The July NM jobless report was a shocker, with unemployment soaring to 12.7 percent from 8.4% in June and making New Mexico 8th highest in the nation. Peeling the onion reveals that the ABQ metro unemployment is even higher at 13.1 percent. The tourist dependent Santa Fe area is at 13.5%. Taos County, another popular visitor destination, has a jobless rate of 16.6%. Luna County in the SW, long the unemployment leader, is at18.6%, just shy of a Depression level 20%.
Sure, the rates may come down as things open up but local leaders now warn that many of the job losses will be permanent.
The business closures are also building with many becoming permanent. The Los Alamos Monitor has announced that after 57 years it will cease publication August 30. The national retailer Bealls is also shutting down there for good and Los Alamos radio station KRSN announced their last day on the air would be Aug. 30. All of this is due to the battered pandemic economy and/or changing consumer habits.
Rural New Mexico, already hammered and not quite recovering from the Great Recession that began in 2009, is again seeing the eye of an economic hurricane pass over their towns. In San Juan County in Farmington, already deep in the doldrums because of a decade long natural gas bust, the county commission is considering raising the gross receipts tax to get the gun pointed away from their temple.
Sunland Park Racetrack and Casino has given notice that next month they will lay off 259 employees.
Examples of the ongoing wreckage go on ad nauseam.
Then there's the public schools. That's where the Governor is feeling the most pressure. She is stressing that her first priority in any reopening is to send at least some of the kids back to school and free them from the confines of Zoom.
It is working mothers feeling the most pain from the extended school closures, a core constituency of the Democratic Party. Not to say that the pain isn't felt across the board. We've heard from parents who describe themselves and their children as "climbing the walls." Because children have weathered this virus much better than any age group parents are especially antsy now that the state has met its stated goals in curbing the virus.
TURNING THE DIAL
MLG made a statement in a weekend op-ed that was greeted with alarm in some quarters:Fewer New Mexico infections do not mean less risk for our state.
The NM Business Coalition charged that the Governor is moving the goal posts for any reopening,
"Let's forget that comment (from the Governor) about the goal (being) to get our number of cases down. Or try, 'it's about overwhelming the hospitals.'vNo, wait. . . Now MLG says "fewer infections do not mean less risk. . .there's no finish line. . .
Fewer infections--"a flattening of the curve"-- does indeed mean less risk that hospitals will be overwhelmed with patients, an original goal of the shutdown. It also means a diminished death rate. Again, less risk.
MLG also said in her op-ed:
We have to look at resuming “normal” day-to-day activities not as a flip of the switch but as a turning of the dial.
Clearly, with permanent economic damage ravaging the state, often irreversible behavioral health consequences mounting, with students falling further behind in their maturation and with COVID cases and deaths well under control, it still may not be time for this Governor to "flip the switch" but it's also not a time to continue "to look." It's time to very carefully start turning that dial.
BACK ON THE HILL
Los Alamos and Sandia national laboratories and six other U.S. Department of Energy institutions are hiring in a variety of areas via a virtual job fair 8 a.m. to 2 p.m. (MDT) Wednesday, Aug. 26, to help fill more than 600 open positions. Fifty four of the vacancies are at LANL. Individuals are encouraged to register for the event as soon as possible: here.
100 of the jobs are at ABQ's Sandia Labs.
And one more note on the demise of the Los Alamos Monitor. As they headed for the history books, the paper took a bite out of their online competition, the Los Alamos Daily Post:
Community support for the newspaper has greatly diminished, thanks in part to an unusual decision by local government to send its legal advertising to a free newspaper competitor at an apparent higher cost to taxpayers.
Los Alamos is now exclusively an online newspaper town. You can easily imagine more of those amid these ever changing economic times.
AT THE CONVENTION
On the opening night of the Republican National Convention roll call was taken to nominate President Trump for a second term. NMGOP Chairman Steve Pearce did the honors for NM, casting 22 delegate votes for the President.
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(c)NM POLITICS WITH JOE MONAHAN 2020