UPDATE 8/21/24: Watch Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham's full remarks on-demand here.
Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham is the last speaker scheduled in the 7:00 to 8:00 pm MT block of the Democratic National Convention on Tuesday, Aug. 20. Watch the NPR livestream here:
Gov. Lujan Grisham to speak at DNC, appear alongside ‘Veep’ star - Andy Lyman, City Desk ABQ
Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham is slated to speak about health care Tuesday at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, according to her office.
Lujan Grisham’s office didn’t specify when the governor would speak, but noted that she is a former state secretary of health under former Gov. Bill Richardson. Lujan Grisham, who is a party delegate for New Mexico, will be joined by three of her staff members, with travel expenses covered by the governor’s political action committee.
According to The Hollywood Reporter, Lujan Grisham will also take part in a panel discussion with other Democratic female governors, hosted by Seinfeld co-star and star of the political comedy Veep Julia Louis-Dreyfus.
Vice President Kamala Harris officiated Lujan Grisham’s wedding to Manny Cordova in 2022.
Lujan Grisham won’t be the only politico traveling from the Land of Enchantment to Chicago.
Mayor Tim Keller is also attending the DNC this week as a delegate and in a statement said he is honored to be a representative for New Mexico.
“I look forward to the opportunity to play a role in this important process,” Keller said. “This will be an exciting one!”
Watch the governor's speech, and all of Tuesday night's DNC on the NPR livestream.
The full schedule of events at the DNC can be found here.
City Council paves the way for new NM United stadium — Elizabeth McCall, City Desk ABQ
The Albuquerque City Council at its Monday meeting again voted in favor of moving forward with building a New Mexico United stadium at Balloon Fiesta Park — however, it is taking steps to address traffic concerns in the area.
The project had been on pause after nearby neighborhoods appealed the plan twice.
Mayor Tim Keller initially asked the council to approve an agreement between the city and United for the soccer team to pay for a $30 million multi-use outdoor sports stadium on 7 acres of the city-owned Balloon Fiesta Park.
The proposal has bounced back and forth between the council, the Environmental Planning Commission (EPC) and a land use hearing officer for several months.
Part of the process included United paying for a traffic study, which the appellants argued was ignored by the EPC and should have been considered.
A land use hearing officer recommended that councilors deny the appeal and uphold the EPC’s approval, but noted that the commission ignored recommendations from the independent traffic study.
The hearing officer in his final report suggested opening a second traffic lane during games and said “officer control” would probably be required at nearby intersections.
Councilors approved the application to build the stadium in November 2023. It was appealed by residents in the surrounding neighborhood but the EPC approved the plan again.
However, that decision was appealed for a second time in July by neighbors. According to the hearing officer’s findings, the appeal was partially based on procedural errors, misapplications of the Integrated Development Ordinance and concerns about the increased noise and traffic the stadium would bring to the area.
With no discussion Monday night, councilors accepted the recommendation to deny the appeal on an 8-1 vote and set the process of building a new stadium back in motion.
David Wiese-Carl, a spokesperson for New Mexico United, said the team will not move forward with construction on the stadium until the legal “appeals process is exhausted,” and the city finishes the initial construction that was funded by capital outlay.
NMSU announces PED head Romero as one of five finalists for president - Danielle Prokop, Source New Mexico
New Mexico State University has been in the search for a new leader since March, and the leader of the state’s education agency is one of the five finalists announced Monday.
Arsenio Romero, secretary at the Public Education Department, has the potential to return to his alma mater, where he’s served as a regent and taught as a professor.
Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham appointed Romero to the state’s top education spot in February 2023, the fourth person to hold the position during her tenure as governor. If Romero steps down, an interim secretary is appointed, and any replacement requires state senate confirmation.
The other four NMSU president finalists hold leadership positions in higher education around the country.
They include:
· Valerio Ferme, vice president for academic affairs and provost at the University of Cincinnati.
