The Rio Grande Foundation worked hard to make sure that City taxpayers didn’t have to foot the cost of a soccer-only stadium for the New Mexico United soccer team.

But, as KOAT Channel 7 notes in a recent story in which RGF’s president was interviewed, local taxpayers are STILL on the hook for expenses associated with the soccer team. In this case according to recent data requested by KOAT taxpayers have spent $960,000 since the United started playing games.

Is this better than building a brand new stadium? Yes. Has City Council ever voted on this? No. It would seem that at the very least our elected officials should be voting on this. Americans and New Mexicans are often asked to subsidize sports franchises, but that doesn’t make it right.

The 2022 edition of the Canada-based Fraser Institute’s Economic Freedom of North America 2022 is out and for yet another year New Mexico remains at the very bottom among US states in terms of economic freedom. Economic freedom is the ability of individuals to make their own economic decisions
about what to buy, where to work and whether to start a business.

Unsurprisingly, New Mexico performed particularly poorly in:

• Government spending as a percent of personal income (49th);
• Sales tax revenue as a percent of personal income (48th); and
• Government employees as a percent of overall employees (49th).

New Mexico DID get high marks for having relatively low property taxes (7th).

“When governments allow markets to decide what’s produced, how it’s produced and how much is produced, citizens enjoy greater levels of economic freedom,” said Fred McMahon, the Dr. Michael A. Walker Research Chair in Economic Freedom at the Fraser Institute and co-author of this year’s report, which measures government spending, taxation and labor market restrictions using data from 2020, the latest year of available comparable data. Florida was the top performing state in the index followed by New Hampshire. Rounding out the top five freest states are South Dakota (3rd), Texas and Tennessee (tied for 4th ).

The very worst performing states were New York at 50th followed by California.

On this week’s interview Paul talks to Fred Nathan the Founder and CEO of Think New Mexico which describes itself as a “results-oriented think tank whose mission is to serve all New Mexicans.” The organization recently published a detailed and ambitious plan to reform New Mexico schools. While Rio Grande Foundation and Think New Mexico don’t always agree on policy solutions for New Mexico, Paul and Fred both want very much to improve New Mexico’s dismal education system. This conversation really digs into the details of Think New Mexico’s education plan and its pluses and minuses from RGF’s perspective.

The Rio Grande Foundation would like to extend a big THANK YOU to everyone who called, wrote, emailed, and spoke in favor of parental rights in education alongside RGF at last night’s APS school board meeting.

We would also like to thank the five APS School Board members that voted to support parental involvement in the classroom.

In case you missed it, here’s a quick summary of what happened:

KB1, also known as the Parent Rights and Responsibilities policy, passed the APS School Board in a 5-2 vote.  KB1 consolidates education rules into a clear and concise format, making it easier for parents to see exactly what’s going on inside the classroom.

Opposition from special interest groups showed up in force, including numerous paid activists.

Regardless of the heckling and boos from the special interest groups, several brave parents stood up for Parental Rights and bravely took their turn at the mic to show the real local parent support for KB1.

We could not be more proud!

You can read the Albuquerque Journal’s highly biased coverage of the meeting here.

Parental Rights were up for a vote in Albuquerque today, and the clear winners are families.

Like everyone else RGF is interested in what happened in the recent election. Paul has some analysis here.

Paul and Wally aren’t the only ones waiting for something to happen at Spaceport America. A Chicago man recently asked for and received a refund from Virgin Galactic. 

Think New Mexico proposes education reform, we analyze their plan. 

RGF will be in federal court on Wednesday against NM Secretary of State Maggie Toulouse Oliver.

Environmental consults presented to the Legislature recently. They claim to have put a price of $5.3 billion on New Mexico environmental disasters due to climate change, but make no specific arguments that climate change caused the disasters.

According to a new report from the Legislative Finance Committee the State of New Mexico is wasting $18 million a year on unused office space. The LFC report found telework and 21% of staff vacancies are accounting for unused offices.

Telework COULD be a cost-saving measure in some circumstances, but the State needs to produce coherent rules for government employees and whether those jobs are able to be done remotely or not. Sadly, the Lujan Grisham Administration has not managed to do this 2.5 years after COVID began and created the push for remote work. Watch the story here.

The following is directly from the Secretary of State website. You can look for yourself at the Secretary of State website.

