 About the Author Tracy Dingmann spent 20 years as a print journalist writing for daily newspapers, including the Albuquerque Journal in New Mexico and The Capital Times in Madison, Wisconsin. She is also a frequent contributor to such blogs as mediabistro.com, commonties.com and fineliving.com, and she's a weekly commentator on the New Mexico Independent. Tracy is a 1987 graduate of the University of Wisconsin, where she earned a B.A. in Journalism. A frequent volunteer with youth in her community, Tracy has volunteered in Albuquerque schools and with the New Mexico Martin Luther King Commission.
With the "t-files," Tracy relishes the opportunity to tell the stories of everyday New Mexicans who are wrestling with the problems, joys and triumphs that affects us all. |
A Hard-Won Right: Jewell Hall, Frank I. Sanchez and Laurie Weahkee Remember
By Tracy Dingmann
Nov 1st, 2008 at 5:19 pm MDT
Everyone wants to know what's going to happen with the American economy.Jewell Hall remembers watching her friends and family in Texas struggle to pay a poll tax in order to vote back in the 1950's and 60's.
"Black people had to pay a certain amount to get a certificate to vote," says the retired Rio Rancho educator. "A lot of people didn't vote, because they couldn't afford to."
In Louisiana, where Hall also spent time as a young adult, Black people were faced with a test as well as a tax, Hall remembers. "There was a special kind of test that people had to take, and which many did not pass. And that was the point of it. It eliminated a lot of people."
It wasn't until the 1965 Voting Rights Act took the voting process away from individual states and made it a federally regulated one that all African Americans were guaranteed the right to vote, said Hall. "The 15th amendment was always there, but it had been violated across the board when it came to blacks and other groups."
Of course, that right didn't come without a titanic struggle across the American South, which saw the murders and imprisonment of many activists and innocents, said Hall. Not enough youngsters today know about that struggle, and not enough get the connection between voting and being fairly represented in our society. And not enough people realize that fully participating in democracy means not just voting and being represented, but making sure the representative stays responsive and connected to the people who elected him or her, said Hall.
Sadly, the public schools aren't doing a great job reinforcing that information. And not enough parents pass it along to their children, either. "If there are generations of parents who don't understand that process, then the don't have the skills to pass it on. It's a cycle in our society.
Hall, a former president of the American Teacher Federation in Albuquerque and a founding member of the Rio Rancho School Board, says she always took her children and grandchildren along with her when she voted, and brought them to meetings of the groups in which she served as an elected official. She says she always encouraged them to run for office in school and participate in every kind of representative democracy.
And now that they are all grown, Hall spends her hours volunteering on the phone bank at the American Teachers Federation offices in Albuquerque. Since July, Hall has donated 30 to 40 hours a week making calls to remind people to vote or register to vote - for a total of thousands of hours. "We always need to keep at it," said Hall. "Change is very slow, but in my lifetime, I've seen a lot of change."
Laurie Weahkee
Laurie Weahkee has spent years galvanizing the Native American vote in New Mexico.
As lead organizer with the Native American Voters Alliance, she began activating urban Indians in 2002 to vote against a street bond that would authorize construction of a road through the Petroglyphs, a sacred Native American site on Albuquerque's West Side. NAVA sprang out of a group called the SAGE Council, or Sacred Alliance for Grassroots Equality, which was formed to protect sacred native sites.
"It just became apparent to us that we needed to get involved in a political way," said Weahkee. "We would go to transportation board meetings and give fiery, impassioned speeches and still end up losing. So we started the process of trying to garner the Indian vote throughout the city of Albuquerque."
The organized Native voters helped defeat the bond issue in 2003, but failed to defeat a repeat bond issue in 2004, Weahkee said. "And so while it was unfortunate that we lost on the sacred site issue, the upshot is that a lot of Indian people became aware of how political decisions affect our lives on a daily basis. We have a lot of people who now analyze specific policy issues that come up and are asking the hard questions - Is this going to help the Indian community or not?"
In this presidential election year, NAVA has focused on providing basic voter education to 8,000 unlikely Native American voters from all over New Mexico. "We're making sure Indian people know their polling sites and actually get out to vote," said Weahkee.
In the future, the alliance will be working on specific issues such as examining revenue streams for Native health care and preventing uranium mining at Native sites like Mt. Taylor, she said.
On her own time, Weahkee is active in the state Democratic party and was elected to serve as a superdelegate to the DNC in Denver this year. In her work, Weahkee said she continues to be inspired by the example of Miguel Trujillo, an Isleta Pueblo man and Marine veteran who fought to win New Mexico Indians the right to vote in 1948. "He served in the Army and he just felt that if we were able to got to war, we should be able to vote," she said.
