B-2
OPINIONS
THE NEW MEXICAN Sunday, January 26, 2014
The West’s oldest newspaper, founded 1849 Robin M. Martin Owner Robert M. McKinney Owner, 1949-2001 Inez Russell Gomez Editorial Page Editor
Ray Rivera Editor
OUR VIEW
Lamy no place for oil tankers
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he Santa Fe area is known for its abundance of notin-my-backyard reactions — whether neighbors don’t want affordable housing next door or oil wells down the street. We have to guard against knee-jerk reactions while, at the same time, recognizing danger when a proposed activity really is not suitable. The proposal to truck crude oil from the Four Corners area to be loaded on rail cars in Lamy is being met with overwhelming resistance by nearby residents. At first glance, could this be more NIMBY-ism? Or are residents rightly pointing out that the village atmosphere is hardly the place the rumble of big oil trucks through town? (Not to mention the concerns over oil spills, given that the offloading site for the oil is just 109 feet from the town well.) Even without worries over water contamination, a drive to Lamy shows that it makes little sense to bring heavy trucks along a two-lane road through a small village. Once a driver turns off U.S. 285 to take the meandering road to Lamy, there are no longer asphalt shoulders. The first portion of the road, just after the highway, isn’t even maintained by Santa Fe County, according to signs. Lacking adequate shoulders and with several steep curves and drop-offs, the road isn’t built to handle oil tanker traffic. It’s that simple. We believe Sen. Peter Wirth has the right idea. Sit down with the corporate players and find another site — preferably one away from people and water — where the oil can be loaded. The proposal to truck in the oil is being made by Pacer Energy Marketing of Oklahoma. Right now, the company off-loads its crude in Thoreau, a small town near Gallup. Burlington Northern Santa Fe owns the terminal currently being used by Pacer; it says there is not another available location. The oil is trucked from the fields and then loaded onto cars for shipment to refineries south of Albuquerque. Despite being out of the way, Lamy has become the potential alternative for the energy company. The loading site is owned by the Santa Fe Southern Railway (the same company that once ran scenic trains from Santa Fe to Lamy on track it owns). Pacer would use Lamy as a backup to its Thoreau site and bring from six to eight trucks a day to unload. The inadequacy of the two-lane road to the village is not our only concern. People in Santa Fe should pay attention as well, and find out just how the oil tankers would reach Lamy — along Interstate 25 only or along N.M. 599, or could they end up going through town? The overwhelming opposition to the transportation of crude oil through Lamy is not another case of not-inmy-backyard. These are solid concerns about a necessary activity, but one that does not belong in a small village. Channeled correctly, though, we see a business opportunity — not in Lamy, but somewhere along the train line. The state of New Mexico should see whether there’s an investment opportunity to build a terminal alongside the tracks that it already owns — the oil boom may fade eventually, but that won’t happen anytime soon. It makes sense to ensure that businesses can haul goods safely. Rail shipments are booming right now, growing from 10,840 in 2009 to an estimated 400,000 in 2013, partly in response to increased oil production. It would seem that helping the oil industry transport its product — safely and smartly — is the right thing to do. (One reason that Amtrak hopes to keep using its northern route into New Mexico on the Southwest Chief, with its stop in Lamy, is that the line is not as clogged with freight trains as other lines through New Mexico.) What’s more, with Santa Fe Southern tourist trains no longer running, it’s understandable that its operators want to make money by leasing property. A scenic train operation is the kind of business that the tourism sector should support; Santa Fe is more fun for visitors if there is an old-fashioned train ride from downtown. How can it be revived, so that owners can make a profit without renting to energy companies? Like so many things, the issue of crude oil in a small town has many layers. Most urgently, townspeople and neighboring residents should keep talking to Pacer Energy — the company seems like a decent corporate citizen. Find another, better location so that Pacer can do its business and residents can be left in peace. The winding road is attractive to those who choose to live in rural solitude. But it is clearly not built to handle heavy traffic, including trucks full of oil. That’s not NIMBY-ism. That’s common sense.
The past 100 years From The Santa Fe New Mexican: Jan. 26, 1914: E.D. Osborne, the well-known tomato canner south of the city, unearthed this week a bunch of smoky topaz and turquoise, and from the same locality he dug up about five dozen highly decorated Indian bows and under each bow there was a human skull, evidently that of an Indian. There was no particular mound or other evidence of burial except the fact that these articles were all unearthed in the same locality. There was also found in the same locality considerable broken pottery and a number of very small fine arrow heads and ornaments formerly used by the Indians.