In the 2022 general election there was 52% voter turnout statewide

In Lea County (Hobbs) there was 38% turnout.

In Eddy County (Carlsbad and Artesia) there was 49% turnout.

In Chaves County (Roswell) there was 46% turnout

In San Juan (Farmington) there was 51% turnout

On the other hand the big liberal counties of Santa Fe saw 63% turnout and in Bernalillo County there was 54.6% turnout.

None of the biggest conservative counties in New Mexico turned out at the State average and Lea County lagged badly.

Why did this happen? That is a good question. Certainly election denial raised its ugly head in this election. Southeast New Mexico was also split in redistricting which may have impacted things.

Regardless of why it happened, we know that New Mexico’s Southeastern oil patch funds the rest of the State. They are arguably impacted by what happens with “green” policies in Washington and Santa Fe more than any other part of the state. It would seem that getting the conservative Southeast portion of New Mexico engaged would be a critical factor in winning future elections.

In October of 2022, New Mexico’s Spaceport America hit its 11th anniversary of being open. Alas, it’s prime tenant Virgin Galactic has failed to launch a single paying customer during that time.

One customer finally said “enough.” He asked for and received a refund of his $175,000 back from the company. According to the Chicago Sun-Times, a Mr. Shefket Chapadjiev paid Virgin $175,000 back in 2007 for a ticket to space. He’s now 84 years old and in poor health.

Echoing the comments of the Rio Grande Foundation, Chapadjiev, a native of Bulgaria, told the paper, “This has been for 15 years, and always we’re supposed to be flying next year, next year, people from Bulgaria keep asking me, ‘What happened?”

Chapadjiev says his refund from Virgin Galactic came minus 10% of the amount he paid.

The Rio Grande Foundation will be in federal court this Wednesday arguing in favor of free speech against New Mexico Secretary of State Maggie Toulouse Oliver. You can see the court notice below and read up on the case itself here.

While elections come and go, the fight for liberty continues!

The Rio Grande Foundation often works with Think New Mexico. From RGF’s perspective Think New Mexico is a politically-centrist think tank working here in New Mexico. Sometimes we agree with them and sometimes we don’t, but their latest report is on K-12 education policy (an issue we work on) and, since New Mexico will be a “blue” state for at least another two years, it is more likely that centrist ideas rather than conservative ones will get traction in the Legislature.

There are 10 proposals, all of them are thoughtful and open to consideration. A few are questionable from RGF’s perspective such as adding time to the school year. It seems like a lot of schools waste a lot of time they already have in the classroom. We’d like to see evidence that more time will be used effectively. Going to a “balanced” school year also has merit, but for young people working summer jobs, it MAY not make sense. It would seem there should be options.

Improving teacher and principal training including residencies sounds like a great ideas, but again, we want to see data that this has been effective elsewhere and it needs to be tracked, if implemented in NM, in some ongoing way.

Small schools and districts make sense, but we’re not sure about smaller class sizes. Making it easier for charter schools to be organized and operate is also a good thing as would a more rigorous curriculum. We question whether student assessments can be depoliticized though. Same for revamping colleges of education.

Finally, improving school board quality seems like a good idea, but the additional training, disclosures, and transparency may make it even more difficult to find people willing to serve in some rural communities.

So, since RGF supports many of the recommendations in this report, why isn’t it OUR report? For starters, the report mentions Mississippi’s success in turning their education results around. We have what they did and see that as a simpler starting point. It is ALSO largely the same plan as what Susana Martinez TRIED to implement in New Mexico, but failed due to legislative opposition.

Finally, WE believe that this Legislature (and Gov.) are too beholden to the status quo unions to do anything substantial to improve K-12 education in NM. Sadly, that will require a sea change especially in the Legislature. Our view is that IF/WHEN that sea change comes, we’d rather just do what Arizona and West Virginia have done and allow education $$ to follow the child. Parental accountability is the best accountability.

That being said, Think New Mexico’s report is a solid and worthwhile contribution to the education reform conversation in New Mexico.

Rarely have their been more compelling differences between the two major political parties in the United States in an election than there were in 2022. While the national GOP seems poised to take the House, it is likely that control of the US Senate will head to a runoff. In New Mexico Democrats held their big majority in the House while MLG held off a strong challenge by Mark Ronchetti and won all of the relevant statewide races.

What happened?

