Rio Grande Foundation co-founder and former New Mexico Attorney General Hal Stratton has written a comprehensive history of public sector collective bargaining. The history is national in scope and includes a detailed discussion of developments that have led to current hardships in California. The full report is available here.

The Rio Grande Foundation has done a great deal of work analyzing the size of New Mexico's state and local government bureaucracies. As a means of further exploring the situation, I decided to have our summer interns do some research to find out which city and county bureaucracies have the most employees per capita. Check out the city chart ranked from most employees per capita to least:

The county employment chart can be found below:

I was recently interviewed by Jeremy Jojola of Channel 4 about some purchases made by the city recently. While we at the Rio Grande Foundation are always concerned about government spending, Jojola's findings were relatively small within the context of the overall city budget, the fight with public employees, and the potential for tax hikes to fund a convention center expansion. Check out the interview here:

In case you missed it, Clovis’ gross receipts tax rose to 7.5625 percent on July 1.

This is due to the statewide .125 percent increase passed by the Legislature earlier this year to help close the state’s budget deficit.

While the hike may seem innocuous enough (it’s only a fraction of a penny after all!), don’t forget it was 6.1875 percent in 1999; that’s a 22 percent increase in just over a decade.

(Albuquerque) According to a new study by the Rio Grande Foundation, New Mexico’s higher education system holds the possibility of significant, relatively painless cost savings totaling $80 million annually. The study, “Poor Performers in New Mexico Higher Ed: Budget Increases and Inefficiency,” by Adjunct Scholar Kevin Rollins, separately analyzes per-pupil expenditures of New Mexico’s four and two year universities.

Huge investments intended for additional plutonium infrastructure at Los Alamos National Laboratory raise equally big questions. Specifically, will current plans make the best use of the growing billions of dollars now claimed necessary to do the job? Can these enormous costs really be justified?

Or is there already evidence that these projects are simply out of control?

After 30 days in Santa Fe, the one thing the Legislature was charged with doing — passing a balanced budget — was left undone. It wasn't entirely their fault. Gov. Bill Richardson hit them with a long list of non-budget proposals — everything from gay marriage to embryonic stem cell research. They became distracted and failed to address the difficult and critical task of closing the state's $500 million to $600 million budget deficit.