Movies, parades and a beloved politician
Afew years ago, a spokesman for Republican Gov. Susana Martinez famously said that Democrat Tim Keller, then state auditor, looked like the “grand marshal of a publicity parade.”
She was angry that the State Auditor’s Office had been investigating her tax secretary, Demesia Padilla, for allegedly trying to influence an audit of one of her former accounting clients. (Padilla’s preliminary hearing for corruption charges, which stemmed from Keller’s investigation, begins later this month.)
But Martinez recently became a grand marshal of a parade herself. An Oct. 1 news release from her office said the governor would be the grand marshal of the Main Street Parade at the Eastern New Mexico State Fair in Roswell that day. I love a parade. And just last week, both grand marshals, Martinez and Keller, who now is mayor of Albuquerque, essentially served as cogrand marshals at a pretty important publicity parade — the announcement of Netflix’s plans to purchase Albuquerque Studios to build its first production studio complex. The streaming entertainment giant aims to bring $1 billion in production to our enchanted land over the next decade and create up to 1,000 production jobs a year.
Both the governor and the mayor deserve a lot of the credit for this economic development coup. And both deserve credit for keeping political sniping out of it, especially in the final weeks before an election that seems to get more contentious every day.
There was another story last week — this one much sadder — that reminded New Mexicans of the importance of being able to work with others regardless of ideology and party affiliation. That was the death of former state Rep. Larry Larrañaga of Albuquerque. He was a Republican who served in the state House of Representatives for a quarter-century. He was roundly accepted by members of both parties as a budget expert.
In fact, I first learned of Larrañaga’s death from a Facebook post by one of the sons of the late Rep. Luciano “Lucky” Varela, a liberal Democrat from Santa Fe, who considered Larrañaga a close friend.
For a good part of the day, my email inbox was filled with tributes to Larrañaga from politicos of every stripe.
“New Mexico has lost a true statesman,” said House Speaker Brian Egolf, D-Santa Fe. Egolf praised Larrañaga’s bill to establish a “Rainy Day Fund” to offset lean revenue years.
House Republican Leader Nate Gentry called Larrañaga “the dean of the House Appropriations and Finance Committee,” saying, “His quiet determination and steadfast approach served as an example for all of his colleagues in the Legislature.”
Among the tributes were those from both gubernatorial candidates, Michelle Lujan Grisham and Steve Pearce, U.S. Sen. Tom Udall, Republican and Democratic leaders of the Legislative Finance Committee and U.S. Rep. Ben Ray Luján, who said Larrañaga “was always willing to put partisan differences aside in order to get things done for the people he represented.” What was unsaid by Luján was that his dad, the late House Speaker Ben Luján, a lifelong Democrat, worked for years with Larrañaga.
I’ll join this lovefest myself. As a reporter, I very much appreciated Larrañaga. I first interviewed him back in the early 1980s when he was secretary of the state Highway Department (now Department of Transportation) during the administration of Gov. Toney Anaya, a Democrat. Larrañaga was not a publicity seeker, but he always seemed happy to share his thoughts with any reporter who approached him. I always appreciated his insights as well as his cheerfulness.
Plus, his widow, Charletta Larrañaga, is one of the sweetest people I ever met at the Roundhouse. We’d frequently run into each other during a session, many times during late-night House floor sessions.
New Mexico is lucky that even though campaigns and legislative sessions sometimes devolve into partisan spitball fights, the toxicity we see at the national level has not completely gripped our politics here.
Larry Larrañaga rightly will be remembered as a statesman. The partisan bomb-throwers among us will not.