Letters to the Editor: Jan. 8, 2020

John R. Moses
Farmington Daily Times

The language of horns

Dear letters to the editor, I need help please. Why do people in San Juan County get so angry and are so opposed to the sound of horns? There is an actual language of horns from a toot, for thank you, to a short blast meaning...move it. Some people get so incensed at the sound of a horn...Why? Is there an answer out there?

Save a community — Farmington

It is a new year and the State Of New Mexico needs to make some serious decisions about how they want to proceed with consistent and workable energy policy. O&G has provided the state with enormous amounts of surplus revenue while Santa Fe is considering restrictions on new drilling.

PNM has provided half the state with cheap electricity for decades and is planning to shut down the San Juan Generating Station (SJGS) with financial help through the Energy Transition Act (ETA).

It is my opinion the closure of SJGS will have the greatest immediate impact on our overall economy, especially to the City of Farmington and the surrounding communities. There will be hundreds of jobs lost from the power plant and adjacent coal mine closures, as well as many small businesses, that depend on the revenue produced by the plant. There are two proposals on the table to determine the future of SJGS and the City of Farmington.

Option 1: Implement the ETA requirements and completely shut down the SJGS and adjacent coal mine within two years. This option will completely devastate The City of Farmington and surrounding communities. PNM and other owners will be provided financial incentives from the ETA, which is a bail-out of their financial commitment to produce electricity from SJGS. This option will replace the lost electricity with wind-NG and solar-NG industrial farms at a cost of billions of dollars.

Option 2: Sell the SJGS to Enchant Energy and the City of Farmington for $1 and keep the plant open with proven CARBON CAPTURE UTILIZATION & STORAGE (CCUS) technology installed to meet all the ETA emission requirements. This $1.3 billion capital investment will be monetized through sales of CO2 to the O&G Industry to replace water fracking with more efficient CO2 fracking. The generating plant and mining operation stay open and continue to provide jobs with cleaner emissions.

Santa Fe has to decide which option is more reasonable. Shut down the SJGS or sell it. I hate to see another New Mexico boondoggle.

Healthy kids

Healthy Kids Healthy Communities – a New Mexico Department of Health program to improve children’s health – is grateful to everyone at the San Juan College nursing program who helped measure the heights and weights of third-graders and kindergartners in northwestern New Mexico this fall.

Our partnership with San Juan College enables us to collect children’s BMI (Body Mass Index) so we can identify at-risk populations, track data trends, and establish programs to increase children’s access to healthy foods and physical activity. We use these data from about 9,000 students to write our annual childhood obesity report released each March.

Thank you to the San Juan College nursing program students who diligently followed our standardized measurement protocol, to the staff and elementary-school nurses for being willing partners in our efforts to collect BMI data, and to our local Healthy Kids Healthy Communities coalition for working to make healthy eating and physical activity opportunities an easy choice for children and families.

Missing voice

I was very disappointed by your recent front page article about the coming minimum wage increases. While acknowledging that "support for a higher minimum wage is consistently strong in public opinion polls," your reporter somehow neglected to speak to anyone currently making a minimum wage, for whom this change is welcome and uncontroversial.

I applaud the work of Sarah Silva and her Las Cruces activist group. It matters. But so do the voices of the working poor, the single parents, and the community members who stand to gain so much from the coming changes. Newspapers have the power to shape public opinion, and by neglecting those most affected by this, they have framed it as a debate, instead of what it is: an unabashed victory for working folk.

Send letters to the Editor of My Turn columns to John R. Moses via email at jmoses@daily-times.com. Letters should be no longer than 250 words, while My Turn Columns should not exceed 500 words.

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Letters to the Editor