Goodbye and good riddance
For many around New Mexico, the past year was one to forget
AMassachusetts woman couldn’t believe her good fortune in August when she realized she was holding the winning ticket to the largest single lottery jackpot in U.S. history. Across the pond two months later, Prince Harry looked like he was floating on air as he posed for pictures with his brideto-be, a beautiful actress who was grinning from ear to ear as she showed off her cushion-cut diamond engagement ring.
In New Mexico, plenty of people had reason to celebrate in 2017, whether it was a clean bill of health, a much-deserved raise at work or the birth of their first grandchild.
But for others — from politicians and average Joes to government agencies and private businesses — 2017 turned out to be a terrible year that was about as bleak as the slopes at Ski Santa Fe.
Film mogul Harvey Weinstein and other powerful men accused of sexual misconduct had a particularly bad year, sparking a national movement that led to their downfall. Among them was New Mexico state Sen. Michael Padilla. The Albuquerque Democrat was considered by some as a front-runner for the Democratic nomination for lieutenant governor. But his campaign came crumbling down amid renewed attention to years-old harassment lawsuits accusing him of creating a sexually hostile work environment during a
stint with the city of Albuquerque.
Soon after the controversy erupted, Senate Democrats voted to remove Padilla from his leadership position as majority whip.
Padilla, who continues to face calls to step down from the Legislature, did not return a message seeking comment. But after he was stripped of his position as Senate majority whip, he issued a statement saying he looked forward to the future.
“Tomorrow is another day, and I will work just as hard as I always do,” Padilla wrote.
The year also ended on a sour note for former state Sen. Phil Griego after he was convicted of bribery and fraud, among other charges, stemming from the shady sale of state-owned property in which he served as a broker.
For Griego, 2018 could be just as tough, if not tougher.
Not only does the 69-year-old Democrat from San Jose face up to 17½ years in prison, but the New Mexico Attorney General’s Office wants him to pay an “aggravated fine.”
New Mexico Gov. Susana Martinez didn’t have a great year, either.
The term-limited Republican’s approval rating fell to 37 percent, making her the sixth least-popular governor in the country, according to a recent poll. While the state’s economy is improving, Martinez’s decision to veto all funding for higher education backfired big time, painting her as a politician who was willing to sacrifice the higher education system to make a political point and throwing the state’s colleges and universities into chaos.
The state’s top educator — Public Education Secretary-designate Christopher Ruszkowski — ended the year under an embarrassing cloud after he praised Manifest Destiny as one of the fundamental principles that built the country. Tribal leaders decried his comments as “disgraceful, lacking any sensitivity, understanding and appreciation of the atrocious impacts of Manifest Destiny upon generations of our people,” prompting an apology from Ruszkowski.
His autumn wasn’t much better. In October, Ruszkowski was forced to retreat after his department proposed new science teaching standards for public schools that omitted references to such concepts as evolution, global warming and Earth’s age.
“This attempt to take us to a biblical-political-dumb-them-down medieval set of science standards crafted by New Mexican mouthpieces (Gov. Susana Martinez and her minion, Ruszkowski) for big oil, big religion and big robber baron politicians seeking to control minds and our future met its match,” humorist and author Morgana Morgaine wrote in an opinion piece published in The New Mexican after Ruszkowski dropped the controversial proposal.
The year also proved troublesome for Troy Baker, the former president of the Santa Fe police union.
Baker, a 22-year veteran officer, had posted memes on Facebook that included politically charged comments about Muslims, African-Americans, transgender people, immigrants and protesters. The officer’s career survived the initial news reports. But the memes came back to haunt Baker in August after a man plowed his car into a crowd of counterprotesters during a white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Va., killing a woman. One of the memes Baker had posted was a cartoon depicting a vehicle driving through stick-figure protesters under the heading: “All lives splatter.”
Another politician who had a difficult year was Santa Fe Mayor Javier Gonzales, whose proposal to tax sodas and other sugary drinks to fund preschool programs fell flat with city voters.
During a special election in May, voters turned out in droves to shoot down the proposed tax, costing the popular mayor a Big Gulp of political capital and any chance to run for governor next year.
Gonzales hopes 2018 will be better. Though he said he wouldn’t seek a second term as mayor because he wanted to devote more time to his two daughters, Gonzales decided to make a bid for lieutenant governor after Padilla dropped out of the race.
“As I’ve told my daughters, life is about getting back up after you’ve been knocked down,” Gonzales said in a statement. “We had a tough fight over revenue for early childhood education and what got lost was that in my mind the fight was never about soda, but always about children.”
Gonzales said the message that voters didn’t support a soda tax “came through loud and clear.”
“But you’ll never convince me they’re not willing to stand up for our kids,” he wrote. “I know the generous and compassionate spirit of this state, and we’ll continue to look for new ways to do right by our kids.”
Regardless of what happened with the soda tax, New Mexico children in general had a dismal year as the state continued to be at or near the bottom of national rankings for poverty, education, economic growth and childhood well-being.
“Our kids in New Mexico are faring badly — very, very badly,” said Allen Sánchez, head of the Albuquerquebased Catholic Health Initiatives St. Joseph’s Children.
In September, the U.S. Census Bureau reported that 36 percent of New Mexico children 5 and under live in poverty.
