New Mexico
New Mexico, ‘Stranger Things’ backdrop, hits production peak
SANTA FE, N.M. (AP) — New Mexico’s movie and TV trade has hit a brand new peak, with report spending by video manufacturing firms in a state that drew tasks together with the Netflix sequence “Stranger Issues.”
Manufacturing firms instantly spent a report $855 million on movies, TV sequence and different media within the fiscal 12 months that ended on June 30, New Mexico’s governor introduced Thursday. Trade executives have been drawn to New Mexico’s distinctive landscapes for the reason that success of AMC’s long-running sequence “Breaking Unhealthy” and a beneficiant enhance of incentives handed by state lawmakers in 2019.
In-state spending by the trade elevated about 36% from practically $627 million the earlier fiscal 12 months.
Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham, a first-term Democrat operating for reelection, additionally touted a rise in spending past main cities resembling Santa Fe and Albuquerque, fueled by expanded state incentives for rural and small-town movie manufacturing.
Native manufacturing spending in these outlying areas jumped greater than six-fold to $49.5 million amid an trade rebound, state financial improvement officers advised a legislative panel gathered in Las Vegas, New Mexico.
It was unclear how a lot the state will finally spend on corresponding movie incentive funds. New Mexico gives a rebate of between 25% and 35% of in-state spending for video manufacturing that helps filmmakers massive and small underwrite their work.
Incentive funds crested at $148 million in 2019 earlier than falling to about $40 million for the 12 months ending in June 2021. Whereas the state basic fund is awash in earnings linked to federal pandemic assist together with a surge in oil and pure fuel costs and manufacturing, some lawmakers have criticized the rebates as being too pricey.
State financial improvement officers say conversations are underway with lawmakers to revisit phrases of the state movie tax rebate program when the Legislature meets once more in January 2023, presumably redrawing the boundaries for bonuses in rural areas and exploring new incentives linked to decrease emissions of climate-warming air pollution by the energy-intensive trade.
Fiscally conservative legislators have questioned for years whether or not New Mexico could also be spending an excessive amount of on the movie trade as compared with the employment it sustains. However Lujan Grisham pointed to state knowledge that confirmed a rise within the variety of trade employee hours and new highs for the variety of movie and tv productions general at practically 110 for the 12 months.
“As a result of work we’ve accomplished to foster a profitable atmosphere for manufacturing and construct a thriving base of gifted native crews, movie and tv productions from all over the world are placing cash instantly into New Mexico communities, supporting our small companies and creating jobs for hundreds of New Mexicans,” Lujan Grisham stated in an announcement.
After the success of “Breaking Unhealthy” and spinoff “Higher Name Saul,” different notable current productions in New Mexico embody parts the fourth season of the Netflix sequence “Stranger Issues” and AMC’s “Darkish Winds,” primarily based on the the thriller e-book sequence from Tony Hillerman and daughter Anne Hillerman.
Each Netflix and NBCUniversal have arrange everlasting manufacturing hubs in Albuquerque lately, including to hundreds of thousands of {dollars} in investments and guarantees of extra jobs.
Legislative reforms in 2019 opened up better incentives to movie manufacturing firms that show long-term commitments to New Mexico via a 10-year contract on a professional manufacturing facility. Netflix and NBCUniversal have secured that “movie companion” standing that lifts the cap on annual manufacturing rebates.
Spending by the trade had been trending upward earlier than the pandemic introduced a halt to work resulting from public well being mandates and trade protocols, leading to a precipitous drop in 2020. As restrictions had been eased, spending rebounded in 2021 as work ramped up.
File-setting exercise befell amid allegations of office security violations on the set of “Rust,” the place actor and producer Alec Baldwin fatally shot a cinematographer in October 2021. No legal costs have been filed within the case and Baldwin has denied wrongdoing.
Rust Film Productions is difficult the premise of a $137,000 fantastic towards the corporate by state occupational security regulators who say manufacturing managers on the set of the Western movie did not comply with commonplace trade protocols for firearms security.
The Legislature this 12 months allotted $40 million to assist set up a collaborative media academy to bolster coaching for the trade. Financial Growth Secretary Alicia Keyes stated the headquarters of the academy shall be positioned in Albuquerque.
New Mexico
Northbound I-25 closed in northern New Mexico
RATON, N.M. — Northbound Interstate 25 is closed through Raton Pass due to icy, snow-packed conditions and zero visibility.
The closure goes from mile marker 454, in Raton, to mile marker 460, at Raton Pass and the port of entry.
