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Local lobbyist wanted, but didn’t get, support for Spaceport Welcome Center

by Kathleen Sloan | April 25, 2020
4 min read
​A lobbyist won’t have a sheaf of resolutions proclaiming that a united front of local governments want a Spaceport America Welcome Center—the location unnamed—somewhere in Truth or Consequences. 

John Mulcahy, once mayor of Truth or Consequences and head of the Sierra County Economic Development Organization, recently returned to the area. He resigned his position as president of the Roswell-Chaves County Economic Development Corporation and has been hired by un-named principals to lobby for state funding to build a Spaceport America Welcome Center in Truth or Consequences. 

Mulcahy said he approached “chief executives” of the four local governmental entities, Village of Williamsburg, City of Elephant Butte, City of Truth or Consequences and Sierra County. He spoke in a phone interview with the Sierra County Sun, Dec. 16. 

He asked the governments amend their “Infrastructure Capital Improvements Plan” to include a Spaceport America Welcome Center. Since ICIPs are passed by resolution they must be amended by resolution. 

The ICIPs from around the state form the playbook for state funding requests. They are updated each year and go out five years. Current ICIPs go from 2021 to 2025.  

“One of the first things a legislator will ask is if it’s on the ICIP,” Mulcahy said. 

Although the ICIP approval process includes a public hearing, Mulcahy said it can be amended at any time by elected officials, by-passing a second public hearing, “because they represent the people.” 

Truth or Consequences City Manager Morris Madrid put a resolution to amend the ICIP on the Dec. 11 agenda without naming Mulcahy as the requester, who was in the audience, but did not give a presentation or public comment. 

Madrid gave no reason why he was promoting a Spaceport Visitors Center, only that “The state likes to see other government entities collaborate.”

City Commissioner George Szigeti asked if putting it on the City’s ICIP “is saying the city will put money into this?” 

“No,” Madrid said, the project would only be funded by state dollars.  

“I think it does,” Szigeti said. “By putting it on the ICIP there is the perception those are the projects the city intends to pursue and the public will spend money on the facility without the state.” 

Madrid said the City put Sierra Vista Hospital’s expansion on the ICIP, in a united front with other local governments and “we didn’t directly pay for it, it was state funded.” 

Mayor Pro-Tem Kathy Clark disagreed. “The City has put money into the hospital—tax money.” 

“I’ve been involved with State tourism for many years,” Clark said. “The State is closing visitors’ centers, not opening new ones.” Raton and Anthony visitor centers are shuttered among others, she said, despite their costly architecture. 

“We were promised a visitors’ center in 2006 and it didn’t happen,” Clark said. “We could end up taking it over,” at big expense to locals. 

Mayor Sandra Whitehead said, “Let’s all collaborate here. . .It’s not going to cost us anything.” 

City Commissioner Rolf Hechler recused himself from expressing a view or voting. Although he did not state why, it’s because Hechler works for Fiore Industries, subcontracted by Spaceport America. He oversees its 16 firefighters and 13 security guards. 

When it came time to vote, Clark and Szigeti voted nay and Whitehead and City Commissioner Paul Baca voted yea, the resolution failing. 

In a phone interview with the Sun, Dec. 18, Village of Williamsburg Clerk and Treasurer Amanda Cardona said none of the Village Trustees made a motion to approve or disapprove the resolution during a recent meeting, the matter dying on the floor. After following the ICIP process, including holding a public hearing, the Trustees were not keen to amend it, Cardona said. 

Elephant Butte Mayor Edna Trager, also in a phone interview Dec. 18, said Mulcahy emailed her, asking for a resolution amending their ICIP. It would require a special meeting, Trager said, but she relayed the request to the City Council. Before anything was settled,  Mulcahy told her “not to bother” after losing Truth or Consequences’ support. 

By the time Sierra County’s meeting rolled around, Dec. 17, Mulcahy had changed his request to bypass the ICIP amendment. The resolution was simply in support of the state funding a Spaceport America Welcome Center somewhere in the City of Truth or Consequences. 

Mulcahy was ready to give a presentation, but County Commissioner Frances Luna said she was “comfortable” supporting the measure without hearing a word. Her motion passed unanimously with no discussion. 