COMMENTARY: LEONID BERSHIDSKY
Security damages Olympic dream
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ussia’s efforts to ensure security at the Winter Olympics in Sochi are threatening to turn a celebration of sport into a grueling experience for all involved. Security has been a special concern since July 2013, when Doku Umarov, a Chechen separatist field commander who now calls himself the Emir of the Caucasus, called on the “mujahideen” to “prevent the Olympic revelries upon the bones of Caucasus people killed by Russians.” In his final big interview before the opening ceremony, Russian President Vladimir Putin promised that the most expensive sporting event in world history would not see a repeat of the horrors of Munich in 1972. “If we allow ourselves to show weakness, to show fear, we will aid those terrorists in reaching their goals,” Putin said, adding that the authorities would make sure security measures would not be “excessive, too obvious” or “put pressure on competition participants and guests.” So far, though, the security measures have been obvious and oppressive — and the athletes and guests have yet to arrive. Residents of Sochi have endured emergency evacuations of the new railway station in Adler. Rail commuters must get special permission to transport liquids, laser and high-frequency devices, bicycles, tools and winter sports equipment. Since Jan. 7, out-of-town cars have been banned from entering the Sochi area and required to park in special lots at least 60 miles from the city center. Nikolai Yarst, a reporter for the Ura.ru site in the Ural Mountains city of Yekaterinburg, visited checkpoints at the city limits and found long lines of cars with Sochi plates awaiting a painstaking examination by police.
Rallies and demonstrations require permission from local authorities and security officials (which means a de facto ban). Local stores and restaurants have been forced to sign a document binding them to take deliveries only at night and to stock up enough supplies to last until March 22. According to a report on a popular local forum, www.blogsochi.ru, transport disruptions and security barriers are forcing local businesses to lay off workers or simply wind down until the games end. By presidential decree, Russians arriving in Sochi between now and Feb. 14 must register in person with the local authorities within three days of arrival unless they stay at a hotel. Police have been conducting blanket ID checks on the streets to catch violators. According to lawyer Kaloi Akhilgov, residents of the unstable Caucasus regions Ingushetia, Dagestan and Chechnya are being discouraged from visiting at all. As of Jan. 13, the FSB security service was searching in Sochi for a Dagestani woman named Ruzanna Ibragimova, a separatist fighter’s widow suspected of plotting a suicide bombing. “Be prepared,” Yarst wrote on Ura.ru. “At any moment a person in uniform may approach you and forbid something.” Putin said in his interview that 40,000 police and troops had been detailed to ensure security in Sochi. According to some reports, they are themselves treated as if they are a risk. The St. Petersburg news site Fontanka.ru reported that cops from Russia’s second city, sent to Sochi for the Olympics, were living in sealedoff barracks without access to the city, men and women strictly separated and forbidden to drink alcohol. Two officers
were recently detained after escaping the encampment to go home. Volunteers and hired service personnel complain about poor living conditions and extra-tight security. They are not allowed to bring any food, even fruit or chocolates, into the Olympic park, and the fare served on site is woefully inadequate. The workers are given food coupons that were printed during the shortages of the late 1980s to trade for meals at the canteen. Their complaints are invariably anonymous because they have been warned not to post anything negative about the Olympic preparations on social networks. Frequent posts describe Sochi as “a concentration camp.” They complain about the security excesses, ridiculous “aesthetic” bans such as one on hanging laundry on balconies, and the pre-Olympic elimination of stray animals, which activists are attempting to rescue. The measures are akin to those taken when Moscow hosted the Summer Olympics in 1980. Ramzan Kadyrov, the strongman who runs Chechnya for Putin, declared recently that Doku Umarov was dead. But he has not produced a body, so the “emir” may well be plotting a strike on Sochi from some mountain hideaway. Even if he is gone, Putin’s Russia has ample enemies to justify paranoia. The stakes are high: An attack on Putin’s games could forever undermine his prestige. That is the best guarantee for Sochi visitors and locals that the Olympics will not be a replay of Munich — and that the security arrangements will hardly be invisible. Leonid Bershidsky, an editor and novelist, is Moscow and Kiev correspondent for Bloomberg View’s World View.
