Letters

At the Las Vegas School Board hearing on Oct. 14, regarding at least a 30 percent increase in county property taxes being assessed this year, school board president Ramon “Swoops” Montaño made a big point about not seeing the participants at usual school board meetings, as did a woman in the audience, who turned out to be an employee of the school district. This, in my opinion, is a typical tactic to blame the victims in an effort to shift blame from those guilty of gross financial mismanagement in the district.

I take offense to the letter to the editor from Mr. Cliff Bain in the Oct. 13 edition of the Las Vegas Optic. We have the best trained military in the world because they train in peace as they would if they were at war. They train in northern New Mexico because the terrain is like Afghanistan, which is where they are at the present time.

A month or so after the primary election in June, I accessed the secretary of state’s website to check the campaign finance reports of Paula Garcia and John Olivas, two of the county commission candidates in Mora County. I discovered that while Paula Garcia had filed such reports, listing receipts and expense totals, her list of contributors totaled less than half her reported receipts. John Olivas had not filed any reports.

If the polls are correct, Americans are on the verge of voting against their own self-interest by electing Tea Party and Republican candidates on Nov. 2. If they do, they will be voting against health care improvements, consumer protection, regulation of Wall Street and much other legislation that Obama and the Democrats have passed in the best interest of all Americans.
Gus Pacheco
Trujillo