Several years back the sheriff of Santa Fe County was caught selling county equipment on ebay. Then there's Diana Duran, our former Secretary of State, the first Republican elected to that office promising to run a completely honest and open office. She took campaign money and gambled it away at the local casinos, while claiming that lots of illegal immigrants were voting illegally.
Let's see, there was also the former CFO of the one and only hospital in Santa Fe (where I live) who along with his then girlfriend embezzled a lot of money from the hospital.
Oh, oh! How can we possibly forget former state senator, Philip Griego, who is going to stand trial for profiting from the sale of a state owned building. He resigned in disgrace a couple of years ago over this, has just (a couple of weeks ago) been bound over for trial on this. If I'm lucky, I'll finally get jury duty for this trial. To my complete and total dismay, I've only ever once been called to jury duty, and was dismissed because we were getting ready to go out of town two days later.
I know that Griego had said he was going to run again for his senate seat, but then changed his mind.
I've lived in several different states, paid varying amounts of attention to local politics in each of them, but I must say that New Mexico is breathtaking in its corruption. Not sure why. I think there are several factors involved. Two of them are the long Democratic control of the state. It really isn't good if one party controls a state for too long. No matter which party. The other, probably more important here, is that the entire state is essentially a small town. We've only recently achieved a population of over 2 million. Here in Santa Fe, the state capitol, when I say everyone knows everyone I'm not exaggerating. Outsiders like me simply don't count. Those here who aren't directly related to each other still know each other's cousins and aunts and uncles. It doesn't help that there's a shortage of surnames. It's not uncommon to read something like this in the paper: Jose Gonzales was arrested yesterday by Juan Gonzales (no relation) for drunk driving and will be arraigned next week by Judge Silvia Gonzales (no relation) on the charge.
When I worked the information desk at the local hospital it was not at all uncommon to have two people there with the same first and last name. When someone showed up asking, for instance, for Estevan Armijo (made up name, but both first and last are common here), that there would be two Estevan Armijos as patients. Usually I could simply ask, "Approximately how old is your person?" and the information would help me send them to the correct room. More than once I had two people with the same first and last name who were no more than two years apart. I'd throw up my hands, and even if this violate federal law, I'd give them both room numbers and tell them if their person wasn't in the first room, apologize and go to the second.
As a side note, I had various creative ways to bypass HIPPA.
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