COMMENTARY: MARGARET CARLSON
Wendy Davis: The devil’s in the details WASHINGTON n politics, lying is the new sex. Even the lesser sin, exaggeration, is grounds for questions about your suitability to run for office. Americans may be becoming more like the French in tolerating peccadilloes (just ask Rep. Mark Sanford of South Carolina or Sen. David Vitter of Louisiana about surviving a sex scandal), but get a detail wrong about whether you divorced at 21 or 19, and woe unto you. That’s what happened to Wendy Davis over the weekend. You may know her as the Texas state senator in pink sneakers who delivered an 11-hour filibuster against abortion restrictions in June. The onetime teenage single mother who lived in a trailer park and graduated from Harvard Law School was so well-spoken, impassioned and appealing that she is running for governor less than a year later. But now she’s being Swift-boated. The story of the courageous, articulate and inspiring lawyer has become the tale of a fabulist who can’t be trusted after the Dallas Morning News raised a swirl of questions about her personal history, some provided by her ex-husband. She says the allegations came from her would-be Republican opponent in the gubernatorial race, Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott. The attacks won’t work, she says, “because my story is the story of millions of Texas women who know the strength it takes when you’re young, alone and a mother.” Nonetheless, Republicans fact-checked her life story and found the timeline wanting. Davis herself acknowledged that “my language should be tighter” when it comes to the details of her biography and promised to be “more focused on the detail.” I may be soft on anyone who takes a good story and makes it better. I grew up
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Editorial page editor: Inez Russell Gomez, 986-3053, igomez@sfnewmexican.com, Twitter @inezrussell
There’s something at work here where men get to boast and women are supposed to be modest and sweat the details. in an Irish family where Sunday dinner would have been no more than well-done roast beef and mashed potatoes had it not been for uncles outdoing one another about the size of the fish they’d caught and the poker pot they’d won. And what is journalism but organizing facts into a compelling narrative. Davis has the bad luck to have a second ex-husband giving his side of the ragsto-riches story (he says he supplied the riches). Yes, she and her daughter lived in a mobile home, but only for a few months before moving into an apartment, and she worked two jobs. Enter the second husband, an older lawyer with whom she had a second daughter. They divorced in 2005 but not before, he says, he paid for her last two years at Texas Christian University and for Harvard Law, and kept her two daughters while she was there. Davis said that she and her husband cashed in a 401(k) and took out loans to pay for her tuition and that she split time between Massachusetts and Texas. When they divorced, he asked for and got custody of the two girls, and Davis was doing well enough by then to pay child support. Did Davis “cavalierly deceive voters” with a “fanciful narrative,” as Abbott’s spokesman, Matt Hirsch, said, or is there a truthiness to her telling of her life 30
years ago? The elements of working her way up from hardscrabble beginnings are as she’s described them. Davis already faces an uphill climb in a state that hasn’t elected a Democrat statewide since 1994. Women have a hard time in Texas. When former Gov. Ann Richards ran in 1990, it was no barbecue. She was accused of using cocaine and being an alcoholic, albeit a recovering one. At a debate, her Republican opponent, Clayton Williams, refused to shake her hand. At one point in the campaign, he expressed the hope that she wouldn’t “go back to drinking again.” An oil and gas wildcatter, he outspent Richards 2-to-1, but lost after a joke about rape that went too far, even by Wild West standards: “If it’s inevitable, just relax and enjoy it.” There’s something at work here where men get to boast and women are supposed to be modest and sweat the details. Look at Mayor Dawn Zimmer of Hoboken, N.J. If she gets a single fact wrong about her allegation that Gov. Chris Christie’s administration threatened to stiff her city on Hurricane Sandy recovery funds, she’ll be toast, and Christie will remain the self-proclaimed hero of the coast. I don’t agree with Davis on the filibuster that made her famous. Abortions should be illegal after viability, which is coming earlier and earlier as neonatal care improves. But I do agree with her on the arc of her life. She started out dirt poor and rose through pluck and luck (though that ex-husband is a mixed bag) to make a huge deal of herself. Nothing that happened recently takes away from that. But still, it’s too bad for her she didn’t run off to Argentina with a polo player, or two. Then she’d be ahead in the polls. Margaret Carlson is a Bloomberg View columnist.
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