· Brian Haynes, a vice chancellor for student affairs at the University of California, Riverside.
· Monica Lounsbery, a dean at the college of health and human services at California State University in Long Beach.
· Neil MacKinnon, a professor in the school of Public Health and former provost at Augusta University.
NMSU, the state’s land-grant university, has just over 14,700 students at its Las Cruces campus, and more than 21,000 students across the state, according to the 2023-24 headcount.
The University has been without a permanent top leader since April 2023, when Chancellor Dan Arvizu resigned just months before his contract expired in June. The board of regents agreed not to renew his five-year contract in December 2022.
Arvizu was overseeing the whole NMSU system and the main campus as both chancellor and president, taking on the title after President John Floros stepped down in March 2022.
Arvizu oversaw a tumultuous period at the university. This included the cancellation of the basketball season over instances of hazing, where former players settled with the school for $8 million. Former employees filed multiple lawsuits against the university under his leadership, for allegations including retaliation for investigations in racist and sexist pay disparities.
Arvizu’s base salary was $500,000, but could be as high as $650,000 if he reached incentive goals.
The board declined to hire any of the five finalists picked in the first search for a replacement, opting to restart the search in March 2024.
In March, the board appointed interim President Mónica Torres, who formerly was president at Doña Ana Community College. She replaced interim President Jay Gogue, a former NMSU president the board appointed to operate the university in the wake of Arvizu’s departure.
The university is holding finalist interviews in August, with a scheduled campus visit in September, according to the scheduled process. The NMSU Board of Regents, which governs the university, anticipates announcing the new president at the end of September.
For more information, the university is posting updates and bios of the candidates on the https://nmsu.edu/president-search page.
Lawmakers from three states share experiences regulating AI - Austin Fisher, Source New Mexico
Lawmakers from three other states where laws governing artificial intelligence were recently passed discussed how to protect people’s privacy in future legislation written and debated by New Mexico legislators, and across the country.
Connecticut Sen. James Maroney helps to lead a working group coming up with definitions and lessons which could inform the ways AI privacy legislation is crafted. The group has members from all but three states, he told the New Mexico Courts, Corrections & Justice Committee on Aug. 13.
About 19 states in total have adopted laws similar to Connecticut’s commonly dealing with people’s rights and data controllers’ and data processors’ responsibilities, Minnesota Rep. Steve Elkins said during the committee meeting.
New Mexico this year enacted its own law related to AI, but it has to do with political advertisements and doesn’t deal with other related issues like data privacy. Another bill discussed in the 2024 regular session would have provided basic guard rails on how the state can use AI, but it never reached a vote in either chamber.
Maroney and Elkins said while no two AI bills in state legislatures will be exactly alike, it’s important to make them similar so national businesses can more easily comply with them.
“So if you pick up Senator Maroney’s bill, or the Maryland bill, or my bill as a starting point, you’re going to be most of the way there, because all of the provisions in these acts have been thoroughly vetted and by-and-large accepted by the business community,” Elkins told the New Mexico committee.
Maryland Sen. Sara Love said these kinds of AI laws should be able to operate state-by-state, “However, that doesn’t mean that I was going to accept everything that (businesses) wanted.”
In most other states, Love said, the law says the data controller must limit their collection to what’s “adequate, relevant and reasonably necessary in relation to the disclosed purposes with which the data is processed.” In other words, the company just has to disclose they’ve collected the data, and given a reason why.
Love said she wanted something stronger in her bill, so she required data collectors to limit their collections to what’s “reasonably necessary for providing or maintaining the product or service.”
For example, a company running a mobile phone game shouldn’t be able to collect the user’s location, because that’s not necessary to provide the service, Love said.
AI DECISION MAKING
AI has the potential to make decisions better, fairer and more transparent, said Christopher Moore, a professor at the Santa Fe Institute.
On the other hand, AI algorithms are often based on historical data containing their own biases, and often assume past patterns will continue in the future, Moore said at another presentation to the Courts, Corrections & Justice Committee later in the day on Aug. 13.
