A study currently underway will determine whether Silver City's Gila Regional Medical Center should add to its current facilities or put up an entirely new hospital altogether.

Located on the north side of the city at 1313 E. 32nd Street, the hospital traces its roots to the opening of what was called the Ladies Hospital in the 1880s, becoming the Silver City General Hospital in 1957.

Not until 1983 was the 68-bed hospital on 32nd Street completed, at the same time that the institution was given a new name: the Gila Regional Medical Center, reflecting a growing southwest New Mexico patient base.

Responding to that growing patient base, hospital officials have said that the facility needs more care and treatment space, although concerns about funding remain constant.

Now, members of Gila Regional's Board of Trustees have voted to approve a contract with the Albuquerque-based Dekker architecture firm to put together a study weighing the relative merits of facility renovation and/or new construction.

Neither option, Robert Whitaker, chief executive officer of Gila Regional, will be "small in terms of both dollars and time."

As quoted in the Silver City Daily Press, Whitaker said he anticipates that the Dekker study will also suggest issues beyond facility matters. "There's a little bit of future planning of where health care is going, and how do we make sure we appropriately allocate for that."
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According to public records, Gila Regional last year treated nearly 82,000 patients and had an operating profit of some $1.7 million.

​By Garry Boulard

A new proposal by Democrat Presidential Nominee Kamala Harris to set the nation's capital gains tax rate at 28% has temporarily replaced abortion, the Middle East, and border security as a hot-button campaign topic.

The Vice President made that suggestion during a campaign stop in New Hampshire during which she remarked that her vision of what she called an "opportunity economy," is one in which "everyone can compete and have a real chance to succeed, where everyone, regardless of who they are, where they start, can build wealth, including intergenerational wealth."

The 28% rate would be an increase over the current 20%, along with an additional 3% for higher earners. But it is substantially lower than the figure earlier proposed by President Biden in his 2025 budget, which called for top capital gains rate of 44.6%.

"The so-called billionaire minimum tax would take the tax code in the wrong direction by imposing a complicated tax on a narrow segment of high-earning taxpayers in a way that's never been tried," writes tax experts Garrett Watson and Erica York in an essay published by the Washington-based Tax Foundation.

Ultimately, contend Watson and York, the Harris proposal would "add new compliance burdens for taxpayers and administrative challenges for the IRS, while weakening the US economy by raising the tax burden on saving and entrepreneurialship."

An entirely different perspective is offered by New York Magazine's financial reporter Kevin Dugan, who suggests that the 28% would not be nearly high enough to seriously address the question of wealth inequality.

"Capital gains taxes are lower than income taxes and apply to investments, making them so attractive for wealthy people whose net worth is largely tied up in stocks, bonds, and other assets," notes Dugan.

Dugan adds that both Presidents Reagan and Obama called for a 28% capital gains rate, and that by not calling for a higher rate, Harris is "bringing back the status quo that exacerbated the problem in the first place." 

Back and forth: billionaire investor Mark Cuban announced on the platform X that the Harris proposal is "evidence that Kamala Harris is listening to businesspeople and getting their feedback on what's fair and what will lead to more investment in business."

But, according to the New York Times, Morris Pearl, chairman of the group Patriotic Millionaires, said Harris was "making a catastrophic mistake by capitulating to the petulant whining of the billionaire class."

One way or the other, while the Harris proposal has become a heated early September talking point, notes the publication Politico, "it prefaces a major debate next year in Washington over the future of the tax code."

That debate will come when large portions of former President Trump's 2017 tax cuts are set to expire, and "taxing the rich will be a key issue."

By Garry Boulard

Image Credit: Courtesy of The White House

Plans are in the works for the construction of a massive building on the northwest side of Grand Junction that will house a new Costco store location.

The project is set to go up off 24 Road near the Interstate 70 intersection and will see the building of a nearly 158,000 square-foot structure on a just-under 14-acre site.

Officials with both the Seattle-based Costco and the City of Grand Junction have been in talks since late last year on the project. But according to published reports, the giant warehouse chain has been thinking about building a new location in Grand Junction for upwards of a decade now.

According to the Economic Development Council of Colorado, the deal was sweetened by a Grand Junction City Council vote foregoing up to $12.3 million in sales taxes as an incentive to get the store built.

The new Grand Junction store is a part of a larger effort on the part of the company to build at least two dozen new locations nationally before the end of this year.

A membership-only operation, Costco has some 900 stores across the U.S. and in parts of Asia and Europe. Last year the company saw more than $252 billion in revenue.