Was it abortion? Was it Trump’s election denials (nationally) and the candidates he backed in certain races? Was it just the fact that the nation is evenly split and New Mexico is a blue state and has been for decades and thus, in what proved to be a non-wave election, Democrats won big (again)?

It seems like all of the above are true.

For starters, it is worth noting that New Mexico is a BLUE state and has been for many years. In a “red wave” election Ronchetti and Republicans had a chance, but 2022 turned out to be a mediocre year nationally for GOP candidates and just the latest tough year here in NM.

What’s next?

We have a 60 day session in January. A new Democrat will take over as Speaker of the House. It is not going to be easy. If the GOP has a solid presidential nominee in 2024 there could be some good changes to the New Mexico Legislature. All of them are up for election then.

In the meantime, the Rio Grande Foundation will both continue and expand upon its efforts to do much needed education of the citizens of New Mexico on economic and education policy issues and what New Mexico needs to do to thrive.

A new report attempts to tally the supposed cost of climate change in New Mexico and around the nation. Here’s the full report and here’s an article about the report. The author recently presented to the Legislature’s Revenue Stabilization and Tax Policy Committee.

If readers are hoping for some fancy, detailed, and halfway convincing analysis of various disasters and whether all or part of them were the result of global warming/climate change, you’ll be sadly mistaken.

The report simply claims that “Weather-based disasters and duress have cost New Mexico $5.3 billion in the past 42 years while nationally, extreme weather events caused $150 billion in damage in the past year alone.”

How much of this is driven by “climate change” as opposed to natural deviations in the weather? Who knows? What are the costs and tradeoffs of the “energy transition” our Gov. has planned for us? Again, no information is provided. How about the fact that over the years more people live and build businesses along coastlines and into the mountains, thus making them vulnerable to floods and other disasters.

What is left unsaid is how greater economic prosperity has allowed humans to deal with climate issues, thus preventing deaths.

Candid analysis of the costs and tradeoffs of various environmental policies and what impacts foreign countries and their public policies are having are all worth study, but this isn’t the report for that.

At Rio Grande Foundation we have closely followed Mississippi’s recent education success.  As we noted we discuss in a blog post AND our podcast (to name two) Mississippi largely followed the plan put forth by former Gov. Susana Martinez which was NEVER implemented by New Mexico’s Democrat-controlled Legislature.

We’re not the only New Mexico think tank to find Mississippi intriguing, Think New Mexico’s latest report also takes on New Mexico’s broken K-12 education system and cites positive results in Mississippi as a model to consider. With the horrendous recent NAEP scores in which New Mexico was dead last in all categories, it certainly seems worth considering.

The latest NAEP 4th grade reading scores further highlight the stark contrast between Mississippi’s success and New Mexico’s failure.

Across the country homeless issues are critical. At a recent national conference Paul met Judge Glock, Senior Director of Policy Research at the Austin, TX – based Cicero Institute, a think tank that among other issues focuses on solutions to homelessness. Paul and Judge discuss the challenge we face and real-world solutions for the problem. You don’t want to miss this conversation!

A new report from Greenpeace released this week calls plastic “recycling” a myth and finds that of 51 million tons of plastic waste US households generated in 2021, just 5 percent was recycled.

How does this affect YOU? For starters, Albuquerque’s Solid Waste Department spends considerable resources collecting “recyclables” including plastic. According to the Department the cost of the recycling program rose 900% in two years. That has resulted in higher fees on Albuquerque residents.

With such low recycling rates for plastic it would seem there is little point to the effort. This is especially true since aluminum is worth actual money. Why waste time and effort working to recycle something that is basically un-recyclable when aluminum is easily recycled and can generate 44 cents/lb?

It’s time for the City of Albuquerque to follow price signals by abandoning plastic recycling.

With a week to go before the 2022 election the ABQ Journal released their poll which has MLG up 8. There is another poll from Emerson that finds a much narrower race. The latest Emerson poll puts Herrell in the lead. The Journal has a fairly tight race between Michelle Garcia Holmes and Melanie Stansbury. Interestingly the Journal has Herrell losing. Paul and Wally discuss the challenges of polling and how this election is going to impact the credibility of certain pollsters.

Paul and Wally make their own predictions regarding some top New Mexico and national races.

