As a sizable number of positions in the Department of Health remain unfilled, critics say they’re empty for a reason.

To the three public employee unions currently negotiating new state contracts, the state’s offers are nothing more than the governor’s latest sneer toward organized labor.

When Andrea Alano submitted her resignation to the Medical Cannabis Program in late November, she was the last of the program’s permanent staffers to resign.

  

  

Los Alamos National Laboratory is doubling down on a project that helps create a controversial, highly reactive new fuel used in nuclear power plants.

Santa Fe’s fiscal track record makes John Gordnier, a member of the Santa Fe Coalition for Good Government, skeptical of the most recent bond proposal.

It’s a familiar “small government” prescription for driving up revenues: Lower taxes, but increase the tax base. But this time, it’s not a Republican, or even a libertarian, beating that drum. New Mexico Sen. Peter Wirth, D-Santa Fe, is the somewhat unlikely author of a bill to lower the state corporate tax rate from 7.6 percent to 7 percent.

SFR's Weekly Matrix

In the summer of 2010, an excavator lifted a 1940s-era radiation protection suit from a pit in Los Alamos National Laboratory’s Technical Area 21. With it came two pickup trucks of the same vintage—one of which may have been involved in the famous Trinity nuclear test near White Sands—and a 30-foot-tall chemical mixing tank. The successful excavation of Material Disposal Area B, the lab’s oldest waste site, disproved a commonly held belief: that comprehensive cleanup of radioactive waste at the lab was cost-prohibitive, if not impossible. The project cleared a 200,000 square foot area and removed 750,000 cubic feet of toxic waste that had lain dormant since World War II. It cost $110 million—a modest sum for a facility with an approximately $2 billion budget.