Gateway West’s $2.1M emergency contract expires in 90 days - Damon Scott, City Desk ABQ
It’s been a long and frustrating quest for the city to find a new operator for Gateway West, formerly the Westside Emergency Housing Center. After eight months of searching — and about 90 days until an emergency contract expires — it’s still unclear who is willing or able to take on the task.
The facility accommodates 660 people experiencing homelessness, including the medically vulnerable and those with mental illnesses and substance use disorders. Many residents, including hundreds of seniors and veterans, have been living there for years.
After the city was unable to find a suitable operator in a March request for proposals (RFP) process, it had little choice but to ask the current operator, Albuquerque Heading Home, to stay on — negotiating a $2.1 million emergency contract to operate the facility from July 1 to Dec. 31. The nonprofit’s three-year contract (at $4.1 million a year) expired June 30.
Heading Home’s chief executive officer, Connie Chavez, said in April that the homeless services provider wasn’t interested in continuing to manage the site, saying that operating a facility like Gateway West was “never our mission.”
WHO WILL STEP UP?
Operating the 24/7 Gateway West is a daunting task. The operator must coordinate medical and supportive services, meals, laundry, security, sanitation and the cleaning and orderly use of common areas. It is also required to provide bus monitors on vehicles that carry scores of people experiencing homelessness to and from pickup points in the city.
After the failed March RFP process, the city decided to split the contract into two buckets — one for operations (at $3.1 million a year) and one to provide social services, like intensive case management (at $750,000 a year).
When asked Monday about the status of finding a new operator — the city’s RFP is no longer active — Health, Housing & Homelessness Department (HHH) spokesperson Connor Woods said one had been identified and contract negotiations were underway. He said once a contract was finalized and approved by the City Council, a public announcement would be made. No specific timeline was provided.
City Councilor Nichole Rogers said if the city expects to transition to a new operator at the end of the year, a contract should already be in place.
“There’s no talk in this [emergency] contract about a transition plan,” Rogers said. “There’s nothing that obligates Heading Home to do a transfer of leadership. That’s concerning to me.”
Rogers said she’s also concerned about the $2.1 million price tag, saying it’s “quite a bit of money for a small amount of time.”
Woods said the contract would require Heading Home to give a 45-day notice before ending operations — ostensibly enough time for a new entity to take the reins.
“Our new contractor and Heading Home will work together to provide a seamless transition for our vulnerable population at Gateway West,” Woods said.
He added that the emergency contract, like many city contracts, is under a “reimbursement model.”
“Only Heading Home’s actual expenses will be paid,” Woods said. “At this point, we don’t see an increase in spending.”
Meanwhile, Rogers feels uneasy about a lack of detail in the emergency contract’s reporting requirements for security and staff training.
“It says that they need to provide onsite security, ensuring safety standards, but it doesn’t specify how many [per resident]. That, to me, is important,” she said.
Rogers said when she arrived at Gateway West for an unscheduled visit earlier this year, she saw one security guard on duty.
“One security guard is not adequate in my opinion,” she said.
In addition, Rogers said the contract language is too vague on requirements that staff have lifesaving skills and de-escalation skills.
“What, specifically, do they need to have? I would have been more prescriptive of CPR, Narcan training — things that are more appropriate than just general lifesaving skills,” she said. “This just tells me that the City Council needs to get involved in contract management to make sure that there’s data to base decisions on where to put our funding.”
New Mexico residents with felony convictions are wrongly being denied ballot access, lawsuit says — Associated Press
Some New Mexico residents with felony convictions have been wrongly denied ballot access despite state lawmakers restoring their voting rights last year, a lawsuit alleges.
A law that took effect in July 2023 restored voting rights to about 11,000 people in New Mexico who previously served prison time for felony convictions. It allows people to vote after they are released from custody, including those who are on probation or who have been granted parole.
But a lawsuit filed last week in Santa Fe by Millions For Prisoners, a group that advocates for people who are incarcerated or used to be, claims that some applicants seeking to have their voting rights restored have received rejection letters from county clerks relying on inaccurate or outdated information from the secretary of state's office and the New Mexico Corrections Department, the Albuquerque Journal reported. It names as defendants Secretary of State Maggie Toulouse Oliver and the corrections department.
Alex Curtas, a spokesperson for Toulouse Oliver, said in a statement to the newspaper that the secretary of state's office is committed to ensuring ballot access to every eligible voter, and that as of last month, hundreds of people had successfully registered to vote since leaving prison.
A corrections department spokesperson declined to comment on the pending litigation.
