Voters in House District 46, which stretches from Santa Fe up through the northern pueblos to Española and includes parts of White Rock and Chimayó, have grown accustomed to power. Outgoing New Mexico House Speaker Ben Luján, who represented the district for more than 35 years, possessed a legendary ability to control the Legislature and defend northern New Mexico. But by next session, all of this will change.

On May 15, the New Mexico Public Regulation Commission voted to grant a protest, lodged by a branch of the federal Department of Energy, that questions whether New Mexico Gas Company is adequately prepared for another weather event like last winter’s deep freeze—and whether it could have prevented the major service interruptions that devastated much of the state last year.

On July 12, 2011, Lynn Degenhart resigned from his post as a member of the New Mexico Passenger Transportation Association board with a message titled “Ethical Concern.”

When Gov. Susana Martinez gave her first State of the State address on Jan. 1, 2011, she emphasized two priorities: improving education and keeping businesses in New Mexico. But SFR has found that, in the 15 months since Martinez took office, the New Mexico Public Education Department has paid out more than three times as much in professional service contracts to out-of-state education contractors than to those located in New Mexico. What’s more, it’s unclear whether some of them have produced tangible results.

At the height of the Occupy Wall Street evictions, it seemed as though some diminutive version of “shock and awe” had stumbled from Baghdad, Iraq, to Oakland, Calif. American police forces had been “militarized,” many commentators worried, as though the firepower and callous tactics on display were anomalies, surprises bursting upon us from nowhere.

Five years ago, state agencies were in an uproar over New Mexico’s new online accounting system, known as SHARE. They blamed it for financial misstatements, unaccounted-for federal funds and other mistakes. In one high-profile case, the Federal Highway Administration threatened to cut off crucial funding when the New Mexico Department of Transportation failed to properly reconcile its federal funds with SHARE data.

At 18, Nick Montoya, a member of the Taos Pueblo, exuded health, he says. But that changed after a year of duty in Vietnam, where he was exposed to Agent Orange. Since 1969, Montoya has dealt with post-traumatic stress, alcoholism, depression, diabetes, kidney disease, a heart attack and, last September, open-heart surgery.

Instead of a City Council that produces radical, outside-the-box ideas—the types of ideas that are beginning to turn a crumbling Detroit into an urban-planning mecca, for instance—Santa Fe’s leaders turn repeatedly to the same government and tourism industries. Instead of stopping to think carefully about where we want our city to go, elected officials often seem complacent, quietly biding their time until “the economy gets better.” What if it doesn’t? What if Santa Fe won’t improve unless we take action?

On Jan. 17, the opening day of New Mexico’s 2012 legislative session, longtime state House of Representatives Speaker Ben Luján, D-Santa Fe, stood before a hushed chamber. Luján, a diminutive man in his 70s who for years had controlled much of what happened at the capitol, had just announced that he had lung cancer and planned to retire from politics. The 2012 session would be his last. It was the end of an era.