Roswell Daily Record THE VOICE OF THE PECOS VALLEY
Vol. 122, No. 312 75¢ Daily / $1.25 Sunday
December 29, 2013
Former Homeland Security bureau chief sues
SANTA FE (AP) — The former head of the state Department of Homeland Security and Emergency Management’s Intelligence and Security Bureau is accusing his bosses of retaliation. Richard Clark filed his lawsuit earlier this month in state district court. It names as defendants Cabinet Secretary Gregory Myers and Assistant Secretary Anita Tallarico Statman. Clark is suing under laws protecting whistle-blowers and members of the armed
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services. A retired New Mexico National Guardsman, Clark was demoted earlier this year after trying to help one of his staf fers, National Guardsman Victor Marquez, document scheduled military trainings on his time sheets. Department spokesman Estevan Lujan told The Santa Fe New Mexican that Clark could have appealed his demotion through the personnel process. The department is challenging many of Clark’s claims, but Lujan declined to comment
further because the case is in court. Clark and Marquez said they tried unsuccessfully to use the state’s computerized timecard system to account for Marquez’s absences from work due to the military training. Clark refused to reprimand Marquez when Statman accused him of time sheet fraud for failing to properly document his military trainings under department policy. Clark said he asked for a copy of the policy but was not provided one.
Clark claims Statman and Myers violated both the unifor med services employment act and the state’s Whistleblower Protection Act. The lawsuit asks for Clark to be reinstated to his former position as bureau chief, back wages, damages for emotional stress and attorney fees. In other complaints filed with the New Mexico Attorney General’s Of fice, employees allege that Statman pressured Clark to illegally change 2012 employee per for mance
AP Photo
This July 19 photo shows realtor Tony Campos, Watsonville's first Latino elected official, pointing to a wall with photographs of the towns past Mayors in Watsonville, Calif. In the bricked plaza, strolling musicians wearing glitzy cowboy outfits blast a mariachi song, while Spanish-speaking shoppers bustle between farm stands choosing tasty cactus leaves and fresh chiles. Welcome to an increasingly typical town in California, a state where Hispanics become the largest ethnic group this summer. As the Golden State becomes less and less white, communities are becoming more segregated, not less.
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$35,000.
reviews months after they already had been finished and signed. Clark’s lawsuit could be affected by another uniformed services employment act case now before the state Court of Appeals. In that case, Phillip Ramirez Jr., an Iraq war veteran, National Guardsman and longtime state employee, sued the state Children Youth and Families Department for wrongful termination and won. He was awarded $100,000 by a jury, but a judge reduced the award to
The state appealed, saying state employees can’t sue under the uniformed services employment act in state court.
lawyer, Ramirez’s Rosario Vega L ynn, expects the case to go to the New Mexico Supreme Court. At issue is whether the state has sovereign immunity from the federal law meant to protect service members and veterans if they are also state employees.
Diversity prompts the increase of racial isolation
WATSONVILLE, Calif. (AP) — In a grassy downtown plaza, strolling musicians wearing glitzy cowboy outfits blast a mariachi song, while Spanish-speaking shoppers bustle between farm stands, sampling tart cactus leaves, snif fing roasting chilies and buying bundles of warm pork tamales. The scene is an increasingly typical one in towns across California, where Hispanics are on pace to become the largest ethnic group next year. And Watsonville is but one of dozens of California communities where Hispanics outnumber whites. The town of 52,000 on the picturesque Central Coast, where good soil and pleasant weather enrich crops of strawberries and lettuce, and a driven and determined low-wage workforce fuels small factories producing everything from
high-end shock absorbers to handcrafted glassware. Spanish is spoken in most homes and businesses in town, and one out of five households is linguistically isolated, meaning no one over 14 speaks English. Rising immigration hasn’t made Watsonville more diverse; it is a community heading toward racial isolation, a growing phenomenon in a state that offers one possible look at how the nation may change as non-Hispanic whites become a minority in the coming months. Like most U.S. towns, Watsonville has been formed by waves of immigrants, Croats, Portuguese, Filipinos and Japanese, each arriving with their own language, customs and cuisine. The current surge of Hispanics has See ISOLATION, Page A2
Navajo Nation Council Changes streamline process for businesses approves mine proposal FARMINGTON (AP) — The Navajo Nation Council approved a measure that would allow disputes over a northwestern New Mexico coal mine being purchased by a tribal enterprise to be settled in state courts rather than tribal courts. The council voted 17-5 in favor of the measure during a special session Friday in Window Rock, Ariz. Navajo President Ben Shelly signed the legislation following the vote. A number of tribal delegates, attorneys and risk management experts met
for about an hour in executive session before the vote, The Far mington Daily Times reported.