Native Americans had officially won the right to vote in 1924, but in actual practice, they were not allowed to vote in New Mexico, she said. Trujillo filed suit against the state and prevailed. His suit, Trujijllo v. Garley, gave New Mexico Indians the right to vote in 1948, making 2008 the 60th anniversary of Native voting here, said Weahkee.
Frank I. Sanchez
Frank I. Sanchez of Roswell knows that people who don't have the right to vote for elected officials who truly represent their community get ignored.
"The reason I fought is because, being raised in Roswell, I saw my parents and my neighbors routinely excluded from the political process," said Sanchez, in explaining why he became a community organizer and voting rights activist years ago.
As an organizer, he fought for better schools for his fellow Mexican Americans, who made up a large part of Roswell's population but who weren't represented on the school board. That's because the seats were elected at-large, which diluted the voting power of the significant Mexican American population.
"The very first time we went before the all-Anglo school board was in the early 1970's. We went demanding bilingual education, a reduction of the dropout rate, and more Mexican American teachers. We were about 30 percent of the population, but only 1 to 2 percent of teachers were Mexican American. Our students didn't have any role models."
That first experience was dismal, Sanchez remembers. "They just ignored us. There was no one there who even reflected our interests at all." At a later meeting, the parents organized and filled the school board hall. "We had 150 people and we were just totally ignored. And that was pretty much our experience with every electoral body that we had experience with."
In 1981, Sanchez became the lead plaintiff in Sanchez v. King, a sweeping voting rights lawsuit against the State of New Mexico that challenged racial and ethnic gerrymandering in house districts. The lawsuit forced the state to redraw district boundaries to ensure that minorities in those districts would be fairly represented. The suit especially affected Mexican Americans in southern New Mexico and the state's many Native American nations, Sanchez said.
Since then, Sanchez has been enormously effective in helping others organize voting rights lawsuits all over New Mexico. His lawsuit and others like them have changed New Mexico's political landscape for the better, he said."The towns of Portales and Artesia, where there's been some racial conflict in the past, have now elected Mexican American mayors," he said. "Statewide, every council, every school board, every hospital board, every community college board - all have at least one Mexican American on them - and in some cases they are in the majority."
There's been some improvement, but the journey is not over, said Sanchez. Getting the right to vote is just the first step - but making sure people are equally represented requires constant vigilance, vigorous voting and an ongoing effort to hold elected officials accountable, said Sanchez.
Sanchez has donated his extensive legal papers to the University of New Mexico. You can read more about him here.
Postscript: Here's a great video from New Mexico Youth Organized - Why would anyone want to stop you from voting?:
In the Loop on the Economy
By Tracy Dingmann
Oct 24th, 2008 at 12:09 pm MDT
Everyone wants to know what's going to happen with the American economy.The preoccupation ranges from daily hysteria on Wall Street to despair, anger and confusion on Main Street about how the crisis will really affect Americans.
While anxiety reigns, there's a distinct lack of practical information about what sort of knowledge or actions might help people cope - and to insure that this level of deception and greed from those in charge of our financial systems is never allowed to run unchecked again.
The Clearly Team hits the streets. Watch the interviews here:
So, I picked a few specific questions and decided to chat with some New Mexicans who are in unique positions to discuss them.
I asked Alan Marks, co-founder of the South Valley Academy, a charter high school with a college-prep curriculum, what he thinks our schools should be teaching our children about economics. Each year Marks teaches a senior-level economics class that teaches students all about basic economic principles, including interest rates, credit, and the other tools the government uses to shape the economy.
Using those tools, the students are asked to create their own economy. But they are asked to view their creation through a critical lens that includes these three criteria: Is it fair; is it efficient, and does everyone have a say, Marks said.
"We ask them to do a critical analysis of what they see going on around them. We ask questions like `What are certain jobs worth? What does it mean to live well? Is making more money the end all and be all?" The current crisis on Wall Street has certainly been fodder for much discussion, said Marks.
"For their final project, I'll be asking them to record their observations about what is happening economically. They'll be writing a pretty intense critique of how our current system works. It's a high school class, but with the level of analysis and detail they are asked to explain, it is probably more significant and in-depth than most college classes."
Last year, all 200 or so students in the South Valley Academy were involved in an economic literacy project facilitated by the University of New Mexico Law School.
Teacher Stewart Paley, who helped coordinate the class unit said students learned all about payday loans, credit cards, car loans and other financial products that can sometimes get consumers into financial trouble. The law school hopes to expand the program and bring it to other Albuquerque schools in an effort to create better- informed consumers, Paley said.