Since that method worked, the Sun asked Mulcahy if he was going to re-approach the other government entities for resolutions of support. 

“No,” Mulcahy said. “The legislative session will start soon [Jan. 21, 2020] and will end in four weeks [Feb.20, 2020]. There isn’t time.” 

There was no urgency for a welcome center until Virgin Galactic recently became more active, Mulcahy said. Virgin didn’t have the money until they held an Initial Public Offering in October, he said. “Now they are hiring 100 more people and White Knight II is out there.” ​

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Kathleen Sloan is the Sun’s founder and chief reporter. She can be reached at kathleen.sloan@gmail.com or 575-297-4146.
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Understanding New Mexico's proposed new social studies standards for K-12 students

“The primary purpose of social studies is to help young people develop the ability to make informed and reasoned decisions for the public good as citizens of a culturally diverse, democratic society in an interdependent world.”
—National Council for the Social Studies 

Reader Michael L. Hayes of Las Cruces commented: What impresses me is that both the proposed standards and some of the criticisms of them are equally grotesque. I make this bold statement on the basis of my experience as a peripatetic high school and college English teacher for 45 years in many states with many students differing in race, religion, gender and socioeconomic background, and as a civic activist (PTA) in public education (My career, however, was as an independent consultant mainly in defense, energy and the environment.)

The proposed social studies standards are conceptually and instructionally flawed. For starters, a “performance standard” is not a standard at all; it is a task. Asking someone to explain something is not unlike asking someone to water the lawn. Nothing measures the performance, but without a measure, there is no standard. The teacher’s subjective judgment will be all that matters, and almost anything will count as satisfying a “performance standard,” even just trying. Students will be left to wonder “what is on the teacher’s mind?” or “have I sucked up enough.”

Four other quick criticisms of the performance standards. One, they are nearly unintelligible because they are written in jargon. PED’s use of jargon in a document intended for the public is worrisome. Bureaucrats often use jargon to confuse or conceal something uninformed, wrong or unworthy. As a result, most parents, some school board members and more than a few teachers do not understand them.

Two, the performance standards are so vague that they fail to define the education which teachers are supposed to teach, students are supposed to learn, and parents are supposed to understand. PED does not define words like “explain” or “describe” so that teachers can apply “standards” consistently and fairly. The standards do not indicate what teachers are supposed to know in order to teach or specify what students are supposed to learn. Supervisors cannot know whether teachers are teaching social studies well or poorly. The standards are so vague that the public, especially parents or guardians, cannot know the content of public education.

Three, many performance standards are simply unrealistic, especially at grade level. Under “Ethnic, Cultural and Identity Performance Standards”; then under “Diversity and Identity”; then under “Kindergarten,” one such standard is: “Identify how their family does things both the same as and different from how other people do things.” Do six-year-olds know how other people do things? Do they know whether these things are relevant to diversity and identity? Or another standard: “Describe their family history, culture, and past to current contributions of people in their main identity groups.” (A proficient writer would have hyphenated the compound adjective to avoid confusing the reader.) Do six-year-olds know so much about these things in relation to their “identity group”? Since teachers obviously do not teach them about these other people and have not taught them about these groups, why are these and similar items in the curriculum; or do teachers assign them to go home and collect this information?

Point four follows from “three”; some information relevant to some performance measures requires a disclosure of personal or family matters. The younger the students, the easier it is for teachers to invade their privacy and not only their privacy, but also the privacy of their parents or guardians, or neighbors, who may never be aware of these disclosures or not become aware of them until afterward. PED has no right to design a curriculum which requires teachers to ask students for information about themselves, parents or guardians, or neighbors, or puts teachers on the spot if the disclosures reveal criminal conduct. (Bill says Jeff’s father plays games in bed with his daughter. Lila says Angelo’s mother gives herself shots in the arm.) Since teacher-student communications have no legal protection to ensure privacy, those disclosures may become public accidentally or deliberately. The effect of these proposal standards is to turn New Mexico schools and teachers into investigative agents of the state and students into little informants or spies.