“That’s 5 [percentage points] worse than Mississippi,” Sánchez said. “So many times we would play leapfrog with Mississippi to see who would have the worst numbers. On overall children, we’re still 49th for all the well-being, which is terrible, and Mississippi is 50th. But as far as children under 5, we’re the worst in the nation.”
A lot of adults didn’t have it easy, either, especially those looking for an affordable place to live in Santa Fe.
“It is impossible to find a place to live in Santa Fe, and it is the biggest issue of inequality we face in our city,” said Vince Kadlubek, chairman of the Santa Fe Planning Commission.
Kadlubek, CEO of the hugely popular arts collective Meow Wolf, said the city has made big strides in affordable housing in the past few years, but that it still has a long way to go. He contends the city will be “crippled by this issue” if Santa Feans don’t take it seriously.
“We are over 3,000 rental units short of our current need, and those who are most affected by it are lower-income families,” he said. “Available places are few and far between, overpriced and in bad condition. It’s a crisis.”
New Mexico drivers have faced a crisis of their own this year trying to obtain a license under stricter requirements imposed by the state.
Jessica Lucero, 38, of Las Cruces said her experience with the state Motor Vehicle Division affected her “terribly” in 2017, turning her year into a “nightmare.”
“I don’t have a job because my driver’s license is not valid,” said Lucero, who previously worked as a server, while waiting Thursday to talk to a supervisor at the Motor Vehicle Division office in Santa Fe. She was in the area visiting her family and decided to try and resolve her license issues.
“I’m going to get evicted,” she said. “I can’t pay none of my bills. Nobody will hire me because I don’t have a valid driver’s license or a valid server’s license.”
Lucero said she submitted all the required paperwork to obtain a driver’s license after going “back and forth for three days at the DMV in Las Cruces.” She was supposed to receive her driver’s license Oct. 22, but it was returned in the mail to the Motor Vehicle Division, which destroyed the license, she said, and told her she would have to pay for a new one.
“I can’t stand them,” she said of the agency.
Lucero can at least take comfort knowing she lives in Las Cruces, where crime is declining, according to data released by the FBI.
In Albuquerque, the crime rate is so high some residents are afraid to go outside. The state’s most populous city has endured one gruesome incident after another this year. Violent crime shot up by 15.5 percent, and property crime increased by 13.3 percent between 2015 and 2016, data show, and the trend appears to have continued in 2017.
“The year is ending on a bloody note in [Albuquerque] with the number of murders soaring to 75, a modern day record,” New Mexico politics blogger Joe Monahan wrote on his website. “An especially gruesome discovery shook the city two days before Christmas — a decapitated body so brutalized at first its gender could not be determined.”
Albuquerque’s rising crime rates factored heavily into this year’s mayor’s race.
“Crime was a problem in Albuquerque in 2017, which is one of the reasons residents supported the change outlined by incoming Mayor Tim Keller,” said Gilbert Gallegos, the Albuquerque Police Department’s communications and community outreach director, in an email.
Women in Santa Fe’s South Capitol neighborhood have lived on edge for months as a man dubbed the “South Capitol Creep” exposed himself or broke into their homes and touched them this summer. The suspect remains on the loose.
It wasn’t just people who had a rough year. Big institutions took a hit, as well.
Los Alamos National Laboratory has been flanked by accidents, poor-performance reports, federal investigations and heightened scrutiny.
At the start of the year, Los Alamos was the only U.S. Department of Energy site to fail a safety program meant to prevent runaway nuclear reactions. In August, workers violated the program again by placing excess plutonium metal in the same room.
Two lab workers were sent to the hospital in 2017, one who suffered burns from a fire ignited by materials in an unidentified waste drum and another who unwittingly cut a live electrical line.
The lab sent mislabeled containers to Colorado and shipped a package of plutonium by air, rather than by cargo truck, in violation of federal regulations.
In August and September, nearly a dozen lab workers were exposed to radiation, and the lab had a “near-miss fatality” when a worker entered a room with low oxygen levels.
An independent safety board said the lab is poorly prepared for an emergency and questioned its ability to carry out a key national security mission: ramping up production of plutonium pits, the softball-size fission triggers in nuclear weapons. And another federal agency said in a recent report that it would be less costly to do the work elsewhere.
Closer to home, the College Plaza Shopping Center needed repairs three separate times this year after motorists drove into the building in three unrelated incidents.
The closure of the Santa Fe University of Art and Design was announced in April, and a month later, a late-night fire that could be seen from miles away broke out on the edge of the campus, destroying a World War II-era building that was used in recent years as a set for the cable television drama Manhattan.
Some businesses, such as the former Bad Ass Sandwich Co. — which made national headlines when Department of Health employees reported symptoms of food poisoning after the downtown restaurant catered its holiday party — closed their doors.
While a lot of people were ready to say goodbye and good riddance to 2017, many remained hopeful about the new year.
“The start of winter this season has been a slow start, but we’re making the most of it,” said Ben Abruzzo, manager of Ski Santa Fe.
Abruzzo said 80 percent of Santa Fe’s ski season occurs January through April, giving him hope that the slopes will see more snow in 2018.
“When you talk about this season as opposed to this year, we have had a slower start to this season, and the amount of guests is certainly down,” he said. “But because our season runs all the way through winter, I’m still very optimistic.”
With 2017 about to end, he can afford to be.