As policy leaders cast about for solutions to our current economic crisis, there's been lots of talk about socialism - and whether the United States is inching ever closer toward it. Specifically, talk of rolling back tax breaks for some of society's most wealthy citizens while cutting taxes for the middle class has caused some to invoke the scary-sounding word.
So I asked UNM political science assistant professor Gabriel Sanchez to explain what socialism really means - and why the concept is so widely misunderstood. (end of update)
"Most people think of socialism as directly in opposition to American, capitalist values - the whole idea that if you work hard and are effective, you will be able to succeed. They see socialism as working against that - putting all the resources in one pot, and having government divide them."
Currently, many wealthier Americans are up in arms about the idea of their taxes going to pay for, well, anything - but American government has always been based on a redistributivel tax plan, said Sanchez. People who earn different incomes are taxed at different rates, and those taxes help pay for schools and roads and services for everybody.
What many are calling socialism right now is really only a rolling back of controversial tax breaks for the very wealthiest Americans, said Sanchez. "It's not really taking money from the rich and giving it to the poor - like a Robin Hood scenario. It's just taking those huge tax breaks for the wealthy away."
I also asked Sanchez what he thinks about the middle class and whether it's on the verge of extinction.
First of all, actually defining the middle class is tough, because everyone aspires to be middle class and assumes they are, said Sanchez. Unfortunately, Americans tend to tie the definition to how much they make and how much "stuff" they have - while failing to consider their actual net worth.
A big house and an expensive SUV only count against you if you bought them on credit and still owe thousands. That's why this financial crisis has the so-called middle class reeling - because the value of their physical trappings is dropping and the all-important value of security is gone, said Sanchez.
In his classes, Sanchez said he tries to provide real-life information to his students about economics and consumer finances and is often surprised at how little they know or care. He said he would favor more economic literacy classes for high school students, who hopefully would pass information along to their parents.
"The elephant in the room is, why aren't parents talking to their kids about this?" said Sanchez. Mostly, it's because the parents themselves don't know anything about it."
Kevin Hoover sees the great American pursuit of middle class status shrinking every day - but he doesn't think it's lost forever. As a senior loan officer at Lewallen Mortgage in Albuquerque, Hoover says the pool of prospective homebuyers who actually qualify for loans has shrunk by half over the last few months.
Hoover, who writes a real estate advice column for the West Side and Rio Rancho editions of the Albuquerque Journal, acknowledges that many economists blame overzealous lenders and the eventual collapse of the housing bubble for the current economic collapse.
And it is true that many brokers and lenders approved mortgages they never should have considered, said Hoover. People were encouraged to buy houses they couldn't afford because everyone believed that housing values would only keep going up and up, said Hoover.
Then good mortgages were mixed with subprime, risky mortgages and sold as investments, which precipitated the collapse. The pendulum has swung back so far now that almost no one can get a mortgage….but it will swing back again, he said.
Albuquerque is somewhat sheltered from the bust because it didn't boom as big as states like California, Arizona and Florida did. Foreclosures are inching up here, but what's happening right now is nothing so dramatic as the extinction of the middle class, said Hoover.
However, the days of buying a house, selling it a few years later and making an easy $20,000 or so are gone forever, said Hoover. Back in the old days, people bought a house to live in, for life. They put a large amount of money down and borrowed the rest from bankers they knew, said Hoover. Americans may have to start thinking that way again.
"A house is a place to live. It's not a 401k and it's not an ATM, and people need to start thinking that way."
Pricing Out Small Business
By Tracy Dingmann
Oct 19th, 2008 at 10:44 am MDT
As executive director of the Albuquerque Independent Business Alliance, Rebecca Dakota communicates regularly with the owners of about 175 small businesses in the city. Dakota's members tell her they know that keeping their employees healthy is good for their businesses as well as for each employee and their family."The bottom line is that when employees are healthy, they do a better job, they are more productive and they show up at work more often. So it's a good thing for the employer," says Dakota.
Watch the interview with Rebecca Dakota here
Ideally, an employer also wants to be able to insure the employee's family, too, because if a child is sick, it affects the employee's work, she said. But increasingly, the cost of making sure that employees are insured is out of reach, says Dakota.
"For small business owners, the number one obstacle to providing decent health care is the cost of getting a decent policy," said Dakota. "And even then, sometimes the employee can't afford the matching part. And that's a big issue, because 40 percent of families in New Mexico are considered low-income families."
Dakota says she's not sure what the solution is, but she knows the current system isn't working. Tying health insurance to people's jobs is an idea that emerged after World War II, when people typically stayed at one job throughout their lives. That rarely happens anymore. Plus, the job-based model leaves out so many people and pushes the cost for those who do have insurance ever higher, she says.