This PED proposal for social studies standards is a travesty of education despite its appeals to purportedly enlightened principles. It constitutes a clear and present danger to individual liberty and civil liberties. It should be repudiated; its development, investigated; its PED perpetrators, dismissed. No state curriculum should encourage or require the disclosure of private personal information.

I am equally outraged by the comments of some of T or C’s school board members: Christine LaFont and Julianne Stroup, two white Christian women, who belong to one of the larger minorities in America and assume white and Christian privileges. In different terms but for essentially the same reason, both oppose an education which includes lessons about historical events and trends, and social movements and developments, of other minorities. They object to the proposal for the new social studies standards because of its emphasis on individual and group identities not white or Christian. I am not going to reply with specific objections; they are too numerous and too pointed.

Ms. LaFont urges: “It’s better to address what’s similar with all Americans. It’s not good to differentiate.” Ms. Stroup adds: “Our country is not a racist country. We have to teach to respect each other. We have civil rights laws that protect everyone from discrimination. We need to teach civics, love and respect. We need to teach how to be color blind.”

Their desires for unity and homogeneity, and for mutual respect, are a contradiction and an impossibility. Aside from a shared citizenship, which implies acceptance of the Constitution, the rule of law and equality under the law, little else defines Americans. We are additionally defined by our race, religion, national origin, etc. So mutual respect requires individuals to respect others different from themselves. Disrespect desires blacks, Jews or Palestinians to assimilate or to suppress or conceal racial, religious or national origin aspects of their identity. The only people who want erasure of nonwhite, non-Christian, non-American origin aspects of identity are bigots. Ms. LaFont and Ms. Stroud want standards which, by stressing similarities and eliding differences, desire the erasure of such aspects. What they want will result in a social studies curriculum that enables white, Christian, native-born children to grow up to be bigots and all others to be their victims. This would be the academic equivalent of ethnic cleansing.

H.E.L.P.

This postmortem of a case involving a 75-year-old women who went missing from her home in Hillsboro last September sheds light on the bounds of law enforcement’s capacity to respond, especially in large rural jurisdictions such as Sierra County, and underscores the critical role the public, as well as concerned family and friends, can play in assisting a missing person’s search.

Reader Jane Debrott of Hillsboro commented: Thank you for your article on the tragic loss of Betsey. I am a resident of Hillsboro, a friend of Rick and Betsey, and a member of H.E.L.P. The thing that most distresses me now, is the emphasis on Rick’s mis-naming of the color of their car. I fear that this fact will cause Rick to feel that if he had only gotten the facts right, Betsey may have been rescued before it was too late. The incident was a series of unavoidable events, out of everyone’s control, and we will never know what place the correct color of her car may have had in the outcome. It breaks my heart to think that Rick has had one more thing added to his “what ifs” concerning this incident.

Diana Tittle responded: Dear Jane, the Sun undertook this investigation at the request of a Hillsboro resident concerned about the town’s inability to mount a prompt, coordinated response to the disappearance of a neighbor. From the beginning, I shared your concern about how our findings might affect Betsy’s family and friends. After I completed my research and began writing, I weighed each detail I eventually chose to include against my desire to cause no pain and the public’s right to know about the strengths and limitations of law enforcement’s response and the public’s need to know about how to be of meaningful assistance.

There was information I withheld about the state police investigation and the recovery. But I decided to include the issue of the car’s color because the individuals who spotted Betsy’s car emphasized how its color had been key to their identification of it as the vehicle described in Betsy’s Silver Alert. Because the misinformation was corrected within a couple of hours, I also included in this story the following editorial comment meant to put the error in perspective: “The fact that law enforcement throughout the state was on the lookout in the crucial early hours after Betsy’s disappearance for an elderly woman driving a “light blue” instead of a “silver” Accord would, in retrospect, likely not have changed the outcome of the search” [emphasis added].

I would also point to the story’s overarching conclusion about the inadvisability of assigning blame for what happened: “In this case, a perfect storm of unfortunate circumstances, many of them beyond human control, hindered the search that it would fall to Hamilton’s department to lead.”

It is my hope that any pain caused by my reporting will eventually be outweighed by its contribution to a better community understanding of what it will take in the future to mount a successful missing person’s search in rural Sierra County.

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