New Mexico urges caution for holidays amid virus threat
By Susan Montoya Bryan Associated Press
New Mexico health officials on Wednesday warned that COVID-19 transmission rates remain high across the state and they urged people to be cautious over the holiday weekend, acknowledging that the public will need to learn to live with the virus and take action to reduce risks for older people.
The warning comes as workplace safety regulators are investigating the death of a third employee of Santa Fe's local bus system who was infected with COVID-19.
State health officials said during a virtual briefing that New Mexico's death toll since the pandemic began is approaching 5,700 and that every county is experiencing high rates of spread. That's despite having a statewide mask mandate in place for public indoor spaces and a vaccination rate of more than 75% among adults. Nearly one-third of adults also have received boosters.
The officials also noted that while the omicron variant has been reported in New Mexico, delta continues to be the dominant variant in the state right now.
State Epidemiologist Dr. Christine Ross said there are several specimens that are awaiting sequencing at the state laboratory to determine if they are omicron cases and that the state is monitoring the situation closely.
Overall, she said New Mexico is sitting at what appears to be a "very high uncomfortable plateau" when it comes to COVID-19 cases. She said the surge began in July when the delta variant became prominent.
"We have been dealing with this ongoing high level of cases for several months now and we do see some decrease in our seven-day moving average most recently," she said. "We certainly hope that trend continues downward, but I think we need more time to follow that trend out and see where it's going to head."
Ross said the state's goal is to reduce risk, whether it be by encouraging vaccination, getting more people tested or reminding them about social distancing and avoiding crowds.
The state said it will be embarking on a pilot program aimed at expanding access to home tests.
In Santa Fe, the worker who died Monday was a supervisor with the city's transit department.
Stephanie Stringer, deputy cabinet secretary of operations for the state Environment Department, has said that if the state finds the city did not take steps to prevent worker exposure to COVID-19, the department can take enforcement action and seek corrective measures.
City spokesman Dave Herndon Herndon said Santa Fe follows state guidelines, provides workers with personal protective equipment and regularly cleans and sanitizes buildings and equipment.
3rd employee of Santa Fe transit district dies from COVID-19
A third employee of Santa Fe's local bus system has died of COVID-19 as state workplace safety regulators investigate virus cases involving Transit District workers.
City spokesman Dave Herndon said the latest worker who died recently from the virus was the latest worker who died recently, the Albuquerque Journal reported.
Stephanie Stringer, deputy cabinet secretary of operations for the state Environment Department, said last week that the Occupational Health and Safety Bureau was gathering information on positive COVID-19 cases among transit workers.
If the state finds the city did not take steps to prevent worker exposure to COVID "NMED will take appropriate enforcement action and seek corrective measures," Stringer said.
Herndon said the city has communicated with the safety bureau and will continue to do so, and he said the city has stringently followed state guidelines and formulated its own.
The system has provided all workers with proper personal protective equipment and regularly cleans and sanitizes buildings and equipment, Herndon said.
Lawmakers want to study costs, benefits of public power
By Susan Montoya Bryan, Associated Press
More than a dozen New Mexico lawmakers are petitioning state utility regulators to study the potential costs and benefits of publicly owned electrical power for the state.
The lawmakers in a petition released Tuesday said they believe public ownership of the electrical utilities that serve New Mexico likely would benefit customers, businesses and state, local and tribal governments as mandates aimed at curbing pollution and growing renewable energy development kick in over the next two decades.
The lawmakers, most of whom are liberal Democrats, want to make their case before the Public Regulation Commission during a meeting next month.
"We no longer need to trade off the environment and the economy against each other as we have abundant natural resources in New Mexico," state Sen. Liz Stefanics said in a statement. "We must look at alternative ways to structure the provision of energy so that we can meet our goals as quickly and equitably as possible."
The request comes after the Public Regulation Commission issued two major rejections involving the state's largest electric provider in recent weeks. The five elected commissioners voted unanimously against Public Service Co. of New Mexico's proposed exit from the coal-fired Four Corners Power Plant and a proposed multibillion-dollar acquisition of the investor-owned utility by global energy giant Iberdrola.
