What is Change and Will it come to New Mexico

For the Voters:

Change for the voters will take more time because the first chance local elected officials will get to make changes is in January at the next session of the legislature. Now is when our local elected officials are setting their bills and goals for that session so people should start to contact them with requests on issues. The budget is tight this time round so the money will be limited. I for one would like to see paid holidays and annual leave for CNM Instructional support staff this is only fair since all of the other staff already get those benefits. The amount of money for the request is so small that most people in the legislature call it a rounding error so I would love to see that error fixed this year. These people did not get a raise this year yet because the college is unwilling to move even thought the legislature handed over the money for those raises months ago. But the school was able to give the school president an 11% pay raise. This is just one more example of a CEO who puts herself first while the basic workers are facing hard times economically. Now is the time to speak out on the issues that you feel the most strongly about in this state. You can find your representative's contact information at: http://legis.state.nm.us/lcs/default.asp.

For the Democratic Party:

The day after the election a friend who I met this year on the campaign trail emailed me all fired up to begin the change here in New Mexico. This individual wanted to replace inactive political people with young people he had met on the campaign trail. My advice was to start up a youth group that could have their own meetings and meeting place. These active individuals could and should bring a lot of spirit to our group but should not in any way cause the older members of our group to stop being active.

They can help build the party over the next two years by reaching out to other young people and by using technology to build lines of communication within the groups and with voters. Too many times in our city’s history and in the history of other groups people get all fired up about change and in the end all they really do is damage the organization that they are attempting to build up because change often means new and younger people who want to replace the current group of people. Just because people are older does not mean that they don’t have good ideas and some real world experience in the area that they are active and at the same time just because someone is young does not mean that they don’t have skills and knowledge that could help build an organization. Now is the time to find ways to unite and combine these two groups to build a stronger organization for the future. People should be proud of all that we have achieved from our hard work over the past two years and now is the time to build for a brighter stronger future both for our state and for our party. We have solid leadership so now let’s build more solid support for that leadership.