Today's Opinions

A current public issue is whether county water wells should be drilled in county park lands on the edge of White Rock Canyon.
The public discussion has dealt little, if any, with alternative drilling technology, namely, directional drilling, also called slant drilling.
Directional drilling goes back 50 years, but major advances came as computers became commonplace.
Directional drilling is the technique of drilling wells at a slant, instead of always boring straight down.
Not only can holes be drilled at an angle, their paths can curve and bend to reach more places under ground from fewer work sites.
A well can easily bend enough to reach places up to 1,200 feet off to any side of a drill site and thousands of feet down.
Lateral wells can extend much farther to the side — out four miles and more — at still greater cost.
Up to four wells can be drilled from a single drilling pad.
The other side of the story is always cost. Directional drilling is more complex, which may add $30,000 to $100,000 to the cost of a well within the easier 1,200-foot distance from the pad.
At more cost, the range can go out the four miles and more. These dollars have meaning only when compared with the typical cost of a vertical well: about $1 million.

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.