“AI treats people as statistics in some sense,” he said. “They don’t look at the individual facts about a person the way that a human decision maker might.”
Maroney said the working group is concerned about how biased algorithms can profile people and negatively impact their applications for jobs or housing.
Landlords often use AI to run a background check on a prospective tenant, Moore said. Even if a landlord doesn’t intend to discriminate against them, the AI could still have a discriminatory effect, he said. There’s a lot of inaccurate data floating out there including eviction records for someone with a similar name, or criminal charges that were dropped, he said.
It’s important the law requires companies who do this algorithmic profiling must study any possible disparate impacts, Maroney said.
“We need to make sure we’re testing these algorithms before they’re making important life decisions,” he said.
It’s also important companies governed by the law may not discriminate against consumers for exercising their rights, Love said, like charging more for a product if they refuse to sign over the rights to their data.
Many AI systems are called “black boxes,” Moore said, meaning you don’t get to see how or why they produce a particular score or recommendation.
The people affected by AI and the decision makers advised by it need to understand the logic behind it, what kinds of errors it can make, and make an independent assessment of its accuracy and fairness, he said.
“AI is a great tool, but like any other tool, we need to figure out when and where it’s the right tool for the job,” Moore said. “Or do we just have to take the vendor’s word for it, that it works great and you should pay for it?”
DATA PRIVACY
Elkins said his bill borrowed language from Oregon and Delaware requiring companies disclose where they might have sold someone’s data, and prohibiting them from selling or using for targeted advertising sensitive information like precise location data.
He said he also inserted a provision in his bill in Minnesota explicitly prohibiting the re-identification of data which has been purposely collected anonymously.
The Minnesota law also requires companies to provide an annual report on its data minimization policies, meaning companies shouldn’t be collecting data they don’t need in order to provide goods or services, and shouldn’t be collecting data just to sell it to someone else.
Love said Maryland’s law allows people to access their data being collected and processed, correct inaccuracies and obtain copies. It also allows people to opt out of having their data processed for targeted advertising, sold, or used to profile them for consequential decisions, she said.
New Mexico Sen. Antoinette Sedillo-Lopez (D-Albuquerque) asked what opting out means.
Elkins said many state laws say if you don’t want companies to use your data to rate you for auto insurance or getting an apartment, you can opt out of having your data used for that purpose.
Elkins said he doesn’t think that standard is adequate, because if you have a reason to complain about your data being profiled, “it’s probably already been done.” So he added an additional provision in his bill that says if your data is already profiled, you have additional rights.
Bus route returns to bring students from Northwest ABQ to university area — City Desk ABQ Staff Report
The city is once again running a bus from Northwest Albuquerque to the University of New Mexico — and it has even added a stop at the Central New Mexico Community College.
Madeline Skrak, a spokesperson for the Transit Department, said the popular Route 790 which starts near Cottonwood Mall and stops in Old Town and Downtown will benefit students and staff who commute to campus.
The route had been put on pause since March 2023 due to understaffing, Skrak said. She said the transit department had been covering the area with “baseline service” but now that they have more staff it is able to accommodate more routes.
Route 790 is expected to run through the fall and spring semesters and then be added to a new route map.
The city is working to implement the ABQ RIDE Forward Plan’s Recovery Network to revamp the bus system by reexamining routes, and when buses run. It plans to begin implementing the new map next summer.
“We heard the community and are reintegrating the Route 790 as soon as staffing levels have permitted,” said Transit Director Leslie Keener. “While many routes serve the UNM area, this route improvement will serve CNM’s main campus for the academic year before we transition into even better connectivity in our Recovery Network.”
Chief Administrative Officer Samantha Sengel said in a new release that the city had been working with CNM to make it easier for students to use public transportation.
“Many students commute from the West Side, and the return of this route connects them to training and education that leads to employment opportunities,” Sengel said.