The New Mexico Department of Transportation camera on I-25 at Raton Pass shows what conditions looked like on the road at around noon Monday:
Northbound I-25 isn’t the only major highway closed in the area. Authorities also closed U.S. Highway 64 earlier in the day from Raton to Clayton – an 82-mile stretch. NMDOT cited road conditions that became “unsafe for travel due to inclement weather.
The NMDOT camera on U.S. 64 at Capulin showed this at around noon Monday:
New Mexico
Despite wrongful denials, New Mexico veteran who completed his sentence for a felony finally votes • Source New Mexico
Virgil Dixon was born in New Mexico but had been away for two decades moving around the country, following his son and grandchild to remain close to them.
Dixon, 71, made it a priority to register to vote and was able to cast ballots everywhere he lived: in Iowa, Oregon and Minnesota.
Those states, like New Mexico, allow people like Dixon – who was once convicted of a felony – to vote.
But after he returned to his home state in 2022, he tried to register to vote the following year and was denied his right, because he was convicted of possessing cocaine more than two decades earlier.
People with felony convictions can vote in New Mexico. The state has for many years allowed people who are out of prison — and who are no longer on probation or parole — to re-register to vote.
When Dixon tried to register to vote in 2023, Bernalillo County Clerk Linda Stover sent him an outdated registration form asking him whether he served his full time in prison.
The thing is, Dixon has never been in prison. A judge sentenced him to one year of unsupervised probation, and he completed it in 2001.
However, on July 27, 2023, Stover wrote a letter to Dixon telling him he was not eligible to vote because he had been convicted of a felony.
Whenever someone is convicted of a felony in New Mexico, the state’s voter registration system attaches a “felony flag” to their name, making them ineligible to vote.
Until a 2023 change in the law, the only way to get the flag removed was for the Corrections Department or the voter themselves to have it removed.
This resulted in felony flags being attached not just to people in prison but also to everyone who had ever been convicted of a felony, including those still on probation or parole, and those who had long completed their sentences.
Dixon said he felt like tearing up the letter. He tried to register a second time in September 2024, and was rejected again for the same reason.
“My spirit just got shot down,” he said in an interview.
Dixon said the denials triggered his post-traumatic stress disorder. He was a U.S. Army combat engineer in the Vietnam War from 1972 to 1973.
“I blew my top,” Dixon said. “I was ready to say, ‘To heck with it all,’ you know?”
‘Emotional disenfranchisement’
On July 1, 2023, a new state law went into effect, restoring voting rights to people with felony convictions as soon as they get out of prison, including those who are still on probation or parole.
It restored the franchise to an estimated 11,000 New Mexicans, according to the Sentencing Project, which advocates for lowering the number of people behind bars.
But over the following 15 months, Dixon and about 900 other New Mexicans’ voter registrations were wrongfully denied because New Mexico Secretary of State Maggie Toulouse Oliver used an incorrect list showing they were still in prison, said Daniel Yohalem, a civil rights attorney representing Dixon and the other plaintiffs in the case.
The new law requires the New Mexico Corrections Department to give Toulouse Oliver a list of people in prison and therefore ineligible to vote, so she can register everyone who’s eligible, including those on probation and parole.
However, the Corrections Department failed to give her the list, leaving her to rely on outdated and inaccurate information to populate the statewide voter registration system.
When the county clerks ran those registrations against the Secretary of State’s bad list, that caused those people to be rejected, Yohalem said in an interview.
After repeated unsuccessful attempts over the past year to convince Toulouse Oliver to implement the new law, court documents show, Yohalem and the Washington D.C.-based Campaign Legal Center filed the lawsuit.
Less than two weeks later, on Oct. 8, a judge ordered Toulouse Oliver and the Corrections Department to make the changes needed to implement the new law.
Following the judge’s order, Toulouse Oliver directed all 33 county clerks to stop using the old voter registration form, and to use only the new corrected ones, Yohalem said.
The old forms were unlawful because they incorrectly stated that, unless the governor had personally pardoned them, people with felony convictions cannot vote until they had served their whole sentence and completed all conditions of parole probation, according to the lawsuit.
Toulouse Oliver also changed some incorrect references to the old forms on her official website, Yohalem said.
Toulouse Oliver compiled a list of the people who were improperly denied after the new law went into effect, sent it to the clerks and directed them to reprocess those people, and unless they’ve gone back into prison for a new crime, they’re supposed to be registered, he said.
The Corrections Department sent an updated list of people in prison as of Oct. 1 to Toulouse Oliver, and set up a hotline for clerks to call to determine whether someone is incarcerated.
