Roswell Daily Record
Martinez signs $5.9B budget
Vol. 122, No. 83 75¢ Daily / $1.25 Sunday
INSIDE NEWS
SANTA FE (AP) — New Mexico’s state workers and educators are in line for their first across-the-board pay increase in four years under a nearly $5.9 billion state budget signed into law Friday by Gov. Susana Martinez.
WALL STREET FALTERS
NEW YORK (AP) — Stocks fell on Wall Street Friday after the government reported that U.S. employers added the fewest jobs in nine months in March and more people gave up looking for work. The report was worse than economists were expecting. The Dow Jones industrial average fell 76 points ... - PAGE B5
The governor used her line-item veto powers to trim $1.7 million from next year’s spending in the budget, but she left intact provisions that allocate
THE VOICE OF THE PECOS VALLEY
April 6, 2013
SATURDAY
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about $33 million for 1 percent salary increases for public employees, including school workers, in the fiscal year that starts July 1.
Among the vetoes, Martinez cut $125,000 that lawmakers had provided for the Commission on the Status of Women next year, but the agency will be able to continue to operate by spending unused money from its current budget, Martinez administration
officials said. Also signed by the governor were measures to: •Revamp the pension system for nearly 90,000 state and local government workers and retirees. Costof-living adjustments will be lowered, and some workers will be required to contribute more to improve the long-term finances of the retirement fund, which See BUDGET, Page A3
GOV OKS SUNDAY LIQUOR SALES SANTA FE (AP) — Among the bills signed by Gov. Susana Martinez on Friday:
•Allow bars and restaurants to begin serving alcohol at 11 a.m. on Sunday, instead of noon. A Sunday noon starting time remains for package liquor purchased at grocery stores and other locations
‘Oh, ick! There’s pollen on my feet’
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INSIDE SPORTS Mark Wilson Photo
A honeybee explores the inner workings of a tulip residing in a flower bed at Grace Community Church, Friday morning.
for off-premise consumption. •Allow counties to increase the salaries of their elected officials by as much as 15 percent. A salary cap is raised for officials such as sheriff, treasurer and assessor. County commissioners
Obama plan hits seniors See BILLS, Page A3
WASHINGTON (AP) — President Barack Obama’s proposal to change the way the government measures inflation could lead to fewer people qualifying for college grants and anti-poverty programs, reduced benefits for seniors and veterans, and higher taxes for lowincome families. If adopted across the government, the new inflation measure would have far reaching effects because so many programs are adjusted each year based on year -to-year changes in consumer prices. Social Security recipients would get smaller benefit increases each year. The federal poverty level would rise by smaller amounts, meaning more people would technically rise out of poverty with only small
Governor vetoes judicial FAA delays closing control towers retirement, other bills
SANTA FE (AP) — Among the measures vetoed by Gov. Susana Martinez on Friday were proposals to:
SYRACUSE V. MICHIGAN TONIGHT
ATLANTA (AP) — Syracuse is brimming with confidence, largely because of its suffocating style when the other team has the ball. Next up, a guy who knows a thing or two about breaking down opposing defenses. Trey Burke, meet the Orange Crush. The Final Four semifinal between Syracuse and Burke’s Michigan team will present a clear contrast in styles tonight — the Orange, a veteran group that is perfectly content to settle into their octopus-like zone, vs. the brash young Wolverines, who love to run, run, run and have been compared to those - PAGE B1
TODAY’S
•Revise the judicial retirement system to improve its solvency. The legislation would have required state judges and magistrates to increase their payroll contributions along with gover nment employers, and would have eliminated the use of court docket fees for financing the pension plan.
