Dear Gallup Sun,
Your informative Top Five stories of 2022 made me ponder on the “Top Five or Six Elephants in the Room” – those enormous and difficult issues which are obvious yet ignored due to the discomfort or political embarrassment of those in power.
1. Duplication of services Your “RMCH still facing problems” seems to have been an annual story for some 50 years, before the Rehoboth-McKinley General merge when we had three hospitals. Many of us wonder why there are multiple hospitals in a region which should require only one.
We are perplexed that there is a need to segregate non-Indians from Indians. Whether you have a Medicare, Medicaid, VA, ACA, Indian Health ID, or other insurance card, it should be a simple billing process when presented at any health care facility. If you desire to build a new Indian hospital, kill two birds with one stone: conglomerate, and relieve the county taxpayers from this mess.
2. The Navajo-Gallup Water Supply Project water pipeline funding The “water rate hike” was another of your top five stories. Water is the most critical need for the economic future of Gallup and the Navajo Nation.
Do you remember Obama’s trillion dollar stimulus for “shovel-ready” infrastructure projects? It was mostly corporate bailouts while only stimulating unions, inflation, and debt. Hardly a drop went to the Navajo-Gallup pipeline. For a project that originated in the 1960s, it appears the wheels of federal government funding are turning awfully slow.
3. Five fire stations? Cities our size across New Mexico and the nation have privatized services in order to avoid public labor union shakedowns where taxpayer money is funneled to outsiders and Democrat Party coffers, yet Gallup city hall folds like a cheap suit when union thugs make lame threats of ‘legal action.” When did this happen?
The consequences of pandering to labor unions are in plain sight; five firehouses and double the expenses of a town typically with one, sometimes two stations, while multiple other fire-control operations are provided by regional government agencies… and don’t get me started on what we’ve recently learned about teachers’ union corruption. Name the other cities. Give us some examples.
4. The BIA sacred cow With a $500 million annual budget they are the powerbrokers of Gallup, yet have you ever heard a media inquiry into what they do and where all that money goes?
Since they own and manage Indian property and allot funding, they are essentially legal guardians of all tribal residents. Those who escape the socialist squalor and oppression of the reservation for the freedoms, civilization, NCI flophouse, and entertainment of Gallup are not homeless, vagrants, or transients. They are refugees. Why isn’t the BIA covering all refugee costs rather than the city bearing the blame and expenses?
5. Not just one, but three power plant closures How crazy is that? In the most energy impoverished region in the nation, with NO electricity to thousands of households, our ivory tower leaders in Santa Fe chose to wage an insane war on hydrocarbons (Energy Transition Act) and shut down the Prewitt and San Juan power plants, not to mention Arizona’s Page plant.
6. Solar Genocide Panels Do you wonder why we rarely hear about our virtuous solar farm? The only report I ever saw on it was an Independent report two years ago detailing numerous maintenance and sunshine (??) issues befuddling Gallup’s Electric Department director. Yet for well over a decade *every* solar farm has had those same issues. The precedent was set long ago with the Spanish solar crash in 2009.
The Gallup Solar Farm is, like all solar farms (look up “Ivanpah $2.2 billion bust”), an impotent unsustainable boondoggle, and the impoverished bear the burden of subsidies and surcharges granted to the elite eggheads and clueless virtue signalers of these green energy schemes. Solar panels are toxic, non recyclable, and made from slave labor and cancer villages in CCP China.
I warned the city of “green” energy and curbside recycling scams, yet they chose the Sustainable Gallup Board’s solar farm scheme. They did not choose wisely.
It’s uncomfortable enough to have one elephant in the room, but a whole herd will get you chin deep in the stench of public sector doody.
Sincerely,
Joe Schaller
Gallup, N.M.
