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Today's Opinions

  • Our View: Council should rethink ice rink investment

    The Los Alamos County Council should be applauded for its decisive action Wednesday in the approval of eight capital improvement projects. With one notable exception, the council has committed your tax dollars to work on undertakings that should indeed yield some quality of life improvements.

    The one project that should have been excluded is the ice rink. Expending $1.5 million to rehab that facility is a pig in a poke. The rink is in an atrocious location, too far removed from town. At best, it should become a place for training and practice.

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  • Several energy options exist

    or my humanities class I was asked to do research on a topic of my choosing.  I decided to research on energy and specifically renewable energy. I learned a lot about the new attempts and new ideas that we can use as viable ways to  replace the fossil fuel energy source, and I want to share my information  that I have found.
    Our community in Los Alamos has been expanding in different sources of  energy. We have a new solar array at our middle school on North Mesa and we are even in the process of getting one around our dump near the lab and in a  nice open space with lots of sunlight able to be collected. This is one way that our community is making an impact on changing the energy source. This is only one alternitive and there are many more.

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  • Working beyond classroom

    John Pawlak said a mouthful a couple weeks ago, but he usually does.  I want to add to his teacher appreciation column.
     Recently, and it was during teacher appreciation week, a student asked me if one needed a college degree to be a teacher.  A while back a student asked me if math teachers get paid more than P.E. teachers- because math is harder than P.E.  
    My son has graciously pointed out to me that teaching is at the bottom of the professional totem pole and Foreign Language teachers, that would be me, are at the bottom of the bottom.  I ignore him a lot.

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  • Driving home a point

    I was only 12 years old, but I remember sitting in the car with my father, listening to soft music, enjoying the fragrant scent of flowers, and wondering who was in that coffin.  It was a “drive-through funeral” and my father (like many other curious drivers) stopped to see if it was really true.
    Well, yes, a funeral home had set up a drive-through area so that people could drive up, spend some time looking at the body in the window, and enjoy the pleasant ambiance piped out to the car.
    Today, you can drive-through at the bank.  You can drive-through for a cup of joe.  There are drive-through pharmacies, restaurants, laundromats, prayer vigils, postal services, car washes, grocery pickup, and even marriage chapels.

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  • Congress must seize conservation opportunity

    An unfortunate, and little noticed, casualty of the present political gridlock in Washington, D.C. is the protection of our nation’s outdoor recreational resources. Budgets for the operation and maintenance of America’s iconic National Park system have been slashed in the interest of balancing the federal budget and parks are only part of this tragedy. With so many of us relying on public lands for our quality of life and our livelihoods, ill-considered cuts to conservation programs only make hard times worse for most Americans.

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  • State finances seem all right

    At one point in the rock opera “Tommy” by The Who, someone says, “I think it’s alright, yes I think it’s alright.”
    Alright seems the status for the state’s financial condition, I concluded after financial officials reported to the recent annual conference of the New Mexico Tax Research Institute.
    This year’s session of the Legislature was successful, said Charles Sallee, deputy director of the Legislative Finance Committee.

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  • Avoid rude rental car surprises

    I’m usually a pretty savvy traveler, but a recent car rental mishap reminded me that even when you take every precaution, things still can go awry.
    While planning a family vacation to Panama, I searched online for rental cars. One lower-cost rental car agency I’d never used before offered a significantly lower rate than the others. Ignoring the little voice in my head, I decided to try them.

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  • Employment law is so 20th century

    The group of small business owners sat around a table talking earnestly about what helps and what hurts their efforts to stay in business and maintain the jobs they have previously created.
    During the current recession, said one gentleman, he did everything he could to avoid layoffs in a construction-related company that had lost much business. He and other principals took no pay for several months. He knew he could not keep everyone on full time at full pay, so he explored alternatives. Could he cut back employees’ hours, keeping everybody but giving everybody some time off? Or just reduce their pay? Or put some employees on a contract rather than employee basis?  

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