Harassment probe appears to clear Navajo president, stokes new wave of political upheaval - By Morgan Lee, Associated Press
Political turmoil erupted at one of the largest Native American tribes in the U.S. on Monday as the attorney general for the Navajo Nation announced that an investigation had cleared the Navajo president of sexual harassment allegations by the vice president.
On the same day, Navajo Nation Attorney General Ethel Branch was removed from office by legislators by the Navajo Nation Council, in a 13-6 vote without public discussion.
The tribe has been mired in political upheaval since April, when Navajo Vice President Richelle Montoya publicly outlined allegations of intimidation and sexual harassment against President Buu Nygren, stemming from interactions at an August 2023 meeting in Nygren's office.
Results of an investigation by outside counsel into the harassment allegations were announced Monday morning in a news release by Branch.
The probe found that the "incident does not constitute sexual harassment under policies applicable to either Navajo Nation elected officials or employees," and that further investigation was not warranted.
"The facts reported would not constitute a violation of any criminal law of the Navajo Nation," an excerpt of the findings said.
Nygren expressed vindication and described a "need to heal from this and focus on moving forward." But he also warned that the removal of the attorney general without a clear explanation sends a message of political instability, with implications for major government ventures.
Branch, a Harvard-educated attorney who served a previous stint as attorney general under Navajo President Russell Begaye, recently worked on a proposed settlement that would ensure water rights for the Navajo Nation and two others tribes in the drought-stricken Southwest and regulations aimed at safe transportation of radioactive materials across the reservation.
Navajo Vice President Michelle Montoya said she is eager to read the full investigative report once it's released publicly, and that she's heard from an "avalanche" of people who have endured harassing behavior in tribal government workplace settings.
"Then I'll know what definition they utilized to say that I wasn't sexually harassed," Montoya said. "I do know that the Council and the people of the Navajo Nation have been frustrated with this investigation."
Branch said she was "satisfied that no rock was left unturned in the search for evidence of any potential wrongdoing" in the harassment investigation by outside counsel.
"I do not believe it is in the best interest of the (Navajo) Nation to continue spending the Nation's money on allegations that, even if taken as true, would not amount to any violation of Navajo law," Branch said. "I encourage any Navajo employee who feels they have been subjected to sexual harassment to report it."
But Branch also announced the termination of contracts with the law firm for outside counsel in the harassment probe, expressing frustration at an "inordinate delay" in completion of the investigation that "exacerbated the instability in Navajo government that the allegations induced."
Haaland announces new National Historic Landmark in New Mexico - By By Susan Morée, New Mexico Political Report
The U.S. Department of Interior announced the designation of the Peter Hurd and Henriette Wyeth House and Studios in San Patricio as a National Historic Landmark.
Wyeth and Hurd were painters who built artist studios in the 1930s on a ranch outside San Patricio, where they continued to work until their deaths in the late 20th century, according to the site’s website. Hurd was originally from Roswell. Wyeth was an accomplished portrait painter originally from Pennsylvania.
The announcement was a part of President Joe Biden’s executive order to provide greater recognition to women’s history in national parks and historic landmarks across the U.S. to honor the legacy and contributions of women and girls to the nation, according to the news release.
Biden signed the executive order in Newcastle, Maine at a signing ceremony establishing the Frances Perkins National Monument to honor the first woman U.S. cabinet secretary. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt appointed Perkins to be the U.S. Secretary of Labor in 1933, according to the Frances Perkins Center.
U.S. Secretary Deb Haaland, who’s from Laguna Pueblo, attended the signing ceremony with Biden.
“I am grateful to President Biden for taking this step to ensure that current and future generations will learn about [Frances Perkins’] body of work,” Haaland said in a statement.
Haaland also announced four additional new National Historic Landmarks recognizing women’s history on Monday. They are The Charleston Cigar Factory in Charleston, South Carolina, The Furies Collective and Lucy Diggs Stowe and Mary Burrill House, both in Washington, D.C. and the Azurest South in Petersburg, Virginia.
High-speed internet to expand in rural areas impacting students in seven NM school districts - Leah Romero, Source New Mexico
Nearly 40,000 households in seven rural New Mexico school districts will receive high-speed home internet in coming months, following state grants from the Office of Broadband Access and Expansion’s Student Connect program.
The OBAE’s Student Connect program falls under the office’s Connect New Mexico Fund, which was established in 2021 by the legislature. It designated $70 million in state funds to expand broadband in unserved and underserved areas. Working to connect rural students and educational institutions was one of the intentions behind the creation of the fund.