The lawsuit also accuses Toulouse Oliver and at least one county clerk of creating an additional barrier to voting access by requiring in-person registration for those who were denied.
"Certainly, if a person is no longer incarcerated and appears in-person at a County Clerk's Office, polling location, certain state agencies, or the motor vehicle division, that person is now legally presumed to meet the requirement of not being incarcerated and can register to vote," Curtas said in a statement to the newspaper.
The lawsuit is seeking a court order that would bar election officials from enforcing the in-person registration requirement for voters with felony convictions. It also wants Toulouse Oliver to instruct all county clerks in the state to process the voter registration forms that have been rejected since July 1, 2023, when the law took effect.
Trial nears in APS sex-harassment case — Rodd Cayton, City Desk ABQ
As the trial date approaches in a lawsuit against Albuquerque Public Schools, the district’s Board of Education will hold a closed session at Wednesday’s regular meeting to discuss the matter.
The lawsuit, filed in 2020, alleges an English teacher at Valley High School engaged in inappropriate behavior with a 17-year-old student during the 2019-2020 school year.
APS, in a motion for summary judgment, argued that the plaintiffs failed to show they suffered any physical harm.
A jury trial is scheduled for Oct. 21, with a pretrial conference set for Oct. 7.
A complaint filed on the student’s behalf says the teacher first asked about her sexual orientation, what actors she found attractive and later made unwanted physical contact with her and other female students, including rubbing their shoulders, grabbing one student’s hand under the pretense of looking at her nails and regularly commenting on what the student was wearing and how her clothes fit her body.
“He even stated, at the beginning of the school year when the air conditioning was not working, that the female students could go ahead and take off their bras if it would make them more comfortable,” the complaint states.
The complaint also says he took a student’s mobile phone and programmed his personal phone number into it, offering her a chance to call and “discuss her insecurities,” and mentioned a sexual act in warning her to not tell anyone she had his number.
The complaint says the student informed her father of the teacher’s actions in January 2020, and that her father reported what she told him to school officials, who promised an investigation. It’s alleged that the teen wasn’t contacted by an investigator from the district’s Office of Equal Opportunity Services until May 2020.
APS, the teacher and Valley’s principal are listed as defendants in the suit, along with 10 other school staff members not mentioned by name.
Attorneys for the parties did not respond to requests for comment. APS spokesperson Martin Salazar said the district does not comment on pending litigation.
By law, the board can take no action in the executive session.
ABQ transit announces new app aimed at bus safety — Rodd Cayton, City Desk ABQ
City leaders Tuesday rolled out details of their latest effort to keep Albuquerque bus riders safe.
The tiered strategy includes a new smartphone app riders can use to anonymously report incidents or issues on city buses or at bus stops.
Mayor Tim Keller said the new campaign started along the Central Avenue corridor and will spread from there.
“We’re continuing to step up when it comes to keeping transit safe for families by using tech, holding violators accountable, and doubling down on police presence,” Keller said. “Criminal behavior will not be tolerated, and we won’t back down until riding the bus in Albuquerque is a frictionless experience for all; hop on, hop off, and be safe the whole time.”
The changes were discussed at an Alvarado Transportation Center press conference that included a demonstration of the See Say app, where officials simulated a situation with an intoxicated man who was harassing a female passenger and another rider surreptitiously submitted a report to transit staff. The report instantly relayed the time and location of the incident to ABQ RIDE — along with a photo of the problem passenger.
Albuquerque Community Safety (ACS) and ABQ RIDE transit safety officers are part of the effort, Transit Department Deputy Director Bobby Sisneros said. He added they will try to assist riders and remind them of the rules for riders, with Albuquerque Police Department officers able to assist if arrests or citations are necessary.
Those who don’t have smartphones can report issues by texting or calling 505-391-2600.
Legislators question AI resource consumption - Hannah Grover, New Mexico Political Report
Artificial intelligence has led to major breakthroughs in medicine and other fields, but that progress comes with a cost. The technology requires a large amount of resources, including water and electricity. That has led to concerns that this technology could harm arid states like New Mexico if it’s left unregulated.
State Rep. Christine Chandler, D-Los Alamos, expressed concerns during the interim Science and Technology Committee meeting on Monday about the resource demands of artificial intelligence.
“It’s agreed that AI uses a lot of power,” she said. “And it’s agreed that AI uses a lot of water.”
She asked what role the government should play in addressing those issues.
“This is a significant issue for us in the desert,” she said.
AI experts Patrick Bridges and Manel Martínez-Ramón defended the technology to the committee and spoke about efforts to reduce the consumption nature of AI.
