Regulators Nix PNM/Avangrid Merger

COVID-19 by the numbers

New Mexico health officials yesterday reported 1,444 new COVID-19 cases, bringing the statewide total so far to 326,713; DOH has designated 275,618 of those cases as recovered. Bernalillo County had 447 new cases, followed by Doña Ana County with 211 and Sandoval County with 98. Santa Fe County had 75.

The state also announced 15 additional deaths, 12 recent; there have now been 5,445 fatalities. As of yesterday, 687 people are hospitalized with COVID-19, the highest number since January.

Currently, 86.6% of New Mexicans 18 years and older have had at least one dose of a COVID-19 vaccine and 74.8% are fully vaccinated. Among that age group, 26% have had a booster shot. In the 12-17-year-old age group, 65% of people have had at least one dose and 55.9% are fully inoculated. Among children ages 5-11, 19.6% have had at least one dose of the Pfizer vaccine and 5.4% are fully vaccinated. In Santa Fe County, 98.1% of people 18 and older have had at least one dose and 84.7% are fully vaccinated.

New Mexicans can register for a COVID-19 vaccine here, schedule a COVID-19 vaccine booster here and view a public calendar for vaccine availability here. Parents can add dependents to their vaccine profiles here.

You can read all of SFR’s COVID-19 coverage here.

NM remains red for COVID-19

New Mexico continues to experience high daily case rates of COVID-19, with the entire state showing “red” for high community transmission, state Epidemiologist Dr. Christine Ross said yesterday during the health department’s weekly pandemic update. The state’s cases continue to be driven by the Delta variant, Ross said; New Mexico has not yet detected the Omicron variant in the state—though both Ross and Acting Health Secretary Dr. David Scrase said they anticipate finding it here soon. “We remain on high alert for this variant,” Ross said. The upshot of the current surge is its ongoing impact on hospitals, which Scrase described as a “grave situation.” Emergency rooms, he said, are seeing the highest number of patients waiting on hospital beds they’ve had all year. Two hospitals reported recently they had 65 and 90 people, respectively, in emergency room beds waiting on beds in the hospitals. “You don’t have to…run a hospital to know if you have that many people taking up emergency room beds you’re not able to see people who come in with emergencies,” he noted, adding a request for people to avoid calling ambulances or visiting emergency rooms except in cases of actual emergencies such as traumas, heart attacks and strokes.

The health department continues to report most of the new cases, hospitalizations and deaths to be among those who are not vaccinated: over the last four weeks, 74.1% of cases were among the unvaccinated, as were 81.5% of those hospitalized and 85.7% of deaths. Ross also provided data on new cases known to be people who were reinfected: 4,128 identified through surveillance. Health officials, thusly, continue to emphasize vaccinations and booster shots for those who are two months past a single J&J dose and six months past their second Moderna or Pfizer vaccine. According to state data, the chances for a breakthrough case are four times as high for those who completed their series prior to June 1, versus those who did so afterward. As previewed by President Joe Biden last week, FEMA will be dispatching mobile units next week to New Mexico to help with vaccination efforts; Deputy Health Secretary Dr. Laura Parajón also said the state will host several booster clinics across the state in the coming weeks, including at the Santa Fe County Fairgrounds on Dec. 11.

PRC nixes PNM/Avangrid merger

In a unanimous vote yesterday, the Public Regulation Commission rejected a proposed merger between PNM and Avangrid, capping more than a year of hearings, allegations and litigation. In so doing, the PRC upheld Public Regulation Commissioner Hearing Examiner Ashley Schannauer’s recommendation last month that the PRC reject the merger. In yesterday’s meeting, PRC Chairman Stephen Fischmann and others said both Avangrid and parent company Iberdrola, S.A. have “a demonstrated record” of bad behavior: “The whole deal for me boils down to promises versus actual performance,” Fischmann said. “…I don’t think we should hoist those risks on our ratepayers.” Regulators’ concerns included massive customer dissatisfaction with Avangrid in Maine and other Northeast states, coupled with regulatory fines, as well as an ongoing criminal investigation of Iberdrola in Spain. Moreover Schannauer cited concerns in his report about the companies’ compliance with PRC rules in New Mexico during the regulatory process. “I am saddened by this Commission’s decision to reject the agreement reached by the parties,” PNM President and CEO Pat Vincent-Collawn said in a statement. “We will continue to evaluate any next steps that could allow us to bring the positive benefits to the people we serve.” Last month, Vincent-Collawn told the Albuquerque Journal an appeal to the state Supreme Court was an option should the PRC reject the merger.

City Council approves $ for staff

Santa Fe city councilors last night unanimously approved “hiring and retention incentives” to help address the city’s 27% vacancy rate—a rate that translates to roughly 320 empty positions. The plan provides 1,200 current employees a $2,000 retention incentive in two $1,000 installments and issues new employees $1,000 hiring bonuses. The $2.4 million for retention incentives comes from an October settlement the city received from the Taxation and Revenue Department, while the $300,000 for hiring incentives will be funded from Gross Receipts Tax revenues from the first quarter of FY22. The city will be hosting a rapid hiring event 9 am to 2 pm Dec. 11 at the Genoveva Chavez Community Center. “We’re dealing with a fundamentally different labor market than, I think, any of us has ever seen,” Mayor Alan Webber said at last night’s meeting, “both with poaching of talent across the board and the scarcity of job applicants for public and private sector job opportunities.”

