Gov, State Officials Tout Progress on Gun Violence

Gov, officials report tout progress on gun violence

Gunshots in Bernalillo County have decreased since Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham signed an executive order regarding gun violence, the governor and state officials said yesterday. According to the governor’s senior advisor, Ben Baker, Sept. 25 through Sept. 28, 128 gunshots were detected, a close to 23% decrease compared with Sept. 18 through Sept. 21. Baker also reported 502 arrests; 20 seized firearms; 1,370 traffic citations and an increase at the Metropolitan Detention Center of bookings to an average of 53 per day. “Every single New Mexican deserves to be safe. While this public health order is temporary, the results we’ve seen are proof positive that bold actions work,” the governor said in a statement. “In the last month, law enforcement officials arrested more than 500 people, preventing further violence in the state. As this work progresses, I call on my partners in the Legislature to be ready—on day one of the session—to work on comprehensive public safety and gun violence legislation so this success continues.” State Health Secretary Patrick Allen, who published an op-ed with SFR yesterday on the topic, characterized gun violence as “a contagious disease spreading uncontrollably across our state,” and said it has become “one of the leading causes of death among our young people. This public health crisis calls for us to tap into the spirit of creativity that New Mexico is known for, to unite as a community, and to do everything in our power to halt the spread of this disease and protect the lives of our young people.” The governor during a news conference yesterday also unveiled a new dashboard from the state Department of Public Safety that tracks violent crime in Bernalillo County that a news release from the governor’s office says will show the progress of the controversial emergency public health order initiatives, which the governor renewed last week.

Election officials kick off voting and voting campaign

Early voting in the Nov. 7 local election began yesterday at county clerk’s offices, accompanied by a new campaign from election officials, coordinated by New Mexico First, emphasizing election integrity. As described in a news release from the Secretary of State’s Office, the “Your Vote Counts, New Mexico!” campaign “is composed of a series of videos recorded by county clerks, county clerk staff, members of the Secretary of State’s Office and other election administrators,” which will be distributed on social media, as public service announcements on TV and radio, and online here. “New Mexico’s county clerks and election administrators are the best in the nation—they work with diligence and integrity every day to make sure our democracy functions with fairness and efficiency,” Secretary of State Maggie Toulouse Oliver said in a statement. “It’s important voters understand that these election professionals are your neighbors, friends, and community members and that New Mexicans know that your vote counts.” The new campaign follows one implemented last year by the Secretary of State’s Office to counter ongoing misinformation efforts regarding elections. Early voting began yesterday at the Santa Fe County Clerk’s office (100 Catron St.), and expanded early voting begins Oct. 21 at eight additional sites throughout the county. Review what’s on the ballot overall here or download your specific ballot here. SFR’s endorsements in local races publish today; find SFR’s complete election coverage here.

Task force recommends free transportation to help addicts

The City of Santa Fe should offer free transportation to help assure people seeking treatment for addiction can access services; should ensure public transportation includes stops at treatment centers; and should advocate for a 24/7 transportation service for those being released from the Santa Fe County Adult Detention Facility. Those ideas were among the recommendations from a subcommittee of the city’s Community Health and Safety Task Force, which met last night to finalize its list of suggestions heading to City Council on Nov. 29. The nine-member group, chaired by City Councilors Renee Villarreal and Chris Rivera, reviewed a prior set of proposals at its meeting Sept. 26. The task force also recommends: using revenue from taxes on cannabis sales to expand the city’s Alternative Response Units, established in 2021 as a collaborative effort between police, fire and community services; creating non-police alternative responses for code enforcement against activities like littering and graffiti painting; and establishing “wellness hubs” to promote health, wellness, safety and recovery services to people who are actively using drugs to avoid more people dying from overdoses. “If you’ve always done what you’ve always done, you’ll always have what you’ve always had,” committee member Mary Louise Romero-Betancourt, the lead restorative justice coordinator for Santa Fe Public Schools, said. “We have got to update the way we do business, and that includes the City Council recognizing that something needs to change.”

HSD extends Medicaid deadline

The state Human Services Department yesterday announced an additional 30 days for Medicaid customers to submit their renewal applications. “We are extending the time for our Medicaid customers to submit the necessary documents for renewals, granting them a total of 75 days instead of 45 days to complete their renewal applications,” Acting HSD Secretary Kari Armijo said in a statement. “During this extension period, their Medicaid will remain open, ensuring continued access to care—and allowing us time to do additional outreach and reminders about Medicaid renewals.” According to a news release, HSD requested the extension from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services to ensure the 934,305 New Mexicans enrolled in the state’s Medicaid program have a longer period to submit their renewal applications. The state also asked and received CMS approval allowing New Mexicans whose income is at or below 100% of the federal poverty level to automatically renew their Medicaid coverage for 12 months without requesting additional information or documentation, and is seeking approval “for an additional strategy to mitigate loss of coverage at renewal for children ages 0 to 6.” More information on Medicaid renewal is available here.

