Here’s a look at today’s headlines:
Santa Clara will soon be celebrating a ground breaking ceremony for the Santa Clara Splash Park. The Splash Park will go in at the corner of Bayard and Maple Street in Santa Clara. Over $45,000 of the funding for the Splash Park will come from the Freeport-McMoRan Foundation 2016 Community Investment Fund, which recently selected the Village of Santa Clara as one of nine organizations to receive financial support to improve the community.
Hidalgo County residents will soon have access to more fresh food, flowers and nutrition education, thanks to funding from PNM Resources Foundation. The foundation awarded over $17,000 to New Mexico State University’s Hidalgo County Cooperative Extension Service for its youth community garden.
A bill to help protect and restore Native American languages and strengthen Native language education was introduced in the Senate yesterday. The Esther Martinez Native American Languages Reauthorization Act of 2015 amends the Native American Languages Act of 1990 to improve access to the Native American Languages Program and reauthorize it through 2020. The program provides grants to Native American language educational organizations to help them preserve disappearing Native languages. The bill recently passed the Senate Indian Affairs Committee.
The Senate also passed the fiscal year 2017 funding bill for Los Alamos and Sandia national labs, the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant, and several New Mexico water projects in a 90-8 vote. A final version of the bill must now be worked out with the US House of Representatives before it can be sent to the president to be signed into law.
US Senator Martin Heinrich introduced the Veterans First Act, a bill to significantly improve accountability at the Department of Veterans Affairs and make sweeping enhancements to benefits and services for our nation’s veterans. The bill addresses a longstanding and critical need to provide Veterans Affairs with additional tools to hold employees accountable when they fail to provide veterans with the level of service and care they have earned and deserve and adds additional protection for whistleblowers.
A federal district judge recently ruled that the Administration improperly funded parts of Obamacare’s cost-sharing subsidies. Despite the ruling, the subsidies will remain in place pending an appeal from the Administration.