The commissioners had voiced concerns about whether the proposals were in the public interest, among other things.
Stefanics and her colleagues argue that a formal study would help determine whether implementation of public power would be in the public interest, stabilize electricity rates, generate revenues and result in the deployment of more renewable energy.
Supporters of the rejected PNM merger had argued that bringing in Iberdrola and U.S. subsidiary Avangrid would have made available more capital and boosted purchasing power that could help meet emissions benchmarks and renewable energy mandates.
But the petitioning lawmakers say that under the current model, plant ownership and energy investments by investor-owned utilities require a return on equity that often creates an incentive not to invest in energy sources with fixed capital costs and no fuel costs.
The petition points to two possible models that could be studied — a state owned and operated electric power authority with municipal and tribal local control over generation or a community choice system where investor-owned utilities maintain transmission and distribution with the option for municipal and tribal control over generation.
The lawmakers say it would be up to the New Mexico Legislature to make the ultimate decision about whether a public power retail electric service at just and reasonable rates is feasible.
"That process must begin with an understanding of what is possible," the petition states.
According to the petition, more than 2,000 communities in 49 states and several U.S. territories have a public power utility and as a whole, public power utilities have lower rates than other types of electric utilities.
The petition suggests that the study, if allowed by the commission, should also look at potential downsides such as whether public power adoption could expand the urban-rural divide or decrease market competition.
New Mexico governor signs spending of federal pandemic aid - By Morgan Lee Associated Press
New Mexico's governor signed a nearly $500 milling spending bill Tuesday that draws on federal pandemic relief funds to expand high-speed internet access, bolster roads, upgrade state parks, expand nurse training programs and help teachers pay off their student debts amid a shortage of educators.
Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham, a Democrat, approved all proposed spending in the bill and vetoed a requirement that local governments contribute to related affordable housing projects. The governor said that requirement was unreasonable given economic distress.
A bill-signing ceremony in Belen marked a truce in a month’s long standoff between the governor and a handful of state senators over which branches of government can allocate $1.7 billion in federal pandemic aid.
Lujan Grisham initially asserted sole authority over the aid approved in March by President Joe Biden and Congress. Legislators including Republican Sen. Greg Baca of Belen and unaffiliated Sen. Jacob Candelaria of Albuquerque challenged the governor at the Supreme Court and successfully defended the Legislature's oversight of the federal relief funds.
Baca highlighted a provision of the bill that sets aside $50 million for the possible construction of an acute care hospital in Valencia County, which encompasses rapidly growing communities on the southern outskirts of Albuquerque.
The bill signed on Tuesday provides $133 million for high-speed internet infrastructure. Spending can go towards alternatives to underground fiber-optic cable such as satellite networks.
It assigned $142 million to road and highway infrastructure projects, $25 million to housing assistance, $20 million for upgrades to the state's network of state parks, $15 million to nurse training programs and $15 million toward advertising aimed at attracting tourists to the state.
The state will spend another $10 million to pick up litter, $7 million on outdoor recreation programs and $5 million on food banks.
The state already used $600 million in federal pandemic relief to replenish the state's unemployment insurance trust fund, avoiding payroll tax increases on local businesses.
Lujan Grisham previously authorized spending on sweepstakes prizes for people who got vaccinated and supplementary wages to agricultural workers that harvest and process the state's renowned chile crop.
Of the state's original $1.7 billion allocation in federal aid, legislators have wrapped more than a half-billion dollars into the state general fund to allow more time for spending decisions in the coming years.
Leading legislators are highlighting the need for workforce training and education programs to expand and diversify a state economy that is closely tethered to oil production, tourism and federal military and research facilities.
As COVID fueled the drug crisis, Native Americans hit worst - By Claire Galofaro Ap National Writer
Rachel Taylor kissed her fingertips and pressed them to the crow sewn onto a leather bag on the couch in the living room. "Oh, my baby," she whispered. She hugged the buckskin satchel filled with her son's ashes.
