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.

On Nov. 3, the city’s planning commission will consider a proposal to eliminate (technically, “reduce by 100 percent”) residential development impact fees for two years. The plan’s sponsors, City Councilors Rebecca Wurzburger and Matt Ortiz, tout it as a way to bolster Santa Fe’s faltering construction industry.

Mayor David Coss spent most of his Oct. 19 State of the City address pushing a $30 million bond proposal slated to go before voters in March’s city elections. Coss bills it as the “Opportunity and Quality of Life Bond,” which encompasses 10 city projects including broadband infrastructure, solar energy investment and public park improvements.

If the JSC’s budget remains the same next fiscal year, commission employees will be forced to take two weeks of unpaid leave.

Occupy Wall Street has made corporate greed into a rallying cry with a simple solution: If government won’t act to get money out of politics, we will—by redirecting our own (albeit scarce) dollars. In reviewing executive compensation at the biggest public companies, SFR found that the best way to vote with our dollars is by doing what mothers have always said: Turn off the TV!

Not long after Pamela Engstrom resigned as principal of Albuquerque’s El Camino Real Charter School, her husband, Anders, requested public documents on the education credentials of a few prominent New Mexico Public Education Department officials.

Gov. Susana Martinez doesn’t have much to show from a special redistricting session that she packed with an ambitious agenda. But one thing she did get was a capital outlay bill, albeit at less than half the size she originally wanted.