Gallup includes pipe replacement in latest budget

Gallup has been the site of numerous unscheduled water outages in recent months. The city’s aging water pipes have kept Gallup Water and Sanitation Director Dennis Romero and his crew busy making repairs.

Romero said water line breaks in Gallup are trending “slightly downward, as we’ve made a concerted effort to move line replacement projects forward.”

The attention to the city’s aging water lines comes at a time that the country is studying infrastructure issues.

Gallup has 201.4 miles of water lines, according to Romero.

The oldest pipes — some of them close to 100 years old — are made of cast iron. After World War...

NMDOT presents zipper merge

In an effort to cut the number of collisions as construction work resumes on five projects along I-40 in McKinley and Cibola counties, District 6 of the New Mexico Department of Transportation has introduced the “zipper merge.”

NMDOT says most New Mexico motorists start to merge in construction zones as soon as they see warning signs and learn which lane ahead is closed. This is called an “early merge” and it can lead to dangerous lane switching, inconsistent driving speeds that cause crashes, long back-ups that block interchanges, angry drivers and road rage.

Research shows, however, that these dangers decrease and traffic moves more smoothly...

Over the next three weeks voters in Central New Mexico, Congressional District One, will have the opportunity to select a new congressional representative. The new representative will take the place of Deb Haaland who almost immediately after being elected to a second term in November, was appointed the first Native American to serve as Secretary of the Interior.

Congressional District One includes all of Torrance County, a good portion of Bernalillo County, as well as a portion of Sandoval County and a sliver of Valencia and Santa Fe counties.

Aubrey Dunn has been a Republican, a Democrat, a Libertarian and is now running as an Independent. Dunn is a long-time rancher with a...

PART TWO: The longstanding link between water and health

Nothing comes without water. The tribal housing authority won’t build homes if there’s no water to plumb them. Schools, health clinics, administrative offices, restaurants, and businesses cannot be constructed or continue to operate without it.

“A homeland for the Navajo people is not merely a piece of land between our four sacred mountains, but is a place where our culture, our language, and our way of life and our people can live and grow,” former Navajo Nation president Joe Shirley, Jr. testified to Congress in 2007. “Without water, viable economic and social communities wither and die.”

The first U.S. Public...