The Associated Press is reporting on a little-noticed bit of funding approved by the Legislature and governor this year to pay a
Blast-N-Clean will get $162,500 after legislators appropriated the money to almost a dozen communities even though many of those communities didn’t ask for money to clear their outdoor garbage containers.
But, as is often the case, the question of why lawmakers would appropriate the funds for this purpose when local communities didn’t ask for it is answered simply: The company hired a former lawmaker to be its lobbyist.
Joe Nestor Chavez is a Democrat who represented
It isn’t that there’s no sense in cleaning the trash cans. It helps keep parks and other areas sanitary, and it can protect ground water. But I just looked through the list of capital-outlay projects the governor vetoed this year – worthy projects including $85,000 for a homeless children’s shelter in
Legislators approved trash-can cleaning in a year when many said repeatedly that there wasn’t money for issues like health-care reform. In such eyebrow-raising instances, why is it that there’s almost always a personal tie like that of Chavez?
Because we live in
Update, April 18, 1 p.m.
Gilbert Gallegos, spokesman for Gov. Bill Richardson, e-mailed to tell me I should have pointed out that the governor vetoed some of the funding the Legislature approved for trash-can cleaning. In fact, Gallegos said, he has citied those appropriations “as examples of wasteful spending and wrong priorities for the junior budget.”
I asked how the governor decided which communities’ trash-can-cleaning funding to leave intact and which to veto. Ultimately, the governor left $162,500 for almost a dozen communities intact.
“He didn’t have a lot of time to analyze, given that all the budget bills were sent at once,” Gallegos said.