Councilors also approved funding for a handful of existing, unfunded positions in the Finance, Public Works and Economic Development departments, as well as a new Inspection of Public Records Act manager. They postponed, however, funding a $110,000 chief of staff position. That role has been vacant since 2019 and will purportedly serve as a deputy city manager to the next city manager (City Manager Jarel LaPan Hill leaves next month; John Blair, former deputy superintendent of the state Regulation and Licensing Department is expected to replace her). Councilors expressed confusion and concern about the chief of staff position—its purpose, its title—and agreed to wait until a new city manager is appointed to revisit. The council also agreed to give the nascent Community Health and Safety Task Force another year, for which the group has also requested $205,000; the committee is expected to make quarterly reports to the council and ultimately deliver public safety recommendations for the city.

Listen up

In the most recent episode of the State Bar of New Mexico’s podcast SBNM is Hear—the final episode of Season 2—retired Judge John J. Romero talks with Second Judicial Children’s Court Judges Catherine Begaye (Navajo) and Judge Alma C. Roberson. Begaye is the state’s only Native American district court judge, a graduate of University of New Mexico Law School, where she was the editor in chief of the New Mexico Law Review. Roberson also attended UNM Law School and previously worked in the public defender’s office. Romero talks with both judges about their careers, their work in the children’s court and how they navigate such an emotionally charged arena. For more interviews with the state’s judiciary, be sure to check out the previous episodes from this season.

Digging in the dirt

One of ArtNet’s art picks for the week takes place in New York, but began in New Mexico. “Brie Ruais: Some Things I Know About Being in a Body” opens today and runs through Jan. 22 at Albertz Benda gallery. In Ruais’ second show at the gallery, “the body is transmuted in clay, and forms emerge through material confrontation and collaboration. In exploring themes of embodiment, Ruais’ work further reflects upon the relationship between an individual’s psychical interior world and the corporeal exterior world.” Specifically, each sculpture begins with “130 pounds of clay—the artists’ body weight—that is shaped by and embedded with Ruais’s movements: spreading out, pushing, tearing open, and scraping away.” That clay came from New Mexico: Last August, the artist visited “a small New Mexican clay quarry to harvest wild clay for the first time. Collecting only with her hands, Ruais peeled the skin of drying clay from the muddy basin, and crumbled clay from the cliff face. After filling up a truck bed with hundreds of pounds of clay, she set up her drone camera, descended into the pond of clay at the base of the mine, and developed a set of performative gestures relating to the place.” Thusly, the exhibition also includes Digging In, Digging Out, 2021, “an aerial video of the artist’s performance in the clay quarry, where she engages, embeds, and emerges from the wet clay.” A previous article indicates the clay came from a quarry near Galisteo.

Enchanted in OK

If you happen to be in Oklahoma before Jan. 2, word on the street is you might want to stop by the National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum and take a gander at “New Beginnings: An American Story of Romantics and Modernists in the West.” The exhibition’s backstory, as described by the Oklahoman: “An anonymous art lover became so enraptured by the Land of Enchantment that he amassed a dazzling collection of paintings, sculptures, textiles, furniture and more.” Museum Chair of Cowboy Culture Michael Grauer describes the show to the paper as “one of the finest collections of New Mexico art that I’ve seen in 35 years” and says attendees have told him the show brought tears to their eyes. “That’s how good the quality is,” Graucer says. The exhibition includes more than 100 works from the private Tia Collection in Santa Fe, an art collection reportedly named for the daughter of the anonymous collector who began collecting the pieces in 2007 when he first experienced New Mexico. “New Mexico is a special place,” Grauer notes. “It’s called the Land of Enchantment for a reason, and people go there and fall in love with it.” Works date from the 1880s through the 1980s, and include New Mexican artists Ernest L. Blumenschein, Walter Ufer, Agnes C. Sims, E. Martin Hennings and Leon Gaspard, among others.

Ready, set, weather?

Today: Mostly sunny with a high near 53 degrees and southwest wind 10 to 15 mph. But tonight, the National Weather Service says, get ready for a 60% chance of precipitation after 2 am, segueing into rain and snow showers tomorrow morning (with some serious wind). The New Mexico Department of Homeland Security and Emergency Management yesterday issued a news advisory urging New Mexicans to be aware of potentially severe weather extending into next week. “This is the first winter storm of the season, and we want all New Mexicans to be ready,” DHSEM Secretary Bianca Ortiz-Wertheim said in a statement. “Notably, NWS forecasts strong winds above 55 mph throughout the week, which could lead to power outages.” Thanks for reading! The Word realizes anthropomorphism can be problematic, but she nonetheless really enjoyed perusing the winners of the 2021 Comedy Wildlife Photography competition.

Editor’s note: An earlier version of the story gave incorrect information about funding requested by the Community Health and Safety Task Force. That’s been corrected.