Mike Curtis, spokesperson for the OBAE, said about $56 million has been awarded through the Connect New Mexico Fund so far, but this recent award came from the subprogram created specifically to help students.
Through the award of $13.5 million two internet service providers and Ohkay Owingeh Pueblo will expand high-speed internet connection to 38,482 households, according to an OBAE news release. This will ensure students and teachers continue to have access to high speed internet outside of the school setting.
The money will go toward building towers, installing fixed wireless service and providing receivers to homes. Projects are expected to be completed by June 30, 2025. According to the news release, students and school staff benefiting from the home access will also receive three years of free internet access.
Awardees include Resound Networks, based out of Pampa, Texas; Oso Internet Solutions from Ramah, New Mexico; and Ohkay Owingeh Pueblo in Rio Arriba County. Connection will be extended to remote areas of Doña Ana, Catron, Cibola, Rio Arriba and Valencia counties, impacting students and teachers in seven school districts:
· Belen Consolidated Schools
· Gadsden Independent School District
· Grants Cibola County Schools
· Hatch Valley Public Schools
· Los Lunas Public Schools
· Ohkay Owingeh Community School
· Quemado Independent School District
The Student Connect program grants became available in October and still has about $11.4 million in grants available for applicants. Other Connect New Mexico Fund grants awarded outside of the connection to school districts include areas in Doña Ana, Valencia, Colfax, Socorro, Grant, Hidalgo, Lincoln, Chaves, Otero, Eddy, Luna, Sierra and San Miguel counties, as well as Picuris, San Ildefonso, Isleta, Laguna and Tesuque pueblos.
Housing, emergency voucher programs draw attention in 2024 - Damon Scott, City Desk ABQ
Albuquerque’s housing and emergency motel voucher programs generally operate a little under the public radar, but the initiatives this year have attracted considerable attention. The City Council is driving an effort to reform the programs, which are key to assist those who are precariously housed or experiencing homelessness. About $12.4 million was appropriated for vouchers in the fiscal year 2025 budget.
Last February, the City Council unanimously passed a measure spearheaded by City Councilors Renée Grout and Nichole Rogers that created an 11-member working group tasked with reforming the emergency motel voucher program — in part to address the blighted motels where they are often used.
Grout and Rogers said it was critical, because the city’s blighted motels pose a health and safety risk to the public at large and to vulnerable individuals and families using the vouchers for a free night or extended stay to help stabilize their situation.
“It’s been made clear that we don’t really have a [motel voucher] program; we have funding we give to local nonprofits and then leave it up to them to go out and establish relationships with hoteliers,” Rogers told City Desk ABQ in the spring.
VOUCHERS, BUT FEW OPTIONS
Over the summer, the city announced it was launching a landlord engagement program for recipients of permanent supportive housing (PSH) vouchers who often wait up to 200 days to locate an apartment where they can use it. One of the reasons for the long wait, city officials said, is a glut of landlords who are reluctant to accept tenants with vouchers.
PSH vouchers are typically used by those experiencing homelessness who have chronic mental illness or substance abuse issues. The vouchers help them secure a place to live without spending more than 30% of their income on rent and utilities. Case management and other support services are included, too.
The Health, Housing & Homelessness (HHH) Department administered about $13.4 million in PSH contracts through 11 agencies in fiscal year 2024. HHH also oversees rapid re-housing/transitional housing vouchers that provide rental assistance up to 24 months.
VOUCHER FUND MISUSE
More recently, on Dec. 3, HHH said it ended more than $2 million in contracts with the Supportive Housing Coalition of New Mexico (SHCNM) — a longtime housing voucher service provider — because officials said SHCNM misused $234,000 in funds for administrative and operational costs instead of making voucher payments to landlords.
The city said it had begun a “corrective action plan” to recoup the back payments that were owed to landlords which were ultimately paid by the city to avoid tenant evictions.
At a Dec. 2 City Council meeting, Grout questioned the administration about the situation and expressed concern that hundreds of thousands of dollars funneled through SHCNM was unaccounted for.
“We don’t know where it is,” she said. “How many people could this be housing right now if this money hadn’t been spent improperly? It bothers me greatly; I know it bothers you, too.”
FOCUS TO CONTINUE NEXT YEAR
Most recently on Friday, Grout announced her intention to introduce a resolution to be heard at City Council in January that would seek to improve the “efficiency and transparency” of the housing voucher programs.
In a news release, she said the measure directs the Mayor Tim Keller administration to establish a centralized referral system and to track housing voucher outcomes. Grout said the effort is a response to “concerns about the current state of the city’s housing voucher system.”
