences Robert M. Houser’s congressional testimony that “the research evidence is overwhelming: Simply holding back students who have not achieved to the appropriate standard does not work.”

It’s also an agenda Skandera appears to have brought with her from Florida, where she served as Governor Jeb Bush’s deputy commissioner of education and advocated the eradication of social promotion, among other changes.

In 2007, Bush, along with Zachariah Zachariah and Brian Yablonski (both of whom have been under investigation by the SEC), founded the Foundation for Excellence in Education, a group that helped draft last year’s New Mexico senate bill 427, the so-called “education reform” bill introduced by Senator Vernon Asbill.

In her interview with the New Mexican, Skandera also told reporter Robert Nott of her desire to move New Mexico students into a virtual learning environment, one provided not by that already in place under the state’s Higher Education Department but one contracted out to a private company. Toward that end, Skandera said the state just submitted a grant to the Jaquelin Hume Foundation in order to raise funds for a study on digital-learning resources.

The push for digital learning is another facet of the “Florida model” of education: through his Digital Learning Council, Bush has also emphasized distance learning via the internet as a way to teach children; and distance learning that’s contracted out to private distance-learning companies such as K12, the company that contributed $5,000 to Martinez’s 2010 gubernatorial campaign.

The Hume Foundation was founded by in 1962 by Jaquelin Hume, a major donor to Ronald Reagan’s gubernatorial and presidential campaigns. Hume also founded Citizens for America, the conservative grass-roots organization once known as “President Reagan’s Lobby.” The Hume Foundation has connections to many other conservative and fundamentalist foundations, many of which were started up and are funded by ultra-conservatives like Richard Mellon Scaife and Charles and David Koch.

Skandera did not address Corwin’s ads nor any of the other issues raised by them. She did not respond to NMI’s request for comment.

Governor Susana Martinez yesterday announced the five finalists she’d selected from a list of 90 hopefuls for the Public Regulation Commission seat vacated several weeks ago by Jerome Block Jr., who resigned after pleading guilty to several felonies. Among the quintet are three Democrats, a Republican, and an Independent.

The five finalists, all from Santa Fe, are Robert Monday, a former utilities manager for Los Alamos County; Douglas Howe, an independent consultant with Cambridge Energy Research Associates; Dennis Gee, a former utilities department director for the city of Santa Fe; Kenneth Costello, a principal with the National Regulatory Research Institute; and Andres Salazar, a research professor at the University of New Mexico’s school of engineering.

There is as yet no deadline for when the new official will take office, but whoever it ends up being certainly has the qualifications as outlined by Think New Mexico and its executive director, Fred Nathan, in a report the think tank issued this past September.

Nathan said this about the announcement: “We are pleased that all five finalists satisfy the qualifications that every PRC commissioner should meet. Every candidate has both the educational and professional experience to serve effectively.”

Having called for candidates with at least a four-year college degree or five years of relevant professional
experience, he could say, “All of these candidates appear to have advanced degrees and many years of related experience, which goes beyond the minimum qualifications that we have proposed.”

Nathan also expressed modest surprise that there seemed to be little politics at play in the governor’s choices, saying “We are impressed that the Governor has put qualifications ahead of party affiliation.”

Liberal muckraker and private investigator Michael Corwin, of the Albuquerque-based Independent Source PAC, a liberal political action committee, recently launched a trio of radio spots not merely critical of Governor Susana Martinez and her administration but seemingly intent on exposing what he sees as widespread hypocrisies and conflicts of interest within the Department of Education.

Working for free and having paid for the spots in order to generate more funds for his PAC, Corwin and his 30-second segments each focus on a very specific transgression: one on the hiring of chief of staff Keith Gardner’s wife at the Public Education Department; one on the apparent conflict of interest in choosing Paul Yarborough as State Personnel Board Chairman, despite his having served as vice president of an Albuquerque law firm that has state contracts totaling more than $500,000; and a third outlining the appointment of a onetime charter schools attorney as the state’s new charter-school czar.

Governor spokesman Scott Darnell offered up a “no comment” in a statement made in response to the ads, adding that they appeared to have been “backed by a shadow group.”

