Press "Enter" to skip to content

Planes and Trains Lead to Student Taxes

The Governor has demonstrated time and time again his unwillingness to follow the state protocol when it comes to securing funding from the Legislature. Now his appointees on the Board of Regents at UNM are following in his footsteps (subscription):

The school can’t wait for legislators to provide the money needed for key construction projects, said Carlos Rey Ramiro, UNM’s director of governmental affairs.

The planned Centennial Engineering Center has topped UNM’s state funding request since 2001, Romero said. To date, lawmakers have appropriated $9 million for the project.

“If we continued on the same trend, it would take five funding cycles to get that done,” Romero said.

Well, let me see if I can explain how this works. See, if the Governor wants to spend millions of dollars on jet airplanes, and tens of millions on slow trains (subscription), then that leaves very little capital outlay money for things like university buildings. But don’t worry, I’m sure you’ll be successful at getting students to endorse the fees increase. Especially, since you are asking students to vote on it during the summer when there aren’t many students on campus. However, if I were a student I might wonder why the regents just don’t ask the Governor to help them secure some of the newly found $200 million (subscription) instead of increasing taxes (oops, I mean fees) on students.