Paul recently undertook an in depth analysis of the recent NAEP scores to figure out if lockdowns impacted learning. There is certainly some correlation there: (Math analysis & Reading Analysis)

RGF has released a new tool to allow the public to engage with candidates.

There is an environmental success story that has received little attention and environmentalists don’t seem to care about.

According to a new audit Albuquerque Mayor Tim Keller has massively padded the City of Albuquerque’s payroll, specifically political or “unclassified” positions.

One of the most frustrating aspects of New Mexico public policy is politicians  and their sycophants who claim success for some government program or another without evidence.

Elizabeth Groginsky, MLG’s Secretary of Early Childhood Education and Care is the latest New Mexico bureaucrat to do this with her new opinion piece in the Albuquerque Journal. The Secretary makes all manner of arguments for “bold investments” in early childhood education. The problem is that New Mexico has been making such “bold” investments for a decade (see chart below).

Rather than relying on a bunch of studies that purport to show this spending has been a success, it would seem that after a decade we’d have some positive REAL academic outcomes from those 0-5 year olds who are now students in New Mexico’s K-12 system (there should be plenty of current 4th graders who went through New Mexico’s pre-K program).

Unfortunately, as we discussed recently, the NAEP scores that just came out (which tested both 4th graders and 8th graders) were disastrous. It’s easy to spend more money on government programs. It’s considerably more difficult to achieve results.

With Election Day just over one week away, the Rio Grande Foundation is as busy as ever. Here are some upcoming media and in-person appearances:

Wednesday, November 2nd, Portales, NM Rotary.

Thursday, November 3rd, Tucumcari Rotary.

If you are in Eastern New Mexico and would like to hear more about the Rio Grande Foundation and its work, please reach out to one of these Rotary clubs at the links above.

Friday, November 4th, 9 – 10am on KKOB radio with Bob Clark. Tune in live or stream the discussion at the link.

Election Day November 8th, 7pm – 11pm on KSFR 101.1FM.  Rather than watching the networks, sit back and listen to Fred Nathan and RGF’s Paul Gessing discuss the election results on the radio in Santa Fe or streaming worldwide!

Statewide bond question 3 on New Mexicans’ ballots will, if adopted, pour $216 million into higher education. RGF was quoted in this article. It is by far the largest statewide bond on the ballot and, if adopted, would mark the sixth consecutive statewide election that voters signed off on tens of millions of dollars for projects at public colleges and universities.

How much is enough? The only way we’ll ever know is if voters say “no.”

Ironically, UNM’s former president Chaouki Abdallah back in 2017 made it clear (even before MLG’s “free” college plan that, “Our higher ed spending is more than most other states; the trouble is we don’t spend it wisely and (we) spread it across so many entities. We do need a plan.”

Abdallah went on to say, “UNM has these spires of excellence, best in the world or top five, but like everything else around this state, the average is bad because you have to make sure everyone is taken care of.”

Even prior to free college, New Mexico was among the biggest-spending states on higher education with little to show for it.

Government at all levels in New Mexico has seen unprecedented money flow in (thanks to both the oil and gas industry’s largesse and federal stimulus and bailout $$). Simultaneously, employers face real challenges filling jobs to perform essential services including right here in Albuquerque where the City’s police department remains woefully understaffed while the City continues to break crime records.  

A new audit of the City of Albuquerque (find the ABQ Journal story here) found that one place that is not struggling to find workers is the bloated city government which has seen an explosion in hiring of “unclassified,” or appointed jobs. Among other things the audit found over half of the jobs it reviewed lacked job descriptions and that some high-level workers have been getting raises without documented justification or changed job responsibilities.

The audit also found that the number of unclassified positions had nearly doubled in the time between FY15 to FY22 going from 314 to 620. During the period, 83 employees moved from classified to unclassified positions, receiving salary increases between 22 and 368 percent!

Of the “unclassified” hires studied in the audit “only 21 percent of positions tested had an application and/or a resume on file related to the position, and only 13 percent had evidence demonstrating verification that the applicant met the minimum requirements.”

The following chart is taken directly from the audit. Clearly, the Keller Administration needs to be held accountable for this by City Council, the media, and the public.

On this week’s interview Paul talks to Timothy Vermeer Senior Policy Analyst with the Center for State Tax Policy of the Tax Foundation, one of the oldest and most credible tax policy think tanks in Washington. Vermeer has spent time in New Mexico talking to the Legislature sharing good tax policies and encouraging legislators to take tax policy seriously as a means of developing New Mexico’s economy. His organization has also just published their 2023 State Business Tax Climate Index.