Corwin says the response from beyond the governor’s office so far has been great. “People are really loving them because they’re so unlike the usual political ads,” he said.

“It’s real information. It’s the first time some people are hearing about this conduct that’s been going on in the Martinez administration. There’s been this sort of honeymoon period. Well, these ads are our signaling that the honeymoon is over. They show that the governor has either been an absentee governor so far, or that her statements about ethics and code of conduct have been little more than lip service.”

Officials in the Martinez administration announced Tuesday that revenue for the state government will be lower than previously estimated. The Associated Press reports:

A new revenue forecast released Tuesday lowered projections for tax collections by $123 million in the fiscal year that starts next July and about $21 million in the current budget year.

Much of the decline is because economists expect oil and natural gas prices to be lower than anticipated.

Last week, Gov. Susana Martinez (R) was in Midland, Texas, touting her anti-regulation record to the annual meeting of the Permian Basin Petroleum Association. She told the crowd that oil and gas revenue makes up about 30 percent of the state’s general fund and 95 percent of the permanent fund, and yet, “Often, the industry is vilified, vilified even in our state.”

But the new depressed revenue figures suggests there are weaknesses to a state relying on oil and gas revenue to finance itself. Although economists say increased economic growth leads to spiking fuel prices, the Federal Reserve’s commitment to tamping down on rising headline inflation, a measure of inflation that includes energy and food prices, means that states like New Mexico must exist in an unpredictable budgetary situation.

The Legislative Finance Committee was told in July they had around $350 million in “new money” to use in the next legislative session. The decreased oil and gas revenue means only $200 million will now be available.

Gov. Susana Martinez (R) signed a law Wednesday tightening requirements for firms who receive preference in receiving government contracts, closing a “loophole” that allowed out-of-state firms to take advantage of the existing system.  

AP reports:

The new law tightens contracting requirements to prevent out-of-state businesses from qualifying for a preference that’s supposed to go to in-state businesses when bidding on state-financed construction projects.

Under the contracting preference system, a bid by a qualified New Mexico business is considered 5 percent lower than the submitted amount – potentially helping the company be selected as the low bidder on a project.

The contracting preference previously didn’t apply to bids of more than $5 million, but that cap has been eliminated. The changes take effect immediately and were approved by the Legislature during a special session, which ended last month.

The law specifies a New Mexico business as one that pays taxes in the state and has at least three employees who live in it. The company must also have leased or owned property in the state for at least five years.

Both the governor and the sponsor, State Sen. Timothy Keller, (D-Albuquerque) claimed that the new law would create at least 3,000 new jobs in New Mexico per year.

The reform was prompted by a 2009 incident in which an Oklahoma-based company was granted a $60 million contract despite an Albuquerque-based firm scoring higher during the bidding process.

Republicans and Democrats in the state are divided over which court should be assigned the task of redrawing New Mexico’s federal and state legislative districts, and Democrats have asked the state’s highest court to pick a location. The Associated Press reports:

Democrats, including Rep. Brian Egolf of Santa Fe, requested that the state Supreme Court consolidate all redistricting cases in district court in Santa Fe and appoint one judge to handle them.

Republicans have filed separate redistricting lawsuits in Albuquerque, the state’s largest city, and in Lovington, a community in GOP-dominated Lea County in southeastern New Mexico. The Democratic group brought cases in Santa Fe, where the party is heavily favored.

Four judges in the three courts have been assigned to different redistricting cases.

Gov. Susana Martinez is still considering whether to approve the new maps for the Public Regulation Commission districts, the one Democratic-approved redistricting plan that she has not already committed to vetoing. Republicans in the Legislature voiced strong opposition to those plans when they were being debated.

Democrats are arguing that the state capital is the right place for the cases to be resolved because the governor and the secretary of state, along with other state government officials, are defendants.

The last redistricting fight ten years ago was assigned to a judge in Bernalillo County. Supreme Court Chief Justice Charles Daniels represented Democrats in that dispute and has recused himself from the current redistricting case.