•Revamp the 11-member governing board of the New Mexico Finance Authority, which was caught in a scandal last year over a fake financial audit. Lawmakers proposed eliminating three of the governor’s cabinet secretaries as board members and having legislative leaders appoint
four members.. •Make the elected State Education Commission an independent agency and stop the public education secretary from overruling the commission’s decisions on whether to approve or reject public charter schools. •Allow former and current lawmakers to enroll in a state pension fund if they had failed to meet previous deadlines for joining the retirement system. It would have required current lawmakers to contribute $700 a year into their pension plan, an increase of $100. Lawmakers receive no salaries, and Martinez said the Legislature should allow voters to consider a constitutional question
WASHINGTON (AP) — The closings of control towers at 149 small airports, due to begin this weekend because of government-wide spending cuts, are being delayed until mid-June, federal regulators announced Friday. The Federal Aviation Administration said it needs more time to deal with legal challenges to the closures. Also, about 50 airport authorities and other “stakeholders” have indicated they want to fund the operations of the towers themselves rather than see them shut down, and more time will be needed to work out those plans, the agency said in a statement. The first 24 tower closures were scheduled to
See OBAMA, Page A3
begin Sunday, with the rest coming over the next few weeks. Obama administration officials have said the closures are necessary to accomplish automatic spending cuts required by Congress. Despite the delay, the FAA said it will stop funding all 149 of the airport towers, which are operated by private contractors, on June 15. Under the new schedule, the closures will be implemented at once, rather than a gradual phase-in as had been planned. Airport operators in several states, including Florida, Illinois and Washington state, and the U.S. Contract Tower Association, which represents the companies that operate contract towers, have filed lawsuits with
the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Washington seeking to halt the closures. The suits contend that the closures violated a federal law meant to ensure major changes at airports do not erode safety, and unfairly targeted the program for an outsized share of the more than $600 million the agency is required to trim from its budget by the end of September. Federal officials have insisted that the closures wouldn’t af fect safety. And there is evidence that with improving safety, some of the closures would make economic sense. It tur ns out that the FAA has been using 30See FAA, Page A3
Kyle Bullock tells family’s personal history in light comedy See VETO, Page A3
ILISSA GILMORE RECORD STAFF WRITER
OBITUARY
• Dr. Greg Leadingham - PAGE B3
HIGH ...86˚ LOW ....51˚
TODAY’S FORECAST
CLASSIFIEDS..........B6 COMICS.................B4 FINANCIAL .............B5 GENERAL ..............A2 HOROSCOPES ........A8 LOTTERIES ............A2 OPINION ................A4 SPORTS ................B1 WEATHER ..............A8
INDEX
Kyle Bullock
For more than 80 years, Bullock’s Jewelry has been a part of Roswell’s history. Yet, in a play premiering this month, Kyle Bullock, the great-grandson of the store’s founder, will focus on the family’s personal history. Oscar Bullock and his wife Helen started the shop in the 1920s. Their son Dixon attended Texas Tech University in Lubbock, where he met and eventually married Pat Hobbs. The couple retur ned to Roswell to manage Bullock’s Jewelry and together, had two sons, Don and Glen. When Dixon died in the 1970s, Pat and Don, Kyle’s father, took over the company. But the family’s committment to the business never interfered with its committment to each other. Kyle said a lot of family traditions were built around the business. For example, the family spent several Christmases working
together at the store. Kyle and his sister Heather would help their grandmother make homemade mints and cookies for customers. “We kind of lived and breathed the holidays there,” he said. “We had a huge sense of pride working together.” The 20-year-old studies psychology at Lubbock Christian University and plans to pursue a master’s in organizational leadership, but also would like to carry on family business one day. Kyle described Pat as something of a family historian and remembers fondly the stories she would share with him and his sister. “The thing that really stuck out to me was when she would talk about Dixon,” he said. “For her,
they were always the happiest stories and you could tell, the way she told the story, how much she loved him.” Pat, who died in 2010, never remarried. “She believed Dixon was the man for her,” Kyle said. Months before her death, his grandmother confessed that she was afraid of dying and seeing Dixon again in heaven because she thought he wouldn’t recognize her after more than 30 years apart. That admission affected Kyle so deeply that he sought to write about the love she and Dixon had. The result is a play entitled “Those Unforgettable Black Rims,” See SPOTLIGHT, Page A2