Nearly a year ago, she opened his bedroom door and screamed so loud she woke the neighbor. Kyle Domrese was face down on his bed, one of more than 100,000 Americans lost in a year to overdoses as the COVID-19 pandemic aggravated America's addiction disaster.
When he was 4, the medicine man had given him his Ojibwe name: Aandegoons — "little crow." She traced the outline of the black bird on the sack.
"Love you," Taylor said to the bag, as she does each time she leaves her home in this city surrounded by three Ojibwe reservations in remote northern Minnesota.
As the pandemic ravaged the country, deaths from drug overdoses surged by nearly 30%, climbing to a record high. The drug crisis also diversified from an overwhelmingly white affliction to killing people of color with staggering speed. The death rate last year was highest among Native Americans, for whom COVID-19 piled yet more despair on communities already confronting generations of trauma, poverty, unemployment and underfunded health systems.
Taylor's tribe, the White Earth Nation, studied the lives they've lost to addiction.
"Their death certificates say they died of an overdose, but that's not right," one member of their study group said.
These deaths were a culmination of far more than that: Despite their resilience, Native Americans carry in their blood 500 years’ worth of pain from being robbed of their land, their language, their culture, their children. In living people's memory, children were taken from their families and sent to boarding schools with the motto, "Kill the Indian, save the man."
"What they died of is a broken heart," the study says.
For years, Taylor tried to break the cycle.
Her grandmother was sent to a boarding school, where she was taught to be so ashamed of her Ojibwe language that she would only speak it once she'd eased the pain by drinking.
Taylor had her daughter when she was 19 and her son a few years later. She'd lost custody of them for a couple years as she battled her own addiction. She told them she wished she could fix all the dysfunctional things that happened when she was using.
"Then I thought, well, then my mom would have to go back and fix things, and then my grandma would have to go back, it would have to go on like that for generations," she said.
Taylor had lived in more than 50 places before she turned 18, and faced sexual, physical and mental abuse.
She prayed to her creator to spare her children, and told her son every day that she loved him.
White Earth Nation too worked hard to save its people from addiction, and in many years lost no one to overdoses on the reservation. But then the pandemic arrived and proved too painful for some.
Taylor and her son quarantined together at her home in Bemidji, a city of 15,000 people.
He'd started abusing pills as a teenager when he got a prescription after having surgery for an infected finger. Then, consumed by the madness of addiction, he would smoke anything — methamphetamine, heroin, fentanyl — that might quiet his anxiety and depression.
The months of isolation dragged on, and he said it seemed like the pandemic would never end. He told her he felt like a bum.
"He just gave up," she said. All around them, people were dying.
On the White Earth reservation, ambulance calls for overdoses tripled. They posted big red signs in gas stations and tribal buildings: "overdose alert."
The number of overdoses the regional drug task force investigated skyrocketed from 20 in 2019 to 88 last year, said Joe Kleszyk, its commander. Fifteen of those were fatal, triple the year before.
This year, there's been 148 overdoses, and 24 of those victims died. The vast majority were Native American.
When the American government forced Native Americans off their land, it signed treaties with tribes promising to provide for them necessities like health care. The dead from addiction prove it's never kept its word, said Minnesota Sen. Tina Smith.
Indian health care has been underfunded for years. The national average for health care spending is just over $11,000 per person, but tribal health systems receive about a third of that and urban Indian groups even less, according to the National Council of Urban Indian Health. COVID-19 added another blow to this already stressed system.
Smith introduced a bill this summer that would usher $200 million in grants to Indian organizations to bolster mental health and addiction treatment. It is stalled in Congress.
"I'm sick of telling people that their kids are dead," Kleszyk said.
In January, Rachel Taylor's heart began aching.
"It was like my heart knew before I did," she said. "My heart was broken four days before he even died."
On January 11, she opened his bedroom door. His skin was purple and ice cold.