“Our most vulnerable citizens deserve a housing voucher system that is efficient, transparent and effective,” Grout said in the release.
The release said the resolution would likely be on the City Council’s agenda at its Jan. 6 meeting. If approved, HHH would be directed to develop policies and procedures for the administration of housing vouchers — including a goal to execute contracts within 30 days of receiving funds — and to submit an implementation plan to the City Council within 90 days. A goal would be set for all the reforms to be completed within a year.
In an email to City Desk ABQ on Monday, HHH spokesperson Connor Woods said the city was “actively working to make changes to the contract process and disbursement of housing voucher funding.”
“It’s important to note there isn’t a one-size-fits-all approach to permanent supportive housing vouchers. What works for one provider might not work for another,” Woods said. “Because of this, we’re evaluating ways to improve this system, which we hope to implement soon.”
Woods added that HHH looked forward to working collaboratively with Grout and the City Council to improve the housing voucher system.
Grout’s resolution can be read in full here.
New Mexico urges people to get vaccinated for flu, COVID-19 and RSV — Austin Fischer, Source New Mexico
New Mexico health officials urged residents of the state Monday to get vaccinated for the flu, COVID-19 and RSV as people gather for winter holiday celebrations that can also spread infections.
“Getting vaccinated against these winter viruses is about protecting yourself and safeguarding those around you,” said Department of Health Chief Medical Officer Dr. Miranda Durham said in a news release.
“Very high” amounts of COVID-19 were found in samples from New Mexico sewers, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Members of the public are left to rely on sewer data to understand how much COVID-19 is spreading in their communities because public health officials no longer provide individual testing like they did earlier in the pandemic.
New Mexico started testing sewage for COVID-19 in April 2022, and stopped providing easily available, community-wide, free diagnostic testing for COVID-19 at the end of that year, to the dismay of local advocates.
As of Dec. 9, only 12.4% of New Mexicans had received the COVID-19 vaccine updated to fight against the latest variants, according to state health department data. Vaccination rates were even lower among Black and Hispanic New Mexicans, and among people aged 39 and younger.
State health officials are directing people toward an online database of providers offering vaccines and vaccination events, and to a list of public health offices for people, including children, who do not have insurance to get a free vaccine.
New Mexico in March 2023 privatized COVID vaccines and treatments as part of the end of the Biden administration’s official response to the pandemic.
Since last fall, COVID has hospitalized six times more people in New Mexico than RSV, or respiratory syncytial virus, and flu combined. Between September 2023 and Dec. 7, the latest health department data available, COVID has sent 436 New Mexicans to the hospital, while influenza has hospitalized 69 and RSV has hospitalized three.
“We cannot talk about COVID in the past tense,” World Health Organization Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said last week. “It’s still with us, it still causes acute disease and Long COVID, and it still kills.”
New reports show how state laws, regulations have reduced greenhouse gas emissions — Hannah Grover, New Mexico Political Report
New reports released this week show that greenhouse gas emissions in the state are reducing in response to laws and policies aimed at addressing climate change.
According to the New Mexico Environment Department, greenhouse gas emissions are projected to be 29% lower in 2025 than they were in 2005.
The Environment Department contracted with the Eastern Research Group and Energy and Environmental Economics (E3) to compile the reports.
Some of the laws and regulations that have been implemented to curb greenhouse gas emissions include the Energy Transition Act, methane waste rules, vehicle emissions standards and the clean transportation fuel standard.
The Energy Transition Act set a goal of 50% of the electricity coming from renewable sources by 2030. New Mexico has already surpassed that goal and 60% of the electricity is generated by renewable sources. The Energy Transition Act only applies to the investor-owned utilities and the rural electric cooperatives. It does not apply to government-owned utilities such as Los Alamos County’s electric utility and Farmington Electric Utility System.
The Energy Transition Act became law in response to the Public Service Company of New Mexico’s plan to close its San Juan Generating Station. The coal-fired power plant closed in 2022 but demolition is ongoing.
At the time the Energy Transition Act passed, there were three coal-fired power plants in New Mexico. Now there is a single coal-fired power plant — the Four Corners Power Plant — and it only operates seasonally. The Four Corners Power Plant is scheduled to close in 2031.
Meanwhile, the electricity once produced by the San Juan Generating Station has largely been replaced by renewable sources. The E3 report did not look at emissions from the Four Corners Power Plant because it is on Navajo Nation land and not under the state’s jurisdiction.
The methane waste and ozone precursor rules targeted the oil and gas industry. These rules and similar policies are projected to lead to 70% less methane emissions from the oil and gas sector in 2025 compared to the 2005 levels.