Ty's Take When a neighboring county's audit comes back stamped "poor" because of illegal debt and misconduct in the sheriff's office, it's a reminder that the machinery of local government only runs clean when people are paying attention—and when
Ty's Take The fourth bond measure in as many years tells you everything you need to know about where the money's going around here—water systems that can't keep up, roads that never stop crumbling, and wastewater infrastructure that's playing catch-up to
Ty's Take The museum director's indictment lands hard in a town where cultural institutions are supposed to be pulling people together, not tearing themselves apart—especially when we're still building what Silver City's going to be in another ten years. You can
Ty's Take There's a peculiar moment every summer when this valley catches fire—literally and figuratively—and people show their true colors. The Aspen Acres fire pushing toward fifty percent containment is the real story here, along with South Arkansas Fire Protection District doing what it
Ty's Take The Phelps County Democrats held their stump picnic last weekend, which means somewhere around here a handful of people sat under trees eating potato salad while a few candidates made their case for the November ballot. It's the kind of event that doesn'
Ty's Take Fifty-eight thousand visitors rolled through Archuleta County over the Fourth, which tells you something about where this place sits in the world's imagination these days—and something about the weight that puts on our roads, our water system, and the folks who actually live
Ty's Take The bear cub advisory buried in today's briefing says something true about how we live up here now—the wildlife is pushed closer, we're building higher on the plateau, and every summer the line between our world and theirs gets thinner. Meanwhile
Ty's Take There's something worth watching in how NMSU keeps threading the needle between what it was and what it's becoming. The university's always been the spine of this valley—Aggie football on Saturday, research dollars flowing into the ag college, kids
Ty's Take Two house fires in two days—one in Stover where a dog did what neighbors sometimes don't, and another in Barnett where three firefighters got trapped when the ceiling gave way—is the kind of stretch that reminds you this region runs on volunteer
Ty's Take Slow week in the big scheme of things, but the pages tell you what's really going on around here—a man running fences down in Licking, another fellow light-fingered with someone else's electric motorcycle, a couple folks who shouldn't have
Ty's Take Most weeks around here you can read the Bulletin and know exactly what's happening down in Las Cruces, which is fine—that's their beat. But when a story about creativity and balance lands in the valley papers, it's worth paying
Ty's Take A rape case pleaded down to a lesser charge is the kind of story that leaves you wondering what happened in the room where the deal got made—what the victim heard, what the evidence really showed, what the system offered as the best available outcome.
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Ty's Take The groundbreaking out in the Heights for a new memory care home is the kind of story that matters more than the headline suggests. This region's getting older—you see it everywhere from the clinic waiting rooms to the empty seats at high school
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Ty's Take When a U.S. Senator shows up in the valley to talk potatoes and water instead of just talking at you, it's worth noticing—especially one who actually knows the difference between barley and malting barley. Hickenlooper's got his own history in
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Ty's Take The political dust settled fast this week when Miyagishima dropped out of the governor's race and threw her support behind GOP nominee Gregg Hull—the kind of move that tells you something about which way the wind's blowing in a state that&
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Ty's Take Civic center's hosting a debate Wednesday night, and if you've got questions worth asking, the organizers want to hear them—that's the kind of thing that works best when it's not just the usual suspects doing the talking.
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Ty's Take When schools start picking up the tab for pencils and notebooks again, you know something's shifted in how we're thinking about equity around here. Truth or Consequences High's TigerSharks making it to Sundance State is the kind of news that
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Ty's Take Sometimes a town shows you what it actually values by what it fights to keep and what it lets slip away. We're hanging onto the museum—good, that matters—and we're wrestling with a mayor's reputation the way small towns
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Ty's Take Chaffee County's got itself a classic late-summer moment coming up—the Fair and Rodeo rolling in Friday with all the dust and noise and genuine community that still matters out here, while upstream in Buena Vista they're wrestling with which historic buildings
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Ty's Take The Fort Wyman stone showing up at the historical society is one of those moments that sneaks up quiet-like, but it matters more than you'd think. Most folks driving through Rolla don't know there was a fort here at all—a trading
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Ty's Take Some weeks the news runs the gamut from the high to the low, and this is one of them—Shakespeare under the stars and kids learning to ride at Bridger right alongside a guilty plea on firearms charges and the Montana Public Service Commission getting serious
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Ty's Take The drilling concerns down in Arboles aren't new, but the fact that residents keep showing up to say so tells you something about what happens when outside money moves into somebody else's backyard. You can talk efficiency all you want—and Lord
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Ty's Take The news out of LANL Foundation and the county health council this week points to something this town knows but doesn't always say out loud: we're good at the big problems—the physics, the engineering, the infrastructure—but the harder work happens
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Ty's Take Carol Ann Knapp Foreman, Clarence Villemez, Shannyn Caldwell, Timothy Joseph Hourigan—four names in the paper this week, four people who lived their lives in this valley and left it different than they found it, the way it works here. You don't get to