"Small businesses are the backbone of the American economy…and yet this backbone is being crushed by the high cost of decent insurance and…by the fact that too many people are left out of the system," she says.
Dakota says many AIBA members share her frustration with the outmoded healthcare system and are keenly interested in helping find an alternate method. AIBA's members range from very small businesses with just one employee to larger ones with one hundred employees or more.
Member Martha Doster operated the popular Nob Hill lingere shop Martha's Body Bueno for 32 years before closing it two years ago.Doster, who now sells her popular massage oils and body care products online, said she always considered her shop a "micro-business," because she only employed a handful of workers.
Typically, the smaller the company, the higher the cost per person for health insurance, Doster says. Most of the time, the cost of insurance was so high that Doster wasn't even able to afford any coverage to her workers. Or if she did, the co-payment was so high her workers declined it, she says.
Doster said it broke her heart to see her workers suffer through everything from abcessed teeth to cancer, all with limited or no health insurance.
Now in business for herself as a licensed massage therapist, Doster said she barters with her doctor, dentist and chiropractor for the health care she need. Doster says she is working closely with Dakota to activate other AIBA members and learn more about different health care models, with an eye toward actually changing health care policy at the state level.
"Within AIBA, we want to educate our members so they are aware there is a dialogue going on and that they can have their voices heard. Typically, insurance companies and health care providers have been involved, but not small businesspeople," says Dakota.
"We want to make sure our members are able to talk with their legislators, to tell their legislators about their concerns and what they think is really important."
The goal is not just to take the burden of providing healthcare off of small businesspeople - it's to improve the affordability and accessibility of healthcare to all, says Dakota.Please share your comments with us. Click here.
Mortgage your Life to get an Education
By Tracy Dingmann
Oct 9th, 2008 at 4:14 pm MDT
Michelle Richardson-Touson doesn't think American college students should have to mortgage their lives to earn an education. But that's exactly what the Texas native has had to do in the course of pursuing a doctorate degree in sports administration at the University of New Mexico.Richardson-Touson, 43, estimates she's borrowed close to $100,000 in student loans to pay for her education so far.
Watch the interview with Michelle Richardson-Touson here
With almost evangelical zeal, Touson believes education will be the key to her success. And while she knows she made the right choice to pursue her doctorate degree, she is concerned about the financial burden that will follow her around for years after she earns it.
"I shouldn't have to mortgage my life to be educated," she says.
Richardson-Touson began her collegiate career fourteen years ago at the City College of San Francisco. She transferred to Washington D.C.'s historically Black Howard University in 1996 and graduated with a bachelor's degree in public relations and journalism with a minor in sports management. Along the way, Richardson-Touson scored internships with Nike and the WNBA.
In 2001, she went to Florida State University and earned a master's degree in sports management in just one year. Richardson-Touson then worked for two years, tutoring student athletes at University of California-Berkeley, but found she couldn't land the jobs she really wanted. She did some research and found that UNM has one of the best doctoral programs in her field. So she came here in 2003 to earn her Ph.D in sports administration.
While a student, she tutored athletes and other students at UNM's African American Student Services, but those were low-paying work study jobs with no benefits.
All the while, her student loans kept growing.
Now Richardson-Touson has a real job, with benefits, in the UNM provost's office. But she's still writing her doctoral thesis. As soon as she leaves school, the loan payments will start kicking in. Students she's tutored look up to Touson and often ask her for advice about pursuing graduate school. Most end up making their decision based on the whopping amount it will cost them. Because she believes in education's power to transform and improve, Touson almost always advises them to go for it.
"I tell them they have to release themselves from the number," she said. "They can't repossess your degree."
Michelle Touson-Richardson is President of the Black Graduate & Professional Student Association
Trickle Down Crisis
By Tracy Dingmann
Sep 25th, 2008 at 4:58 pm MDT
Maryann Padilla worked and saved and scrimped all her life, and now she simply wants to know that the modest retirement she has planned for will be safe.Watch the interview with Maryann Padilla and economist Lawrence Waldman
But like millions of Americans, the retired teacher and Grants, N.M. native is worried about how the financial crisis on Wall Street will affect her retirement plan and the $100,000 worth of annuities she bought 40 years ago to supplement her retirement.
Her annuities have taken hits before when the economy has faltered, and Padilla, who is 62, said she expects she will have almost nothing left by the time she really needs to rely on them.
"I certainly expect the crisis on Wall Street to trickle down to me," she said, alluding to the economic theory that conservatives such as Ronald Reagan used to promote the kind of top-heavy benefits that were supposed to eventually trickle down to the poor and middle class. "It seems like the only trickle-down effect we get is the negative kind."