"Come back, my baby, come back," she screamed.
The toxicology report said that he'd died of a combination of alprazolam, the drug in Xanax, and fentanyl.
At first, she put his ashes in an urn, but it was sharp metal. A friend made the buckskin bag that she could hug.
The anniversary of his death is approaching on Jan. 11, and it is customary in her culture to return him to nature after a year of grieving.
But every morning, she kisses his bag. He'd always loved to laugh, so Taylor teases it.
"Keep an eye on the cat," she'll say. Then she tells the cat to keep an eye on him.
"The medicine man says I have to let him go back to the Earth," she said. "But I don't think I'm going to be able to do that. He left me too soon."
Biden administration moves to expand solar power on US land - By Matthew Brown Associated Press
U.S. officials announced approval Tuesday of two large-scale solar projects in California and moved to open up public lands in other Western states to potential solar power development, as part of the Biden administration's effort to counter climate change by shifting from fossil fuels.
The Interior Department approved the Arica and Victory Pass solar projects on federal land in Riverside County east of Los Angeles. Combined they would generate up to 465 megawatts of electricity, or enough to power about 132,000 homes, according to San Francisco-based developer Clearway Energy. Approval of a third solar farm planned for 500 megawatts is expected in coming days, officials said.
The Interior Department also Tuesday issued a call to nominate land for development within "solar energy zones" in Colorado, Nevada and New Mexico that combined cover about 140 square miles (360 square kilometers).
The invitation to developers comes as officials under Democratic President Joe Biden promote renewable wind and solar power on public lands and offshore to reduce greenhouse gas emissions that are warming the planet. That's a pronounced change from Republican President Donald Trump's emphasis on coal mining and oil and gas drilling.
Biden suffered a huge blow to his climate agenda this week, as opposition from West Virginia Democrat Sen. Joe Manchin tanked the administration's centerpiece climate and social services legislation. The administration also has been forced to resume oil and natural gas lease sales in the Gulf of Mexico and numerous western states, after a federal judge sided with Republican-led states that sued when Biden suspended the sales.
During a Tuesday conference call with reporters, Interior Secretary Deb Haaland did not directly address a question about the faltering climate bill and instead pointed to clean energy provisions in the bipartisan infrastructure bill signed into law last month.
"We fully intend to meet our clean energy goals," Haaland said. She said the Trump administration stalled clean energy by shuttering renewable energy offices at the Bureau of Land Management and undermining long-term agreements, such as a conservation plan tied to solar development in the California desert.
"We are rebuilding that capacity," Haaland said.
But without the climate bill, tax incentives to build large-scale solar will drop to 10% of a developer's total capital costs by 2024, instead of rising to 30%, said Xiaojing Sun, head solar researcher at industry consulting firm Wood Mackenzie.
Incentives for residential-scale solar would go away completely by 2024, she said.
"It will significantly slow down the growth of solar," Sun said.
However, she added that streamlining access to federal land could help the industry, as large solar farms on non-federal lands face growing local opposition and cumbersome zoning laws.
The Bureau of Land Management oversees almost a quarter-billion acres of land, primarily in Western states. Agency director Tracy-Stone Manning said boosting renewable energy is now one of its top priorities.
Forty large-scale solar proposals in the West are under consideration, she said.
The agency in early December issued a draft plan to reduce rents and other fees paid by companies authorized to build wind and solar projects on public lands. Officials were unable to provide an estimate of how much money that could save developers.
In Nevada, where the federal government owns and manages more than 80% of the state's land, large-scale solar projects have faced opposition from environmentalists concerned about harm to plants and animals in the sun- and windswept deserts.
Developers abandoned plans for what would have been the country's largest solar panel installation earlier this year north of Las Vegas amid concerns from local residents. Environmentalists are fighting another solar project near the Nevada-California border that they claim could harm birds and desert tortoises.
Stone-Manning said solar projects on public lands are being cited to take environmental concerns into account.
