The use of drones is a hot-button issue across the country, but only New Mexico is home to the lone flight test center approved by the Federal Aviation Administration.
With the controversy surrounding these unmanned aerial vehicles, state officials and potential business interests are keen to stress their positive applications.
“There has been a lot issues in [...]

The New Mexico State football team hasn’t played in a bowl game since 1960.
The Aggies haven’t fielded a team with a winning record since 2002 and attendance has slipped.
Now the hottest debate on the Las Cruces campus is whether the football team should keep playing at the college football’s highest level , consider going down a step [...]

Do universities in New Mexico spend too much money on what’s called “institutional support” compared to academic support and instruction?
A New Mexico Watchdog investigation into schools of higher education in the state shows that in an 11-year period, spending for services associated with running a university has almost uniformly risen much faster than spending on education and academics in general.
Here’s what we [...]

The board of regents at New Mexico State University didn’t like the job that school president Barbara Couture was doing.
So they got rid of her and gave her a $453,000 buy-out to make her go away and that has more than a few NMSU alums, faculty, students and New Mexico taxpayers hopping mad.
Angry comments ranging [...]

For a non-profit organization dedicated to public service, KNME-TV pays its general manager more than its faithful supporters might imagine.  Polly Anderson, the general manager of New Mexico PBS, receives $165,000 a year, plus benefits. Her non-profit salary is right up there with what for-profit corporations pay managers at far larger television stations.  Though her [...]

New Mexico Watchdog wishes to thank Adrian Velarde, director of operations for KRWG-TV, New Mexico State’s PBS affiliate.  We had been having a difficult time getting a simple answer to questions about the salaries of staff at the television station.  In a previous blog post we scolded NMSU for lacking a Sunshine Portal.  We had [...]

UNM beats NMSU again. Hooray for UNM! A Bronx cheer for NMSU.
UNM’s win this time comes in being an institution that recognizes the duty it owes its funders–the taxpayers–to be open and transparent about how it spends their money. The University of New Mexico launched its Sunshine Portal in May. [...]

The chairman of the Public Regulation Commission says he wants the state agency that regulates utilities to look into a controversial program that the city of Las Cruces has established that would turn off the water, sewage and gas services of those who are delinquent in paying citations from the city’s red-light camera program.
“That’s unacceptable,” [...]

Meet the new board; NOT the same as the old board.
The state’s Environmental Improvement Board has become one of the most politically-charged agencies in New Mexico government.
The previous board members were appointed during the term of Gov. Bill Richardson. Conservationists praised them for passing — in the final two months of the Richardson administration — [...]

The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities – a left-of-center think tank that boasts Joe Biden and Paul Krugman as fans on its website — just came out with a very negative review of state film subsidies called “Not Much Bang For Too Many Bucks.”
From the paper’s first paragraph:
Like a Hollywood fantasy, claims that tax [...]