Padilla said she's outraged about plans for a $700 billion government bailout of the private investment banks whose recklessness precipitated the crash.
"I called everyone in the New Mexico congressional delegation to tell them to vote no on the bailout,'" she said. "I don't want (Treasury Secretary Henry) Paulsen to get the kind of authority he's seeking. There's no oversight."
Plus, Padilla said she questions the morality of a plan that would bail out rich bankers while ignoring the millions of people who have lost their homes to foreclosure. "It'll put the fat cats back in charge of the process again," she said. "My tax dollars will be going to protect them, not the people whose houses are being foreclosed on."
Senior University of New Mexico economist Lawrence Waldman said he hears concerns like Padilla's all the time. As an economic forecaster with UNM's Bureau of Business and Economic Research, it is Waldman's job to study past data and predict future economic trends. He is often called upon by those in the media to help make sense of what's happening in the economy.
In a recent interview with Clearly, Waldman placed blame for the current crisis on several factors, including the greed of predatory lenders in the housing market and the piling-on of investments based on the sub-prime, unstable loans that resulted.
Laws were on the books to prevent those kinds of actions, but no one insisted that the laws be followed, said Waldman. "Fraud and dishonesty were at historic levels," he said. "Self-interest is only human nature." Going forward, the only thing that will prevent a similar corruption and abuse of the system is strict regulation, said Waldman.
"More oversight and regulation is needed. Wall Street needs to adopt a set of ethics, and follow them."
Another part of the puzzle that is already being addressed is to reassess what limitations and liabilities are assigned to large companies such as Bear Sterns and Goldman Sachs. "We've got to keep companies from getting so large that they can't fail."
As far as the first line of effects from Wall Street, Waldman said he expects that lending and credit markets will tighten up as banks decline to lend to each other.
New Mexicans, like most Americans, will likely have trouble buying homes and obtaining loans, and their retirement plans and investments may be affected.The number of foreclosures will go up as unstable mortgages continue to fail. During this uncertain period, New Mexicans should save money and pay down their credit, he said. Investing in Treasury bills is still relatively safe, he said.
The investigation into what went wrong should continue to prevent the same violation of trust from happening to the American taxpayers ever again, he said. "Generally people are resentful of large corporations and if it turns out that the people on Wall Street were reckless and didn't care about the fallout, then there will be a bitterness in this country for a long time."Please share your comments with us. Click here.
On the frontlines of the foreclosure crisis
By Tracy Dingmann
Sep 18th, 2008 at 4:27 pm MDT
Robert Garcia says more and more families are coming to his agency every day for help in their battle to keep their homes.Watch the interview with Garcia
Garcia is executive director of Southwest Neighborhood Housing Services, a statewide homeowner assistance agency located in Albuquerque.
Over the past year, Garcia said he's seen a shocking increase in the number of families signing up for foreclosure prevention counseling. "We've seen a 70 to 80 percent increase in the request for those services," Garcia said recently. Most of the foreclosure cases involve adjustable rate loans, in which the homeowners signed up for a loan at a low "teaser" rate which was set to automatically increase later, doubling or tripling the monthly payment.
Some commentators and observers have been quick to place the blame for the foreclosure crisis on the homeowners, for getting in over their heads. And it is true that many of the homeowners did not fully understand what was being asked of them when they signed the papers, he said.
But Garcia said the blame also lies with the banking and real estate professionals who lead the borrowers astray and offered them loans they knew were not viable.
"It's the mortgage brokers and the developers, just looking at their bottom line. It's just greed, with a capital G, is what that is."
To help protect homeowners, Southwest Housing Services Inc. provides free classes in credit and budgeting and first-time homeownership.
For the homeowners who are already in trouble, Garcia's agency will negotiate with creditor and the mortgage companies for free to help keep families in their homes. "I want people to know that they don't need to sell their home. They don't need to get foreclosed on. There is help available."
Services provided at Southwest Housing Services Inc. are free. The not-for-profit agency is located at 4605 4th NW and can be reached at 243-5511 or nhsofalb.org. Please share your comments with us. Click here.
"Community Organizer"
By Tracy Dingmann
Sep 16th, 2008 at 3:35 pm MDT
Arturo Uribe of Mesquite, N.M. didn't just wake up one day and decide to be a community organizer.But the man who thought of himself as "just a college student, father and husband" effectively became one after he began to suspect that emissions from the Helena Chemical Co. plant next to his family's longtime home were making his young children sick
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Uribe, 38, first noticed that his daughter, Giavanni, 12, began suffering from respiratory problems and uncontrollable nosebleeds shortly after the Uribe family moved to Mesquite in 2003.
