Columns

Maybe you’re a college student looking to rent your first apartment, or a downsizing homeowner reentering the rental market for the first time in decades. Whatever your situation, there are many precautions you should take before renting any property. The last thing you want is to be saddled with a 12-month lease you can’t afford or to be stuck in a neighborhood you’ve come to detest.
As one who’s been there, let me share a few tips for renting a home:
Before you even start looking, know how much you can afford to spend. Housing is the biggest monthly expense for most people, so if you miscalculate what rent is affordable, your budget will suffer from the get-go.
Besides rent, don’t forget such additional expenses as a security deposit, utilities, cable/satellite, Internet access, renters insurance, parking and laundry facilities and one-time, move-in expenses like window treatments, appliances, or rugs.
Scope out the neighborhood and determine how safe you feel walking around, especially if you’ll be parking on the street.
Come back to see if the neighborhood’s character changes at night, or on the weekend.
Also, note the proximity to parks, schools, grocery stores, public transportation and busy commuter routes.
Thoroughly inspect each potential rental:

Are biblical prophesies about the end of the world coming to pass or will global warming predictions beat them to it? We’ve been hearing both in the wake of recent natural disasters.
But it may not be as bad as it seems. Some weather watchers blame the hysteria on the Weather Channel and various weather Web sites pumping up minor disturbances with dire predictions. Last year, the Weather Channel began giving names to snowstorms.
Sometimes the storms barely materialized. Remember back around the time Congress was about to vote on sequestration, a major storm was predicted for Washington D.C.? It was termed Snowquestration. Jim Cantore, the Weather Channel’s disaster master was sent to town. His biggest chore was not hanging on to light poles to keep from blowing away. It was trying to explain why only a half-inch of snow fell.
We see the same situation on Albuquerque television. We wake up, flip on the TV and see some cub reporter stationed at Sedillo Hill in Tijeras Canyon, east of Albuquerque, waiting for the first snowflake to fall.
Occasionally, one of them will make a wry comment about being sent out to cover a non-event at an ungodly hour. They are being honest, but it probably won’t grease their way to an anchor position in the studio.

Since the December shooting of 20 first graders and 6 teachers at the Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., more states have enacted legislation weakening their gun control laws than have strengthened them.
New Mexico has neither weakened its gun laws nor strengthened them.
This, even though a 2012 overall state ranking of gun laws by the Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence found New Mexico to be one of 10 states with the nation’s weakest gun laws. And according to a report released earlier this month by the Center for American Progress, it also ranks among the 10 states with the worst rates of gun violence in America.
One and one still makes two, it seems.
At the 2013 session of the legislature, attempts were made in the Senate to beef up gun controls in New Mexico, perhaps the toughest proposal being an outright ban on the kind of assault-style weapons used to massacre those youngsters at Sandy Hook, and to kill 12 moviegoers and injure 58 others at a theater in Aurora, Colo., last July. The proposal also would have banned cartridges in excess of 10 rounds.
Both of those measures died in a Senate committee.
In the state House of Representatives, however, efforts to enhance gun safety in New Mexico fared considerably better with the passage of House Bill 77.

The last time New Mexico raised its minimum wage, in 2007, then Governor Bill Richardson had just announced his candidacy for president. Getting a bill to his desk still wasn’t guaranteed; the House and Senate leadership deadlocked on a bill the year before and were again eyeball to eyeball. Gov. Bill Richardson told them to stop “dillydallying” and elbowed them into a compromise.
He made it clear he wanted that bill. Christine Trujillo, of the American Federation of Teachers-New Mexico, said: “There must be certain groups of people who are children of a lesser God. How can we justify dooming children to poverty?”
When it passed, raising the minimum from $5.15 to $7.50 an hour over two years, New Mexico jumped to ninth place nationally. But it wasn’t as drastic as a rival bill, which would have built in a cost-of-living increase indexed to inflation.
Six short years later, we have another governor with her eye (or her political consultant’s eye) on national office, and Christine Trujillo is a freshman legislator. This year’s proposal, to raise the minimum from $7.50 to $8.50 an hour would have made New Mexico’s minimum fourth highest in the nation, which was not acceptable to Gov. Susana Martinez.