Bridges is the director of the University of New Mexico’s Center for Advanced Research Computing and Martínez-Ramón is a professor in UNM’s Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering.
Currently, about 4 percent of the electricity generated in the United States goes to powering data centers that support artificial intelligence. That could increase to 9 percent by the end of the decade, Newsweek reported in August.
Chandler said that there are concerns in Los Alamos about resource adequacy as the national lab’s energy demands increase.
“We know there’s talk about…putting in a redundant electric line, which of course is being opposed by every environmental group in the state that I can think of,” she said.
Chandler said that while AI is something people want in New Mexico, it comes with a large resource footprint and is mostly unregulated in the state.
While she said that AI “has the potential for doing a lot of good things,” she expressed concerns about the cost in terms of resources. She said these costs seem to be getting swept under the carpet.
“If this were a discussion about oil, everybody in this room, well, many of us would be saying methane rules, and we can’t have them by schools and we can’t do this,” she said. “And you know what, oil brings in a lot of good to us too.”
She spoke about how oil can help heat houses, power cars and provide “huge amounts of money” to the state.
Chandler said there needs to be more discussion about the costs of bringing AI into New Mexico where there is limited water and where energy can be a “huge issue for some of us who live in little communities that have to share our electricity with a gigantic, mammoth facility.”
“We should be thinking in terms of those kinds of things, instead of saying, ‘Oh, the companies really want to be helpful, if it’s economically advantageous to them to be helpful,’” Chandler said.
New Mexico’s potential for solar and wind energy is one reason why companies are considering locating data centers to power artificial intelligence in the state. While it is not specifically AI related, one of the largest electrical customers in New Mexico is the Facebook data center near Los Lunas.
But that is only one reason why companies focused on artificial intelligence might choose New Mexico to house their data centers.
“There are reasonable ways to do cooling of big data centers in New Mexico that there aren’t always in other places. So that makes us very attractive,” Bridges said. “We have inexpensive property costs in much of the state. We don’t have many of those pesky natural disasters that a lot of other states are suffering with, I’m happy to not deal with tornadoes and hurricanes and these kinds of things.”
Power demand for data centers and artificial intelligence has soared since 2016 and that can have implications as the world looks to address climate change.
This new demand for electricity means that more resources need to be brought online to power these data centers and fossil fuel generation sources may be expanded or kept running longer to prevent electricity shortages.
Meanwhile, AI companies are working to present themselves as solutions in the fight against climate change. And, in some areas, AI is helping address challenges like the intermittent nature of wind and solar energy. AI already helps utilities better manage their generation assets to meet regional demands.
Bridges and Martínez-Ramón said that tech companies are working to make AI more energy efficient and reduce its water consumption.
Details from New Mexico's lawsuit against Snap show site failed to act on reports of sextortion - By Barbara Ortutay, AP Technology Writer
Snapchat failed to act on "rampant" reports of child grooming, sextortion and other dangers to minors on its platform, according to a newly unredacted complaint against the company filed by New Mexico's attorney general.
Attorney General Raúl Torrez filed the original complaint on Sept. 4, but internal messages and other details were heavily redacted. Tuesday's filing unveils internal messages among Snap Inc. employees and executives that provide "further confirmation that Snapchat's harmful design features create an environment that fosters sextortion, sexual abuse and unwanted contact from adults to minors," Torrez said in a news release.
For instance, former trust and safety employees complained there was "pushback" from management when they tried to add safety mechanisms, according to the lawsuit. Employees also noted that user reports on grooming and sextortion — persuading a person to send explicit photos online and then threatening to make the images public unless the victim pays money or engages in sexual favors — were falling through the cracks. At one point, an account remained active despite 75 reports against it over mentions of "nudes, minors and extortion."
Snap said in a statement that its platform was designed "with built-in safety guardrails" and that the company made "deliberate design choices to make it difficult for strangers to discover minors on our service."
"We continue to evolve our safety mechanisms and policies, from leveraging advanced technology to detect and block certain activity, to prohibiting friending from suspicious accounts, to working alongside law enforcement and government agencies, among so much more," the company said.
According to the lawsuit, Snap was well aware, but failed to warn parents, young users and the public that "sextortion was a rampant, 'massive,' and 'incredibly concerning issue' on Snapchat."
A November 2022 internal email from a trust and safety employee says Snapchat was getting "around 10,000" user reports of sextortion each month.
"If this is correct, we have an incredibly concerning issue on our hands, in my humble opinion," the email continues.