The family had been living in Silver City but moved to Mesquite, settling in the house Uribe's grandfather built decades ago. That Uribe family home sits 50 yards away from the Helena plant, which is believed to manufacture and blend agricultural fertilizers, fungicides, pesticides, herbicides and other chemicals. The company is an American subsidiary of the giant Japanese company Marubeni and exact accounts of what chemicals are actually handled there and what is done with them have been hard to document, Uribe said.
Then, in 2004, Uribe's son Mariano was born at a Las Cruces hospital. The newborn suffered respiratory arrest days after he was brought home from the hospital. Now 4, he continues to have serious respiratory problems.
"When my son was born he was fine," said Uribe. "It wasn't until I brought him home that he went into respiratory arrest and I had to take him back to the hospital. That's when I really began looking at our environment and finding out that other families with newborns and young children had respiratory issues. I remember calling the New Mexico Environment Department and being real upset."
Other children in the community had suffered odd ailments, too, said Uribe. One neighbor boy was born with six fingers on one hand and six toes on each foot.
"Their doctor asked them if the husband worked in a chemical plant," Uribe said.
In a grassroots effort, Uribe and others in the town pressed for a New Mexico Environment Department investigation into the plant. Their efforts led to a $238,000 fine for Helena in Nov. of 2004 for failure to obtain an air quality permit and a $36,000 fine in Oct. of 2006 for failing to report a chemical spill.
But the biggest violations were uncovered in Dec. of 2007, when Helena Chemical was cited for 15 air-quality violations and fined $279,000.
The company's repeated pattern of violations shows a marked resistance to improvement, said Uribe.
"The state Environment Department needs to do more. I don't think they (Helena) are taking them seriously. We need new regulations so we can have the quality of life that we want."
Uribe, who has a degree in social work from NMSU and is now executive director of the Mesquite Community Action Committee, doesn't attribute his activism to any particular political ideology. He's says he's just trying to stand up for what's right for the people of his community.
Uribe plans to continue calling for more scrutiny of the Helena plant and says his group hopes the company will choose to relocate to a more remote area that is not home to so many vulnerable children and elderly people.
"That kind of plant has outlived its existence in this kind of rural community," he said.
Other battles Uribe's grassroots group has helped wage to improve lives in Mesquite include fighting to get a skate park built in town, working to get a better day-care center built and campaigning to spread the tax burden of paying for construction of the nearby Spaceport America to the entire state of New Mexico, not just the three counties surrounding it.
All the activism in tiny Mesquite has attracted the attention of PBS, which will be visiting Mesquite before the election and interviewing people for a special on rural Latino voters and the issues that matter to them, Uribe said.
"College Blues"
By Tracy Dingmann
Sep 12th, 2008 at 2:24 pm MDT
Valley High School senior Ahviahn Wells has been doing some serious cramming lately, but it's not for her classes.She's been scouring the Internet for ways to pay for college next year, and she doesn't like the limited options she's finding.
"The issue of paying for college is becoming more of a stress than worrying about being accepted," said Wells, who is 17. "It wasn't until this year, when I became personally affected by the price of tuition, that the stories of my older, college-age friends really hit me. Most of them, all super-smart and talented, cannot afford to pay and are already in debt from taking out student loans."
Wells says she's looked at attending the University of New Mexico or the Community College of Central New Mexico but really wants to attend a small, liberal-arts college, preferably outside of New Mexico. The schools she's looking at run an average of a whopping $11,000 for annual tuition alone - not counting books, food and housing.
For Wells and millions of other promising students hoping to attend college, the traditional methods of paying for increasingly higher school costs have become more difficult.
Student loans carry crippling interest rates, expansion of the historic Pell Grant program is in jeopardy, scholarships are getting scarce, and more and more middle class families - not to mention those less well off - are finding themselves priced out of paying for college themselves.
As the oldest of four children raised by a single mom, Wells said she can't count on much help from her family.
A self-described "B-student who should be making A's," Wells doesn't qualify for the most elite scholarships but says she's looking into the possibility of a New Mexico Lottery Scholarship or another merit-based award.
In her research, Wells says she's come across some odd-sounding possibilities from a number of private donors.
"They range from having Cherokee ancestry to playing a certain instrument to owning a specific type of purebred toy poodle," she said.
Though they might sound wacky, Wells said an offbeat award like that might just end being her salvation.
She's not going to give up her dream of attending college - she promised her mom.
"My mom was in college, but then she got pregnant with me," said Wells. "She wants me to do better than her. She wants me to take every opportunity I can."
"It breaks my heart I can't insure her."