The solar development zones were first proposed under the Obama administration, which in 2012 adopted plans to bring utility-scale solar energy projects to public lands in Arizona, California, Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico and Utah. Officials have identified almost 1,400 square miles (3,500 square kilometers) of public land for potential leasing for solar power.
If all that land were developed, the bureau says it could support more than 100 gigawatts of solar power, or enough for 29 million homes.
That's almost equal to all U.S. solar capacity now in place.
The power generation capacity of solar farms operating on federal lands is a small fraction of that amount — just over 3 gigawatts, federal data shows.
In November the land bureau awarded solar leases for land in Utah's Milford Flats solar zone. Solar leases are expected to be finalized by the end of the month for about land at several sites in Arizona.
Solar power on public and private lands accounted for about 3% of total U.S. electricity production in 2020. After construction costs fell during the past decade, that figure is expected to grow sharply, to more than 20% by 2050, the U.S. Energy Information Administration projects.
Developers warn costs have been rising due to constraints on supplies of steel, semiconductor chips and other materials.
Albuquerque police launch crackdown on off-road vehicles -Associated Press
Albuquerque police are launching a crackdown on off-road vehicles being driven on streets and highways.
Police officials announced Monday that officers are being instructed to cite and tow all off-road vehicles being driven illegally, with no exceptions.
Police noted that a 7-year-old boy was killed when struck by an illegal off-road vehicle on a city street earlier this month as his family used a crosswalk. An arrest warrant has been issued for a 27-year-old man in that case.
Deputy Chief Mike Smathers said police have noticed an increase in off-highway vehicles being driven on city streets over the past year.
Nick Wheeler, another police official, said police have observed off-road vehicles being driven in packs, some even driving on sidewalks and forcing pedestrians to move out of the way.
Wheeler acknowledged that efforts to cite drivers have fallen short in the past.
"They can go places where police patrol vehicles can't go," Wheeler said of off-road vehicles.
To date, officers have issued no citations for their use on city streets, he said, adding, "everything we've tried to do to stop them has failed."
Smathers said enforcement efforts will include use of aircraft and off-road vehicles to track off-road vehicles trying to flee.
Online DNA profile leads to suspect in 1997 rape case in NM - Albuquerque Journal, Associated Press
Prosecutors in Albuquerque say they were able to track down a suspect in a decades-old case by using open-source genealogy data.
Second Judicial District Attorney Raúl Torrez announced an arrest Tuesday in a case from 1997 in which a man is suspected of forcing his way into a woman's home, holding her at knifepoint and raping her.
It's the second time the office has been able to file charges using forensic genealogy,the Albuquerque Journal reported.
In the first case, a man pleaded guilty in 2020 to raping a woman who was running along the Rio Grande on Christmas Eve five years earlier. Authorities had connected him through a second cousin, twice removed, who uploaded his DNA to an online site, the Journal reported.
In the latest case, a contractor with Torrez's office matched DNA collected from a fork that the suspect discarded to open-source genealogy data. Torrez said the suspect's DNA has been linked to several other rapes.
One of the most notable uses of online genetic profiles was in Northern California when authorities connected a former police officer to one of the state's most prolific serial killers and rapists. Joseph James DeAngelo pleaded guilty to 13 counts of murder and dozens of rapes that were too old to prosecute. He is serving life in prison.
Navajo Nation reports 10 more COVID-19 cases, no new deaths -Associated Press
The Navajo Nation has reported 10 new confirmed cases of COVID-19 on the vast reservation in the U.S. Southwest and no additional deaths.
The figures released Tuesday pushed the total number of cases to 40,856 since the pandemic began. The death toll remained at 1,576.
Tribal President Jonathan Nez urged residents to get vaccinated and a booster shot if eligible to build a defense against variants of the virus, including omicron. Vaccines do not prevent people from getting coronavirus, but health officials say the shots are effective in reducing the risk of severe illness and death.
Omicron hasn't been detected in swab samples on the Navajo Nation, the tribe said. The reservation covers 27,000 square miles in parts of Arizona, New Mexico and Utah.