Another employee replied that it's worth noting that the number likely represents a "small fraction of this abuse," since users may be embarrassed and because sextortion is "not easy to categorize" when trying to report it on the site.
Torrez filed the lawsuit against Santa Monica, California-based Snap Inc. in state court in Santa Fe. In addition to sexual abuse, the lawsuit claims the company also openly promotes child trafficking and the sale of illicit drugs and guns.
Appeals Court shields location of NM foster parents and children from publication - Austin Fisher, Source New Mexico
Foster parents’ names, email addresses and physical addresses are confidential under New Mexico’s sunshine law, the majority of a three-judge panel ruled last week.
The Inspection of Public Records Act (IPRA) is a state law that allows anyone to view public records, with some exceptions.
The New Mexico Court of Appeals was asked to decide whether a state regulation making information in neglect or abuse cases confidential is legal under the public records law. The court concluded on Sept. 25 that it is.
Since IPRA was enacted in 1947, it has contained specific exceptions which allow the government to withhold some information.
It also includes a catchall exception prohibiting the release of public records made confidential by state laws, agency regulations, constitutionally based privileges and court rules.
More recently in 2011, the New Mexico Legislature added an exemption to IPRA prohibiting the government from turning over “‘protected personal identifier information,” like home addresses, phone numbers and all but the last four digits of Social Security numbers.
In 2019 and 2020, a Bernalillo County resident filed IPRA requests with the Children, Youth & Families Department (CYFD), New Mexico’s child welfare agency, seeking a list of licensed foster parents, among other things.
In February 2020, CYFD adopted a regulation that, in part, makes confidential “all case records and identifying information, including foster and adoptive families.”
The argument that IPRA’s catchall exemption — not agency regulations — is the only place to find what personally identifying information can be withheld didn’t fly.
Second Judicial District Court Judge Victor Lopez initially ruled in the department’s favor, but he reversed his position, saying the department must turn over the names, email addresses and physical addresses of CYFD-licensed foster parents. In June 2022, CYFD asked the Court of Appeals to review Lopez’s decision.
In a 22-page opinion, Court of Appeals Judge Jane Yohalem wrote that even though the IPRA does not explicitly protect foster parents’ identity and home addresses from publication, those can still be kept under wraps by CYFD regulation.
“It is reasonable for CYFD to believe that the disclosure of the identity and contact information of foster parents caring for children in CYFD custody is likely to allow the recipients of that information to identify and locate children in CYFD’s care, who, after all, reside in the homes of these foster parents,” Yohalem wrote. “Protection of foster parents’ names and addresses and contact information is necessary to protect the identity and location of these children.”
Claims office pays men more than women for food lost in state’s biggest wildfire —Patrick Lohmann, Source New Mexico
When thousands of northern New Mexicans fled the biggest wildfire in state history beginning in April 2022, some of them returned home to a nasty smell emanating from their fridges or freezers: food that went bad amid weekslong power outages.
Food storage is harder in the rural, mountainous areas affected by the fire, where many put deer or elk they harvested in freezers in the garage and store months’ worth of food to last through the winter. Grocery stores are few and far between.
Food lost in the wildfire, which was caused by two botched prescribed burns on federal forest land, is one category of losses that the Hermits Peak-Calf Canyon Fire Claims Office is seeking to compensate victims for using a $3.95 billion fund approved by Congress.
To do that, the office is using a standardized calculator, which allows office employees to quickly figure out losses owed to a household by punching numbers into a spreadsheet. The spreadsheet then applies a formula and spits out an amount for categories like firewood, evacuation costs, mileage, do-it-yourself repairs and more.
A copy of the spreadsheet obtained by Source New Mexico reveals the calculations and formulas the office devised as it seeks to fully compensate victims of the Forest Service’s mistake, choices it has often not explained to the public. As of Sept. 24, the office has paid $1.35 billion of the fund.
One such decision the spreadsheet reveals: Men are paid more than women for food losses, according to Source NM’s review.
A man aged 19 to 50 receives $104.70 for a week’s worth of lost food. A woman in the same age range gets $93, according to the calculator Source NM reviewed. Children get less than adults, as well: A girl between 12 and 13 gets $86.40; a boy between 12 and 13 gets $99.90.
Several wildfire survivors and advocates said they were unaware until recently that the office was paying men more than women for food lost in the fridge, and they thought the process was unfair or unnecessarily complicated.
Amy McFall lost all her food and her brand new fridge due to power outages at her home in Cañoncito de Manuelitas. She remembers several pounds of chicken and beef, a few pounds of frozen green chile and half a lime being among the culinary casualties. She said the claims office should not pay out based on assumptions about how much men and women eat.