By Tracy Dingmann
Aug 14th, 2008 at 3:07 pm MDT
Dena Jaramillo - a college student, a mother and the assistant operations manager at Betty's Bath and Day Spa - lost her health insurance last month.Her offense? She turned 22… and was summarily dropped from her father's policy.
The practice of removing children from their parent's policy once they become adults is common among health insurance companies.
But like almost every young person it happens to, it left Jaramillo in a bind.
As a student at Central New Mexico Community College, Jaramillo qualified for some health benefits, but found they were too limited for her needs.
So she turned to her boss, Elissa Breitbard, who owns the North Valley spa where she has worked for the last eight years.
"I didn't know what to do, so I asked Elissa if I could get on the plan at Betty's," she said.
Breitbard had hired Jaramillo to fold towels and help out in the spa when she was a 14-year-old student at Valley High School and watched proudly as Jaramillo worked her way up to assistant operations manager.
But Breitbard soon found out she was powerless to help her longtime employee.
Breitbard's health insurance provider for Betty's only allows her to insure people who work 32 or more hours a week. Because of the demands of her schooling and her need to care for her young child, Jaramillo can never squeeze in more than 28 hours of work per week.
"It literally breaks my heart that I can't insure her," said Breitbard.
Late last week, Jaramillo said she may be able to get insurance soon through a state plan in that will give her coverage and spare her from having to pay a premium.
But it still bothers Breitbard that she can't provide that service to a valued, longtime employee.
In fact, Breitbard said she can't even afford to insure her own child through her policy at Betty's. She and her domestic partner insure their baby on the partner's policy. The partner works for the Veterans Administration and gets a much better insurance rate.
"I think that just shows how much everyone has to juggle when it comes to this issue," she said.
As a small business owner, Breitbard said she is interested in talking to others about a more workable, affordable, sensible system of insuring all Americans.
That's why she's been meeting up regularly with other local business owners and members of the Albuquerque Independent Business Alliance to compare stories and identify the problems with the current system.
But ferreting out the problems is only the first step.
Ask Breitbard about what kind of solutions she'd like to see, and she is not entirely sure. She says she favors some kind of universal healthcare that would cover all Americans, not just those who have jobs or are on public assistance.
But she's ready to look at the problem and help be part of whatever solution state legislators, policymakers, healthcare workers and patient advocates can come up with.
"We are standing together to try to find solutions to these problems that affect us all."
To contact Tracy Dingmann email her at tdingmann@gmail.com
What is "Green Building?"
By Tracy Dingmann
Aug 11th, 2008 at 8:15 pm MDT
Green builders and architects often joke that they spend half their time explaining what green building actually is.When the Albuquerque green architectural consulting firm Environmental Dynamics, Inc. is pressed to define green building, they have a ready example at hand - their own rehabbed building. The architects and consultants who run EDI bought a "nasty" concrete block commercial building near San Mateo and Central NE several years ago and turned it into a veritable showcase for green commercial renovation.
"What we do is exemplified by the building we're in," explains Kent Beierle, one of four partners who make up EDI.
The building at 142 Truman NE has a rustic yet stylish, modern look, sporting sustainable cork floors in the conference room and bamboo walls and floors throughout. Interior walls are finished with a non-toxic product made from crushed oyster shells and marble sand. Abundant skylights eliminate the need for artificial lighting during the day.
 Photo by Patrick Coulie |
The building's exterior is finished with an all-natural lime wash mixed with crushed, recycled glass.
Recycled steel beams were used in the renovation, and concrete rubble from the nearly complete demolition of the building is "caged" in wire and used as a fence around parts of the building.
It takes a lot of water to make concrete. So instead of using concrete or asphalt for parking areas and outside walkways, EDI used an experimental blend of rocks that compresses over time into a concrete-like surface.
You can't see it, but the building even has a green roof - one of the few in Albuquerque.
EDI is proud to say that it used or recycled about 90 percent of the waste that remained from the building's demolition.
"Only one Dumpster was taken to the landfill," said Bierele.
EDI's renovation was done using the practices and products common to those it uses in its many commercial and residential jobs for good reason: To show how easy and attractive green building can be, said Bierele. "We set out to make green building sexy, to make it accessible to people, to dispel the myths and the voodoo. It's ridiculously simple stuff, really," he said.
An increasing number of companies around New Mexico are catching on to the green building trend, which proponents say not only helps the environment but also produces more conscious, less-wasteful employees and residents.
"New Mexico lends itself well to sustainable design," said Kris Callori, an architect and partner in EDI. "There are so many ancient examples of sustainable building and water usage."