We discuss what New Mexico should do to reform taxes in terms of gross receipts, income, and corporate taxation to name a few given the State’s strong revenue picture.

Local Albuquerque Company ProView Networks, helped Rio Grande Foundation team up with ProView StoryFile technology to allow the public to engage in a virtual environment with candidates and other public figures. The technology allows users to ask questions with the technology selecting the best match. ProView Networks produced the StoryFile conversation in Albuquerque.

The technology offers users the opportunity to sit down with a virtual version of the candidate and ask questions that are relevant to the office they are seeking, about the candidate’s background and their qualifications.

Several candidates were offered the chance to create a Proview “StoryFile” in the waning days of the campaign. Republican Attorney General candidate Jeremy Gay agreed to sit down and answer questions which highlighted everything from the role of the attorney general to his personal philosophy on
important issues in law enforcement and his own biography.

Said Paul Gessing, president of New Mexico’s Rio Grande Foundation: “The Rio Grande Foundation’s podcast Tipping Point New Mexico allows me to regularly sit down with some of New Mexico’s most important thought leaders, elected officials, and candidates to discuss the issues facing our State.

Proview/StoryFile is yet another tool that will allow the public an even more intimate way to hear from these people.”

ProView Networks, an Albuquerque, NM based company has partnered with StoryFile, based in Los Angeles, as a production partner. Through this state-of-the art interactive technology, ProView Networks is producing and telling the stories of not only political figures, but prominent people in athletics, entertainment and business as well as preserving historical and family legacies.

To learn and see more, please visit www.proviewnetworks.com and click on StoryFile. For the first time in American politics any voter can sit down with a political candidate to discuss the issues using this exciting technology. You can access it yourself here: 

The environmental movement and their supporters are a funny group. Oftentimes they prefer policies that have objectively negative environmental impacts while ignoring those that would do a great deal to improve environmental outcomes.

An example of the latter is remote or telework. Nationally, the transportation sector contributes 28 percent of all greenhouse gas emissions—the most of any sector—and personal vehicles make up more than half of those emissions. Obviously, not ALL of those are for commuting, but some significant percentage are.

Demographer Wendell Cox has analyzed the latest Census Bureau report called American Community Survey, which reveals a tripling of working from home in 2021, while transit use dropped by more than half from the 2019 pre-pandemic rate.

Cox noted that auto use dropped to the lowest point since before 1970, though it remained the principal means of commuting while Transit commuting dropped to its lowest level in six decades of Census Bureau reporting (2.5%). Today in America 10 times more Americans walk to work or work from home than use mass transit.

New Mexico saw a jump of 10 percentage points in the number of people telecommuting or working remotely as seen below. This means less traffic and less gasoline burnt both sitting in traffic AND commuting.

Yet politicians from the Biden Administration to our own here in New Mexico continue to pump billions of dollars into transit systems like the Rail Runner that no one is riding.

As our previous analysis found, there is strong evidence that states that closed for longer periods of time due to their political leaders’ COVID policies, experienced larger learning loss than states which did not lock down as long.

Again, we’re using Burbio’s school tracking website for time lost in the classroom.

Using 4th grade reading data, the worst performing states saw losses of 8 to  10 points: Delaware, Virginia, Idaho, Maine, Oklahoma, and West Virginia fall into this category. Sadly, DC was among the worst performing jurisdictions, but it was only included in NAEP not Burbio so it has been omitted here.

In terms of time lost in school, DE lost 13th most, Virginia 7th, Idaho 30th, Maine 20th, Oklahoma 31st, and West Virginia 24th . (average lost school time rank  17.5)

In terms of the LEAST BAD performance on NAEP students in a handful of states actually saw an INCREASE in reading scores. Alabama +2, Hawaii +1, Louisiana +2,

In terms of lost time in school, Alabama ranked 33rd, Louisiana 40th while HI ranked 5th. We made the “cut” at zero learning loss, but no states were in that group. Only Alaska had “just” -1 point of learning loss, so we just went with the three states  (average lost school time rank 26).

So, again, Hawaii seems to have uniquely done a good job with virtual learning, but overall, states where students lost more time in classrooms performed worse than those who lost less time.