“You can’t make a generalization like that. Sometimes, you know, you’ve got a woman who’s pregnant. They can eat like a horse,” she said. “My appetite is bigger than my husband.”
Janna Lopez, who leads a volunteer group for wildfire victims, said the office should just pay everyone a flat fee. It would be easier and fairer, she said.
“I think they should just have a standard rate,” she said. “I think it’s more fair if you have just one number.”
According to the claims office, the difference in payments is based on food plans prepared by the United States Department of Agriculture in February 2023. Those plans incorporate the expected “food needs per individual per week,” said spokesperson Danielle Stomberg.
The USDA has completed food plans since 1894 to “illustrate how a healthy diet can be achieved at various costs,” and they’ve been used by different state and federal agencies and the courts system, according to the USDA’s website. The plans base costs on a selection of foods that make up a healthy diet and the current market prices for those foods.
They also break food plans into three tiers based on a household’s ability to afford groceries, with the most expensive plans placed into the “liberal plan” tier. The claims office pays households based on the “liberal plan,” Stomberg noted. The “liberal plan” payment for a month’s worth of food for a man aged 19-50 has increased $8.60 between February 2023 and August 2024, according to the plans.
The office pays households for four weeks’ worth of food based on the age and gender of each recipient, and then pays a little extra for smaller households. A household with one man aged 19 to 50 gets $502.56. A household with one woman between ages 19 and 50 gets $446.40; a household with a man and woman between ages of 19 and 50 and two children between ages 6 and 8 gets $1,410.
The same formula applies to those who hosted evacuees: A host who put up a man aged 19 to 50 for 20 days will be paid $40.11 more than if they’d put up a woman in the same age range for the same amount of time.
Antonia Roybal-Mack, a lawyer representing hundreds of victims, said she thought the food payment system was “insane” when she first learned about it. She said most of her clients accept offers for food losses without much question, because they’re concerned about their other, more expensive losses, like lost trees, flood damage or the destruction of their homes.
Still, she said, the government has a Constitutional responsibility to treat people equally.
“The United States Constitution says that everybody’s equal under the law and needs to be treated equal by the government. And that’s really not what’s happening here,” she said. “The fact that they have a different rate for a man versus a woman– all those sorts of things are problematic.”
It’s not clear how much money has been paid via the standard calculator for food losses, and how much more has been paid to men than women. The office does not track those figures, Stomberg said.
Still, Stomberg defended the use of the calculators as one tool to simplify the claims process for thousands of victims with their own particular experiences of disaster and loss.
“Each claim is different, and the Standard Rate Calculators are one tool used to ease the burden on claimants,” she said.
The office has repeatedly pointed to the use of standard calculators as a reason they’ve been able to spend money quickly and efficiently.
Jay Mitchell, the new director of the claims office, said in a June letter to the Las Vegas Optic that more staff, better processes and the calculators “have increased the Claims Office’s output: Payments have nearly tripled since January, we’re issuing more Letters of Determination than ever before, and we’re processing payments faster than ever.”
Stomberg also encouraged claimants with questions about how much they’d be compensated to contact the office or their attorneys.
The calculator reveals other choices the office is making about how to compensate people. For example, payments for smoke damage range from $5.71 per square foot for a detached structure to $43.23 for places of worship. The per-square-foot payment for homes and apartments is $35.35. The office has paid nearly $400 million for smoke and ash damage payments, which is about 35% of the total paid out so far.
Also, residents who are seeking reimbursement for repairs they completed on their property can get paid by the hour, including for livestock handling, equipment repair, moving and storage, and debris removal. But the hourly pay they receive depends on which county they’re in: $18.97 an hour in Mora County, for example, versus $29.49 an hour in Santa Fe County.
The hourly wages are based on Census data, based on income data and median hourly wages, according to the calculator Source NM reviewed.
Yolanda Cruz, a community advocate who moderates a Facebook page for fellow survivors, provided the calculator to Source NM after getting it earlier this month from an official with the Federal Emergency Management Agency, which oversees the claims office. The official did not respond to a request for comment.
Stomberg said the calculator Source NM reviewed is “unofficial,” and that the office was “unable to validate those posted or hosted externally.” Only the calculators that FEMA maintains are “official,” she said, though she confirmed in response to a list of questions several particulars about how the calculator works.
Singleton Schreiber, a law firm representing more than 1,000 clients also provided earlier versions of the calculator, with minor differences, to Source New Mexico after getting them from the claims office.