The Line: March 20, 2015

Democratic State Senator Phil Griego resigned last weekend over his support as a lawmaker for a state real estate deal that he made money on as a broker.

This week’s line opinion panelists react to the resignation and talk about whether citizen lawmakers in New Mexico need more training and oversight when it comes to ethics.

Also this week, UNM regent Jamie Koch resigned after the New Mexico Senate rejected the nomination of Matt Chandler to the UNM Board of Regents. The line panelists tell us what they think about the news story.

A columnist for the Albuquerque Journal printed letters from some students to Governor Martinez about the PARCC exam. The letters demonstrated that those students were struggling with basic grammar and spelling, but do the letters represent the writing skills of the average student in New Mexico?

After taping this segment, the Santa Fe Reporter published an article on the student letters published by the Albuquerque Journal. SFR reporter Joey Peters found through an IPRA request that many of the letters showed much better analysis and grammar than the letters published by the Journal. The SFR article by Joey Peters also includes a PDF of all of the letters obtained through that IPRA request.

Line Panelists:
Dan Foley, Former NM House Minority Whip
Sophie Martin, DukeCityFix.com & Attorney
Rob Nikolewski, Watchdog.org
Laura Sanchez-Rivét, Sanchez Legal Solutions