Columns

Year after year, mining and petroleum operations and motor vehicle manufacture steadily improve their methods, tools and products. These advances do not happen by whim or by chance.
Behind the steady climb in efficiency are colleges that develop curricula and supply trained mining engineers, petroleum engineers and automotive engineers. The course work begins with the fundamentals of applied science and proceeds to the technologies of the named industries.
In their fields, the schools also do original research projects that produce new knowledge and tools. Efficiency is driven by basic disciplines, application of basics and inventions from applying basics.
The same path is the way to make regulatory systems efficient.
The steps are clear. We need schools to supply regulatory engineers trained in the basics of engineering, with a major in regulatory applications. We need schools doing research to develop new regulatory knowledge and more powerful tools.
This column examines new products of research that build efficiency in tasks of all kinds. Imagine if tools were created so regulating was done more surely in less time for less money. Surprising things are possible.

Former Gov. Garrey Carruthers is one of five finalists in line to become the next president of New Mexico State University in Las Cruces.
NMSU’s presidency has been something of a revolving door in recent years with one president after another passing through in remarkably rapid succession, leaving onlookers to wonder what if anything had been accomplished during their brief tenures.
Count this reporter among a good many other New Mexicans who has often wondered why the Board of Regents of that university has for so long failed to see the wisdom of putting an end to the turmoil by tapping Carruthers for their institution’s top job.
His Ph.D. in economics is from Iowa State University, but he earned both his Bachelor of Arts and Masters of Arts at New Mexico State.
After his four-year term (1987-91) as governor was over, Carruthers spent a few years in the private sector with management and development activities in the health-maintenance field.
But for over a decade now, he has been dean of NMSU’s business college and he is plainly devoted to that institution. Indeed, Carruthers has reportedly told his six grandchildren that he will pay their way through college, “tuition, room, board and books,” with the proviso that they “have to go to New Mexico State.”

It seemed like a good idea at the time.
That’s a phrase that we can apply to all of life’s situations that didn’t quite pan out — impulse purchases, former marriages, job decisions, bad investments. It takes on a different flavor when it comes to our sometimes desperate efforts to create jobs.
We’ve seen two economic development disappointments lately, and these things have two stages — the cost of the mistake itself and the fallout and recrimination that follow.
First, there is Clovis, where a new cosmetics company was supposed to begin operations after the city provided $2 million to bankroll the deal in hopes of adding 350 jobs. Now the city is hunting the entrepreneur — and its cash — in Guatemala.
How did the guy slip under everybody’s radar? I have in the past interviewed Chase Gentry, Clovis’s economic developer, and he’s shrewd and experienced. I’ve also interviewed banker Kent Carruthers, a board member of the Clovis Industrial Development Corp., and he’s nobody’s fool either.
Boards of economic development organizations are usually a Who’s Who of a town’s major players. If these people could be snookered, it could happen anywhere.

Rose Marie Law first used the employment screening services of the New Mexico Department of Workforce Solutions even before she became director of human resources for Jemez Mountain Electrical Co-op, a nonprofit utility started in 1947 to serve residents of Jemez Springs and now generating electrical power for Rio Arriba, Santa Fe, San Juan, McKinley and Sandoval counties.
While the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers Union Local 611 provides journeyman electricians through its apprenticeship program, Law is responsible for hiring clerical and warehouse workers for the utility’s offices in Jemez Springs, Cuba and Española.
When jobs come open at the utility, the Department of Workforce Solutions helps Law assess the skills and abilities of her top candidates with a WorkKeys test.
The assessment distills the lists of finalists to those who have the problem-solving abilities, math skills and work habits required in the open jobs.
The result, Law said, has been a better match of candidates to jobs and less remedial training of new employees. The free service is available to companies of all sizes — for-profit and nonprofit — but is especially useful to small businesses that don’t have the recruitment resources of large corporations and government employers.