But people impacted by the criminal legal system aren’t going to return to a government building asking to vote, said Selinda Guerrero, a core organizer with Millions for Prisoners New Mexico, a plaintiff in the suit. She calls this “emotional disenfranchisement.”
“There’s so many restrictions if you’ve been convicted of a felony that you essentially are under Jim Crow law,” she said. “You’re a second-class citizen.”
When she tried to reach back out to people who had been wrongly rejected, some had completely lost hope, she said.
“We’re having to re-energize people and try to convince them that this also belongs to them all over again,” Guerrero said.
‘This is home’
As part of the lawsuit, Dixon explained to the court why voting is important to him as a citizen of the Navajo Nation.
“I want to be able to vote in my home state of New Mexico, where my Diné homelands are,” he said in a sworn affidavit.
During World War II, Dixon’s grandfather Richard Thomas, of Shiprock, was a Navajo Code Talker, a group that used their tribal language to secretly transmit messages during battles against Japan. The state of New Mexico did not provide Native Americans the right to vote until a U.S. Marine and Pueblo of Isleta citizen used the courts to force the issue in 1948, well after that war ended.
Dixon’s case is an example of the barriers to Native voting access that remain to this day, including sparse mail pickup in rural and tribal regions, racist gerrymandering in local elections, and polling places located on the other side of poorly maintained or non-existent roads.
In fact, the same state law being fought over in this case also enacted the first-in-the-nation Native American Voting Rights Act, which mandates state and local election officials consult and cooperate with tribal governments on where to locate polling locations, among other reforms.
While there’s no national data for felony disenfranchisement’s impact on Native people, their representation in New Mexico’s population and criminal legal system indicates they’re heavily impacted by felony disenfranchisement laws and policies, according to Human Rights Watch.
Native American representation in New Mexico’s prisons — in other words their share of past felony convictions that land someone in prison — in 2023 surpassed the national rate, with just over 10% compared to 2% nationally, according to the New Mexico Sentencing Commission.
Dixon is a success story in this case. Stover reprocessed his and the other three named plaintiffs’ voter registrations after the judge’s order came down, Yohalem said. Dixon said he mailed in his 2024 ballot on Oct. 15.
“Now I know my voice is heard,” he said.
The day after he mailed in his ballot, Dixon said was sitting in his apartment in Albuquerque, looking at the Sandia Mountains through his bedroom window.
“Oh man, it’s good to be back home,” Dixon recalls telling himself – physically in the same place, but still a world away from the lost feeling he felt when he couldn’t vote.
He wants to hang around on this planet a little longer to see his grandchildren grow.
“I really feel like I’m settled in New Mexico, you know? This is home.”
YOU MAKE OUR WORK POSSIBLE.
New Mexico
NEW MEXICO UNITED WINS FIRST-EVER HOME PLAYOFF MATCH, TOPS PHOENIX RISING, 2-1 – New Mexico United
In potentially the most important match in club history, New Mexico United topped Phoenix Rising by a score of 2-1, earning the victory in the first home playoff match in club history. Goals from Will Seymore and Mukwelle Akale earned the victory for the Black & Yellow, who moved on to host Las Vegas Lights FC in the Western Conference Semifinal on Saturday night. Kickoff in that match is scheduled for 7:30 PM.
It was Rising FC who scored first in this one. After a scoreless opening half, Phoenix’s Jearl Margaritha cut inside toward the top of the New Mexico box, and fired on his right foot. United goalkeeper Alex Tambakis deftly dove to parry the strike, but the rebound found the foot of Fede Varela, who first-time blocked the ball past Tambakis – who was still down after the initial save – for a 1-0 lead in the 49th minute.
Nine minutes later, United were level. Akale received a diagonal ball in the Rising box and chipped across. That high ball was headed away, but only as far as Marco Micaletto, who’s scissor kick was blocked and recovered by Nannan Houssou at the top of the box. After the ball bounced around the box for another ten seconds or so, it found an open Seymore, who cut to his right and fired. His thunderbolt hit all three bars on the net, trickling over the line for an equalizer.
The score remained level until the 85th minute. Avionne Flanagan carried the ball along the left side of the pitch, barrelling past Phoenix’s Laurence Wyke before sending a terrific ball toward the back post. Akale was there to pounce on the low ball, and a tap home was all that was needed to send New Mexico through to the Western Conference Semifinal.
Tickets for that match are on-sale now at: https://seatgeek.com/new-mexico-united-tickets/united-soccer-league/2024-11-09-7-30-pm/17181125
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