Columnist attacks Richardson’s handling of storm

A national columnist says Gov. Bill Richardson’s presidential plans may be buried under a recent snowstorm that crippled Northern New Mexico.

In a Richardson-hating column published in Capitol Hill Blue and elsewhere, Scripps Howard News Service columnist Dan K. Thomasson, a former editor of the news service, wrote about the snow storm that buried Santa Fe and Albuquerque under 20-30 inches of snow over a three day period at the end of December.

Before getting excited about a Richardson campaign, Thomasson wrote, “consider that Richardson’s administrative expertise got severely tested by the politician’s nightmare, a snowstorm that discombobulated the state and its capital for days longer than it should have, leaving New Mexicans grumbling from Gallup to the Colorado line.”

Driving Santa Fe streets, he wrote, “is still hazardous nearly two weeks after the last flake fell in the worst storm in 30 years. It wasn’t that the state and its two major cities – here and Albuquerque (we’ll ignore Thomasson’s ignorance of Las Cruces for now) – were under prepared for 20 to 30 inches of ‘partly cloudy’ over three days, they weren’t prepared at all despite some advanced notice.”

“The lack of equipment available statewide to deal with such an event would have embarrassed my Indiana hometown, population 19,000. But why buy equipment for snow that only occurs now and then? Mañana,” he wrote.

Thomasson wrote about how few trucks were clearing roads in downtown Santa Fe that would have been filled with holiday tourists. But he notes that there was some activity – when a piece of equipment was brought in to clear a city block between to hotels where Richardson was holding his re-election inaugural festivities.

“Both the workers and the equipment weren’t seen again,” he wrote.

“More than one politician has had his career buried by a winter storm, but the local press here – the radio call-in shows being an exception – seemed far more forgiving than in similar situations elsewhere,” he wrote.

No need to worry if you’re Richardson, Thomasson wrote. The governor recently traded his small, hybrid sport utility vehicle for a fabulously large vehicle that runs on a mixture of gasoline and ethanol.

“Even that might not handle the ice build up on the narrow thoroughfares where this city does most of its business,” he wrote. “But that all will be forgotten when the baby-faced governor begins stumping the hamlets of New Hampshire seeking presidential primary backers. If the warming trend continues in the East perhaps he won’t have to embarrass himself by mentioning how he handled what is normally an everyday New Hampshire occurrence.”

“It’s enough to make one wonder in these post-9/11 times of peril just how responsive he might be,” Thomasson concluded. “Chances are we won’t have to find out, given his lack of potential for success if he does run.”

Ouch.