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COVID-19 by the numbers
New Mexico health officials yesterday reported 673 new COVID-19 cases between April 24 and April 26. There have now been a total of 196,844 cases; the health department has designated 177,866 of them as recovered. Bernalillo County had 228 new cases over the three-day reporting period, followed by San Juan County with 110 and Doña Ana County with 65. Santa Fe County had 28 new cases.
The state also announced three additional deaths over the last three days; there have now been 4,027 fatalities. As of yesterday, 112 people were hospitalized with COVID-19.
Also as of yesterday: All New Mexicans 16 years and older can now self-schedule their COVID-19 vaccines. Officials encourage people who do not find appointments at first to continue checking as providers open up more spots. Currently, 57% of New Mexicans have had at least one dose and 40.8% are fully vaccinated. In Santa Fe County, 62.1% of residents have had at least one dose and 39.5% are fully vaccinated.
You can read all of SFR’s COVID-19 coverage here. If you’ve had experiences with COVID-19, we would like to hear from you.
City budget aims to prevent evictions
As many as 5,700 people in Santa Fe could face eviction in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, according to grassroots advocacy organization Chainbreaker Collective, which recently released the second of three research papers examining the impact of evictions in 2020. While last year’s 280 evictions represented half from prior years, they occurred despite local, state and federal moratoria on evictions. Moreover, they overwhelmingly impacted low-income and Latino households, with the highest eviction filing rates the including Hopewell/Mann and Midtown Campus areas, as well as several tracts in the Airport Road Corridor. Chainbreaker’s forthcoming third report will include policy recommendations, such as extending the city’s eviction moratorium, requiring landlord licensing and funding an eviction/tenants’ rights hotline. The city, which previewed budget proposals for the coming fiscal year at a news conference yesterday, does plan to allocate $75,000 to a tenant/landlord eviction hotline. The proposed budget, which the City Council will vote on tomorrow, would also add $1.8 million to the Affordable Housing Trust Fund this year to bring it up to a baseline of $3 million; a sizable chunk of that money would go toward helping people with rental assistance. “What we’re trying to do with this investment is to think about a step ahead of a problem before it becomes a crisis,” Mayor Alan Webber said.
NM population growth slows
US Census data released yesterday shows New Mexico grew by just 2.8% over the last decade, trailing neighboring states such as Colorado, Texas and Arizona, which grew by 14%, as well as the national population, which had a growth rate of 7.4%. The state’s Legislative Finance Committee, which plans a presentation on the state’s demographics on April 29, notes in its most recent newsletter that in addition to the slow growth in the state, more people moved out of New Mexico than moved in and the birth rate fell by 19%; the report says the under-18 population shrunk by 8.3%. According to the LFC, analysts expect New Mexico to see overall declines in the next decade, particularly among younger and rural populations. “Given the status quo, New Mexico is heading toward having more, older New Mexicans using relatively expensive public services (e.g., Medicaid and Medicare) and fewer, younger New Mexicans in school and working,” the report says. “With birth rates continuing to fall, 43% of children who dis-enrolled from public schools during the pandemic moving out of the state, and the number of high school graduates projected to decline 22 percent by 2037, the state should be intentional about right-sizing capacity to address these trends.” According to the US Census, California emerged as the most populous state; Wyoming was the least, while Texas gained the most numerically since the 2010 census and Utah was the fastest growing state (18.4%). New Mexico’s congressional apportionment to the US House of Representatives remained the same: three.
NM to receive $6.4 mil for students experiencing homelessness
The state education department announced yesterday that New Mexico will receive $6.4 million from the federal government over the next two months to help identify and provide services to children and youth experiencing homelessness. At last count, New Mexico had 6,573 such students. The funding is the state’s share of $800 million authorized by Congress in the American Rescue Plan Act to allow children and youth experiencing homelessness to attend school and participate fully in school activities, and can be used “for almost any purpose that achieves those goals,” according to a PED news release. “This is a wonderful new asset to help meet students’ most basic needs so they can succeed academically despite their families’ current housing situation,” Public Education Secretary Ryan Stewart said in a statement. “Every child should be able to participate fully in their education no matter the barriers.” The funds come in addition to money New Mexico already receives through the McKinney-Vento Homeless Assistance Act: $793,000 for the current fiscal year. The new funds will be allocated to districts based on current distribution of McKinney-Vento funds.
Listen up
SITE Santa Fe offers its Innovative Thinker Lecture at 5 pm today: 2020 Vision: Reflecting on a Pivotal Year with Emma Nordin, associate director of education initiatives at the nonprofit Art21. The lecture will focus on how Art21 responded to pandemic restrictions by launching a new online professional development initiative: Art21 Ambassadors, and how that initiative fostered partnerships with organizations such as SFMOMA, Davis Publications and the Museum of Modern Art, while increasing Art21′s professional development audience by 1,732%. Sign up for free tickets for the online event here.SAR grants to help Native artists’ intergenerational projects
Last week, Santa Fe’s School for Advanced Research announced that 16 Native American artists will receive funding totaling $50,000 for projects aimed at “promoting intergenerational learning following the ongoing impact of COVID-19.” Artists receiving the grants through the new SAR Learns! initiative were chosen from an application pool of former SAR Native artist fellows. Artists include Jason Garcia (Santa Clara Pueblo/Tewa), who will be working with his parents and teenage daughter to transfer the knowledge of pottery making within his family; Wayne Nez Gaussoin (Diné/Picuris Pueblo), who will engage youth in oral history projects with their own families; and Melissa Henry (Diné), who will create a Navajo–language version of her film This Is a Hogan (originally in English) and also turn it into an e-book. “As the pandemic continued to progress over the course of the last year and opportunities to sell work continued to be limited, it became increasingly apparent how much the artist community, especially the Native artist community, was struggling,” Elysia Poon, director of SAR’s Indian Arts Research Center said in a news release on the grants. “From our conversations with artists, we saw how this, in addition to the stress of the pandemic impacting Native communities at higher rates, heightened the need to respond in a direct way.”
Happy trails
The most recent installment of our cousin newsletter The Fork was strawberry-centric, but also turned us onto a new New Mexico road trip book, this one focused solely on a few our favorite things: food and drink. In New Mexico Food Trails: A Road Tripper’s Guide to Hot Chile, Cold Brews, and Classic Dishes from the Land of Enchantment, former New Mexico Magazine CEO Carolyn Graham journeys across the state not as a food critic, but as a journalist and second-generation New Mexican who, she writes, “discovered a passion for food and food writing later in life.” No wonder, given that her father was raised in Hatch, Graham has chile in her blood and definitely on her mind in this guidebook, in which which readers will find a fun, readable and useable directory for everything from breakfast burritos to margaritas to, of course, the green chile cheeseburger.
Right as rain
Here’s some good news: We may see some isolated showers and thunderstorms today after 3 pm. Otherwise, it will be partly sunny with a high near 60 degrees and that spring wind we can’t stop talking about: Breezy, with a southwest wind 10 to 15 mph increasing to 20 to 25 mph in the morning. While the likelihood of rain today and tonight rests at approximately 20%, those odds increase to 80% tomorrow.
Thanks for reading! The Word won’t miss the COVID-19 stay-at-home orders, but she might miss some of the stay-at-home dance videos, such as Quinn Wharton’s recreation of Dirty Dancing, Footloose and Flashdance.
