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Politically experienced pair seek treasurer job
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Former Bernalillo County treasurer and ex-state senator faces former party chairman in June 3 Democratic primary
Amputation evolves into viable option Advanced prosthetics, spurred in part by the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, help amputees lead more active lifestyles. LIfe & ScIence, A-9
High-risk wells go unchecked in N.M. Report: BLM skipped inspections, failed to coordinate with state regulators By Hope Yen
The Associated press
WASHINGTON — The government has failed to inspect thousands of oil and gas wells it considers potentially high risks for water contamination and other environmental damage, congressional investigators say. The report, obtained by The Associated Press before its public release, highlights substantial gaps in oversight by the agency that manages oil and gas development on federal and Indian lands. Investigators said weak control by the Interior Department’s Bureau of Land Management resulted from policies based on outdated science and from incomplete monitoring data. The findings from the Government Accountability Office come amid an energy boom in the country and the increasing
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use of hydraulic fracturing, or fracking. That process involves pumping huge volumes of water, sand and chemicals underground to split open rocks to allow oil and gas to flow. It has produced major economic benefits, but also raised fears that the chemicals could spread to water supplies. The audit also said the BLM did not coordinate effectively with state regulators in New Mexico, North Dakota, Oklahoma and Utah. The bureau has become a symbol of federal overreach to industry groups opposed to government regulations related to oil and gas drilling. Environmental groups say the Obama administration needs to do more to guard against environmental damage. In the coming months, the administration is expected to issue rules on fracking and methane gas emissions. The report said the agency “cannot accurately and efficiently identify whether federal and Indian resources are properly protected or that federal
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Joe R. Baca, 91, Santa Fe, May 6
By Milan Simonich The New Mexican
Tim Eichenberg was just 22 when he was elected treasurer of New Mexico’s most populous county. Forty years later, Eichenberg is making a political comeback of sorts by running for state treasurer. His opponent in the Democratic
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N
ot many panhandlers pass out business cards. Bohdan Sywanyk is the exception. “Bodie The Handyman” is the name on his card. It contains the number to his mobile phone and a black-and-gray caricature of a rawboned, bespectacled man holding a hammer. Sywanyk has no luxuries in his life, and that includes his cellphone. He gets around Santa Fe on his bicycle, spends his nights in shelMilan ters or on friends’ Simonich couches, and stores Ringside Seat his tools with a buddy. He signed away his red pickup to the city in 2012 after he was convicted of drunken driving and could not pay the fees to retrieve it from an impound lot. Losing his truck made it harder to find work, another setback in a long run of problems, many of them self-inflicted. Having a cellphone and business cards gives him a chance to land work. But Bodie the Handyman spends more time begging for change or “singles” than he does fixing bathroom tile or paneling in family rooms. “I’m embarrassed to be doing what I’m doing,” he said. But he does it. Bad choices contributed to his downfall. Bad economic times have made it harder to recover. He said he was laid off from his last full-time job when the recession killed construction projects. He collected unemployment for more than a year before it ran out. Sywanyk admits to leading a life in
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Democratic Party of New Mexico at age 36. State treasurer may seem like a less glamorous job than the other offices Wertheim has sought, but he says it is the right fit for him because of his abiding interest in improving the state’s economy.
Bad choices, tough economy make life hard for handyman
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primary election on June 3 is John Wertheim, who also jumped into competitive politics at an early age. Wertheim was 24 when he served as New Mexico director of Bill Clinton’s 1992 presidential campaign. Wertheim ran for Congress four years later. He lost the race but went on to become chairman of the
A passerby gives Bohdan ‘Bodie’ Sywanyk money Friday in a parking lot on the south side of town. Sywanyk, a handyman and mason who is looking for work, has been panhandling for several years. JANE PHILLIPS/THE NEW MEXICAN
which he used illegal drugs and drank to excess. That is part of the reason he turned into something he never expected to be — a 61-year-old panhandler. Still, he has the thick, worn hands of a working man, and he says he takes pride in doing a good job. He wants to work and occasionally finds some. “A lick,” he calls it when he lands a short-term job, as he did last Friday. Sywanyk says most panhandlers, like most homeless people, have alcohol or drug problems, or are mentally ill. Sywanyk knows that panhandlers have been blamed for creating a menacing climate on the Santa Fe Plaza. But, he says, he learned long ago to stay away from the historic
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square, as have many others who beg for money. “You don’t hang there for long before someone calls the cops or the management,” he said. But Mayor Javier Gonzales, who took office two months ago, heard from plenty of people who said panhandlers were hurting the Plaza and making Santa Fe a less desirable place. “It has been a problem,” the mayor said in an interview. In an unscientific online poll in March by The New Mexican, “removing panhandlers and nuisances from the Plaza and downtown” received the most votes for what Gonzales’ priority should be. A total of 398 people, nearly a quarter of those who responded, said rousting panhandlers was the most important
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Having a cellphone and business cards gives him a chance to land work. But Sywanyk spends more time begging for change or ‘singles’ than he does fixing bathroom tile or paneling in family rooms.
Across U.S., traditional and charter schools seek ways to collaborate 20 years after movement began, few alternative approaches have made it to regular classrooms By Javier C. Hernández
The New York Times
NEW YORK — When Neil J. McNeill Jr., principal of the Middle School for Art and Philosophy in Brooklyn, learned that fewer than 4 percent of his students had passed state exams in math last year, he was frustrated. It so happened that he shared a building with one of the top-performing schools in the Brownsville neighborhood, Kings Collegiate Charter School, where 37 percent of the stu-
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dents had passed, well above the New York City middle-school average of 27 percent. McNeill had long been curious about the charter school’s strategies: It, too, served large numbers of lowincome black students, many from the same neighborhoods. But the two schools operated in their own bubbles, with separate public-address systems and different textbooks. And as a matter of practice, they did not talk about academics. “We are kind of two ships in the night,” McNeill, 39, said recently.
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A primary rationale for the creation of charter schools, which are publicly financed and privately run, was to develop test kitchens for practices that could be exported into the traditional schools. President Barack Obama, in recently proclaiming National Charter Schools Week, said they “can provide effective approaches for the broader public education system.” But two decades since they began to appear, educators from both systems concede that very little of what has worked for charter schools has found its way into regular classrooms. Testy political battles over space and money have inhibited attempts at collaboration. The sharing of
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school buildings, which in theory should foster communication, has more frequently led to conflict. And some charter schools have veered so sharply from the traditional model — with longer school years, armies of nonunion workers and flashy enrichment opportunities like trips to the Galápagos Islands — that their ideas are viewed as unworkable in regular schools. In recent years, educational leaders, concerned about hostilities between the two types of schools, have worked to foster warmer relations. In Tulsa, Okla., charter schools and district schools are working together to
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It’s like putting a “ Burger King kitty-corner
to a McDonald’s and expecting — in the same location and competing for the same families — warm and fuzzy cooperation.”
Bruce Fuller, professor of education and public policy at the University of California, Berkeley
Two sections, 24 pages 165th year, No. 132 Publication No. 596-440