The legislation stems from a request by Zurich American Insurance Co. for the tribe to waive its sovereign immunity and settle any arbitration in New Mexico and Arizona courts. Zurich American and another company plan to issue $500 million in bonds and insurances to the Navajo Transitional Energy Co. to buy the mine.
ALBUQUERQUE (AP) — New Mexico businesses no longer have to wait months to get their legal paperwork from the state thanks to changes at the Corporations Bureau. Since the New Mexico Secretary of State’s Office took over the bureau this summer, the average wait has been cut to three days. Under the oversight of the Public Regulation Commission, the wait used to be nearly four months. Ken Ortiz, administrator for the secretary of state’s Business Services Division, told the Albuquerque Journal there was a backlog of more than 15 weeks
when the office inherited the Corporations Bureau. “There was an average 110-day waiting period to process documents and register corporations. But we’ve eliminated that backlog, and as of November, we’ve achieved a three-day average timeline,” he said. The bureau is also being run on a $1.1 million annual budget, compared with $3.8 million under the PRC. Details of the improvements were outlined in a report this month to the Legislative Finance Committee. The secretary of state assumed its new responsi-
bility after voters approved refor ms to the PRC in 2012. The Corporations Bureau had become mired in bureaucracy, particularly after the PRC launched a new online registration system in 2012. The system was never completed, leading to a chronic bottleneck. Tanzanian immigrant Lenny Mamuya told the Journal he waited nearly two months for his documents to operate a food truck in Albuquerque after filing last September. That temporarily blocked him from getting a loan. “I couldn’t do anything until the paperwork came through,” he said.
Local author Arias inspired by family, gardening and faith TESS TOWNSEND RECORD STAFF WRITER Veronica Arias remembers as a young child sitting and watching her grandparents, aunts and uncles work the pecan orchard on Mescalero Road and Sycamore Avenue. “I just loved to be playing out in the dirt under the heat,” says Arias, 49, an administrative assistant in the Roswell Independent School District. Her love of working the earth blossomed into a
love for gardening, a hobby that bore a strong influence on her first book, “Letters from the Garden: A Spiritual Journey of Growth.” Published by Genesis Publishing Group in June, “Letters from the Garden” See ARIAS, Page A3
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TODAY’S FORECAST
Courtesy Photo
Veronica Arias stands with a display of her recently published book, “Letters from the Garden: A Spiritual Journey,” Dec. 12 at the Roswell Hispano Chamber of Commerce's Christmas Tareada at the American Legion.
TODAY’S OBITUARIES PAGE A3, A7 • ALFONSO SOLIS • ELLAGRAY BUTTS-ROSS • KENNETH THOMPSON • TONY BLOISE • JUDY HARRIS • JANE GIBSON • STEVE SILVA • VALERIE CHARMAINE SEELY • DAVID VANCE KNOLL • CATHARINE WRIGHT BARNHILL • TAMMYE R. GREEN
The secretary of state has since finished the registration system, allowing most business-related processing to be done online.
“Our online filings in November grew to almost 1,100 compared with only 240 a year ago, an increase of 350 percent,” Secretary Dianna Duran said.
Business assistance professionals say the system has improved markedly.
“We’re hearing from clients that the process is much faster,” said L ynn Trojahn of small-business lender Accion New MexicoArizona-Colorado.
United Way
622-4150 of Chaves County
Collected
$395,824 Goal
$525,000
75%
Of Goal Collected
INDEX CLASSIFIEDS ..........D1 LOTTERIES .............A2 COMICS .................C3 OPINION .................A4 GENERAL ...............A2 SPORTS .................B1 HOROSCOPES .........A8 WEATHER ..............A8