Listen up

NPR recently showcased New Mexico’s annual Film Prize Junior student film festival, which awards student filmmakers in a variety of categories. The festival “is bringing life to the film-making aspirations of rural and Native American middle and high school students,” the story notes and “the competition provides students with tools to become filmmakers and storytellers in a state that, while under-resourced, has a booming film industry.” The 2023 winners include Jaiya Daniels, who won best documentary for her film about growing up as one of the few Black girls in Los Alamos. Sister of The Circle: A Black Girl’s Journey Through the Land of Enchantment is “basically a film just to showcase that Black girls, we’re all diverse, you know, we’re all different,” Daniels says. Check out all 93 student-made films here.

SFR writing contest open through October

Last May, LitHub recommended Kirstin Valdez Quade’s short-story, “The Five Wounds” to read for Short Story Month. The story, published in 2009, makes a great read any month and was expanded by Valdez Quade into her 2021 award-winning novel by the same name. This year, Valdez Quade will serve as the fiction judge for SFR’s annual writing competition. The 2023 theme: For the Family. Quade says the stories exploring families interest her most: from shared history and experiences to togetherness in the face of uncertain outcomes. Short story entries must include the words: exuberance, pickle and boulder. In the nonfiction category, Jenn Shapland, the Santa Fe-based author of the new essay collection Thin Skin (read a LitHub interview with Shapland here and the LA Times review here), will evaluate essays on the theme of “multi-species entanglements,” a topic Shapland explores in her essay “The Meaning of Life”: “We communicate with plants and animals, we care for them, find love and mutual understanding with them,” she writes. Entries are open until midnight, Oct. 31; the $5 fee per entry supports SFR’s journalism. Find all the details here.

Lippard’s legacy

The New York Review of Books unpacks writer and art critic Lucy Lippard’s new memoir, Stuff: Instead of a Memoir, referencing Lippard’s own observation that she herself owns little “stuff,” having donated most of her valuable possessions to the New Mexico Museum of Art. “When it comes to Lippard—a canonical figure who held no truck with canons, who disdained art history only to become art history—questions of legacy feel even more resonant now,” critic Megan O’Grady writes. “A godmother of conceptual art and a preeminent feminist critic and environmentalist, Lippard shaped the ways in which we think about the contested borderlands of art, identity, and politics, with perception-shifting exhibitions and twenty-odd books of criticism.” Lippard, 86, has lived in Galisteo since 1993, the essay notes, “one in a tradition of women who fled New York’s art scene to live in the desert, most famously Georgia O’Keeffe and Agnes Martin. It was exile not from art itself—the artists Judy Chicago and Harmony Hammond live nearby; Bruce Nauman and the late Susan Rothenberg’s compound is up the road—but from an art world that in the 1990s, flush with Wall Street money, had moved in a different direction than the one she had fought for.” (Lippard’s body of work includes writing about Galisteo: Down Country: The Tano of the Galisteo Basin, 1250-1782 and Pueblo Chico: Land and Lives in Galisteo since 1814).

The essay cites the late Janet Malcolm’s Still Pictures: On Photography and Memory (2023) as one possible literary accomplice. Lippard herself cites Nancy Holt’s three-page 1971 textual work, Studio Tour: Daytime. Holt and Lippard also appear in a new D Magazine story about the exhibition Groundswell: Women of Land Art (through Jan. 7, 2024) at Nasher Sculpture Center in Dallas. Holt’s work appears in the exhibition, some for the first time, according to the Santa Fe-based Holt/Smithson Foundation. The exhibition seeks to remedy the male-centric land-art movement by showcasing its female participants and references Lippard, who wrote 40 years earlier “of a male artist who told her, only half joking, ‘Nature is my slave.’”

Fall wind up

The National Weather Service forecasts a sunny, breezy day with a high temperature near 73 degrees and west wind 15 to 25 mph this morning potentially gusting as high as 40 mph later. Looking ahead to a colder day tomorrow, with even higher winds and fire watch weather in effect. For peepers heading up the mountain to catch the aspens, be ready for potential traffic and construction.

Thanks for reading! The Word loves spooky movie season.