And as one of the few local firms accredited by the prestigious Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) green building rating system, EDI is earning a reputation as one of the state's leading firms. With two licensed architects and a number of associates, the company builds it own projects and provides consulting and design services to a number of architectural companies in the region.
In addition to green building design, EDI helps companies or homebuilders consider incorporating such energy-saving features as digital heating and cooling, ground-source heat pumps and solar appliances, said Callori.
Currently, EDI is working on the Cognitive Behavorial Institute of Albuquerque, a show-stopping 6,900 square foot building in the Sandia Heights that has a goal of attaining LEED certification and reducing energy use by more than 50 percent, compared to a typical office building.
EDI is a proud member of the United States Green Building Council and the U.S. Green Building Council-New Mexico Chapter.
To contact Tracy Dingmann email her at tdingmann@gmail.com
Local Vet Puzzled by McCain's GI Forum Speech
By Tracy Dingmann
Jul 25th, 2008 at 6:12 pm MDT
In a speech today before the American GI Forum in Denver, John McCain told the veterans group that when the government forgets its debts to veterans, it constitutes "a stain upon America's honor."Yet that's just what one prominent local member of the Hispanic veteran's rights group says McCain has done, for failing to support the revamped GI Bill and increased medical benefits for veterans during his long tenure as a United States Senator.
A few months ago, I interviewed Louis Tellez of Albuquerque, a World War II Army veteran and former national secretary of the GI Forum.
Tellez, 84, attended college thanks to the original GI bill and credited it with setting him down the path to a lifetime of success.
Tellez told me how dismayed and betrayed he and his fellow vets in the GI Forum felt by McCain 's refusal to support the expanded GI Bill.
Every major veterans group, including the American GI Forum, called for passage of the bill.
A few weeks after our conversation the bill did pass, with the overwhelming bipartisan support of nearly every senator except McCain.
Tellez also showed me the GI Forum's 2008 legislative agenda, which calls for various initiatives to improve the quality of life for veterans.
Most notably, citing the high rates of suicide and brain injury among returning Afghanistan and Iraq War vets, the GI Forum's platform calls for ensuring maximum funding for medical and mental health care for all veterans.
According to his Senate voting record, McCain has voted repeatedly against expanding compensation for veteran service-connected disabilities since 2000. What does that mean?
That means veterans with physical and mental injuries due to combat or other service, injuries that can make it difficult for them to hold jobs or relate to their families. In short, injured veterans who have paid a price just short of death for serving our country.
It's puzzling, said Tellez, that McCain, of all people - a war hero, a former prisoner of war who suffered greatly - would fail to support these initiatives for his fellow veterans.
"He's against everything that benefits vets," he said, shaking his head. "I wrote to him about three years ago, and I said that, as a vet, he should be well aware of the needs of vets. He never wrote back."
To contact Tracy Dingmann email her at tdingmann@gmail.com
Green Job Profile: Gerald King
By Tracy Dingmann
Jul 5th, 2008 at 1:33 pm MDT
Gerald King can't wait for the day when green jobs become plentiful all over Albuquerque. The New York native says he's tired of working dirty, low-paying jobs that don't benefit the environment.
King says he feels like he's worked every one of those jobs, but confesses that his "bottom rung" was his stint at a fast-food restaurant, serving up "unhealthy, jacked-up food."
Indeed, fast food restaurants, which serve heavily-processed starches, sugars and meat from far-flung sources, pay the lowest and have the highest carbon footprint of any food sources around.
King, who is 32, said he learned about green jobs recently while attending classes at the Central New Mexico Community College, or CNM. Specifically, he read about the green jobs initiative spearheaded by New Mexico Youth Organized, a piece of proposed city legislation that would provide training for those seeking green jobs and incentives to businesses who offer them.
King volunteered with NMYO to get the word out about green jobs and says he hopes to be one of the many people who will benefit if the City Council passes the initiative. Four city councilors introduced the measure to the entire body in May, and it will be taken up again in August.
Right now King works part-time at various jobs, including sometimes working as an extra on movies shot in New Mexico.
But King says he would love to take a permanent, full-time position in recycling work or possibly bike repair - a clean job that benefits and enhances the environment, without harming it. He says he would welcome the opportunity to get training for his new job.
"I mean, you're not necessarily just learning a trade, you're learning a conscious trade," he says. "If a green job were available for me, I would be one of the first people in line."
King's also been pretty busy spreading the word about green jobs. Many of his friends had no idea what they are, so he had to spend a lot of time educating them.
"They're like, `Man, what's a green job?' so then I tell them, 'It's a job like recycling or landscaping.' In my circle of friends, my peoples know now."
To contact Tracy Dingmann email her at tdingmann@gmail.com.
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