Just after midnight on June 28, 2009, 28-year-old Scott Owens allegedly drove his 1992 Jeep Cherokee into the wrong lane, causing a collision with Avree Koffman's 1992 Subaru on Old Las Vegas Highway. The accident killed the four passengers in her car: Kate Klein, Julian Martinez and Alyssa Trouw, all 16, and Avree’s close friend Rose Simmons, 15.

Despite efforts to sweep money out of every cobwebby corner of government with a combination of freezes, furloughs, budget cuts and tax talk, New Mexico is still facing a $600 million budget shortfall. Recurring revenues will be lower than expected—a dangerous situation, especially when many of the budget fixes involve throwing one-time money, like federal stimulus grants set to evaporate next year, at ongoing costs.

Think you can do better than MBA-toting geniuses who ruined the economy? The US bankruptcy court in Maryland has an opportunity for you. The “much coveted” mortgage servicing business of the company formerly known as Thornburg Mortgage must be sold immediately, according to bankruptcy court documents filed this month.

Though its numbers are dwarfed by the estimated 36,000 Americans who die annually of regular, seasonal flu—a disease that garners a lot less media attention—H1N1 still worries retired Los Alamos National Laboratory scientist and special SFR swine flu correspondent Douglas Roberts.

Housing sales may have been slow in Santa Fe this past year, but real estate is booming as a top, if tired, topic of conversation and, as it happens, an eyesore. Although Santa Fe wasn’t hit as hard by the foreclosure tsunami as the rest of the country, foreclosures were steady throughout 2009. And signs for the 2,625 houses for sale (as of Dec. 9) fog the landscape like neighborhood cataracts

Pot made headlines left and right in 2009. California struggled with an oversaturated and under-regulated commercial pot industry. Attorney General Eric Holder discouraged federal prosecutors from interfering with states’ medical marijuana laws. And in New Mexico, officials toyed with the nuts and bolts of the state’s fledgling program.r

In New Mexico, despite brief national hysteria about “death panels” and widespread local confusion about what health care reform actually means, reform has started to sound like the only way out of a very broken health care system. One in four New Mexicans are currently uninsured, the second highest percentage in the country.

The “fathers’ rights” narrative goes something like this: Family courts, cowed by decades of feminist activism, are biased against anyone with a Y chromosome. A few brave men, undaunted by the forces of feminist oppression, are fighting for their rights as fathers—and for the rights of all male-kind. 

 As the economy began to tumble last year, here at the Reporter we decided we wanted each week to look at all the ways money changes everything. These were the stories we hoped we’d hear when we made this year’s Annual Writing Contest nonfiction topic: Money Changes Everything. And hear them we did. 

This week, SFR announces all the winners and publishes the first-, second- and third-place entries from the fiction and poetry categories. Stay tuned next week for the winning nonfiction writers, who tackled the concept of “money changes everything” from a variety of perspectives.