The Grand Junction store will expand Costco's Colorado presence, which already includes 16 stores. Costco has, in fact, been heavily invested in the West with around 150 locations in California, 38 in Texas, and some 20 stores in Arizona.

The anticipated size of the new Grand Junction location is sandwiched between the company's smallest stores at 88,000 square feet and largest at 219,000 square feet.
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If all goes as expected, work on the new Grand Junction store will begin either later this year or in early 2025, with an expected completion date of sometime in 2026.

​By Garry Boulard

A series of new facilities may soon see construction on the campus of the University Medical Center of El Paso and elsewhere in the metro area, depending upon the fate of a big bond proposal in November.

Three weeks ago, members of the El Paso County Commission unanimously voted to put the $396.6 million bond on the November ballot after hearing presentations for why UMC, whose roots in El Paso reach back to 1915, needs to expand its building footprint.

Animating the presentations was a need to expand healthcare access for the city’s growing senior population, while also providing enhanced services for cancer patients.

As proposed, the bond will additionally pay for the building of a burn center, geriatric center, new operating rooms, and cardiac catheterization rooms. Also on deck: facility improvements for imaging and laboratory services.

A geographic dividend will be realized by the bond with an urgent care clinic targeting the west side of El Paso and a health center in Horizon City, 22 miles to the southeast.

In a presentation made earlier this year to the commission, Jacob Cintron, UMC chief executive officer, noted that the demand for more healthcare services in El Paso has been an ongoing preoccupation for the hospital that has only increased in recent years.

“We’ve had challenges that we’ve had to address, and while we’ve taken some steps - for example, the purchase of the surgical hospital and things like that - it doesn’t come anywhere near to addressing the needs we have today and in the future," he remarked.

Community support for the bond is uncertain. In 2022 a move to secure nearly $346 million in certificates of obligation bonds for UMC facility projects was halted when a petition signed by more than 32,000 voters blocked the commission from issuing those bonds.

​By Garry Boulard

​Image Credit: Courtesy of Pixabay

New job openings nationally have decreased to their lowest level since the winter of 2021, according to a just-released report issued by the Department of Labor.

As of the end of July there were just over 7.7 million job vacancies, a drop from 7.9 million the month before.

As reported in the Labor Department’s monthly Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey, separations, which include those who have quit a job or been laid off, jumped from 5.1 million to 5.4 million.

Those quits, asserts the New York Post, are seen as a “measure of the job market’s health: Workers typically quit when they already have a new job or when they’re confident they can find one.”

Even so, the job openings trendline, notes the Financial Times, has been generally heading downward from a “2022 peak as the labor market has slowed, dropping 13% over the past year.”

The upshot, reports the site MarketWatch, is that conditions are “returning to pre-pandemic levels,” yet one more sign that the “labor market has softened and that people can’t find work as easily.”

Put another way, continues MarketWatch, “Fewer industries are hiring, and jobs have become harder to find.”

The job openings numbers remained largely static for some two years heading into the Covid 19 outbreak of early 2020. At that point there was a slight dip, while the nation’s unemployment level went from around 3% to a historic nearly 15%.

As the nation moved into a pandemic recovery period in 2021, the unemployment rate swiftly dropped to around 5%, while the job vacancies rate increased to several percentage points above that.

The two trends have seen a near nexus this year, with unemployment at around 4.5%.
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According to the Labor Department report, job openings were off in the healthcare and social assistance sector by around 187,000; professional and business services by 178,000; state and local government, by just over 101,000; and the transportation, warehousing and utilities sectors by some 88,000.

​By Garry Boulard

New funding to the tune of $500,000 is coming to a town of around 2,300 in western Colorado that is trying to move on from its big oil drilling and coal mining days.

Located near the Utah border, the town of Rangely was once home to more than 1,000 wells, producing upwards of 11,000 barrels a day, while its coal mines have numbered in excess of 3,300.

But town officials have for some time been concerned about Rangely’s future economic viability as moves to reduce greenhouse gas emissions have led to a complementary move to ban new oil and gas drilling permits in the state and a closing of the mines.

In response, Colorado’s Office of Economic Development and International Trade has announced the awarding of what is called a Coal Transition Community grant to help Rangeley move to a local economy less reliant on extraction.

Such grants are awarded to communities in the Centennial State impacted by the ongoing changes taking place in energy development.

According to a website for the program, the “amount of funds available to each community varies depending primarily on the number of coal-fired plant and coal mine closures, as well as the urgency of those closures, within each community.”

In announcing the grant for Rangely, Governor Jared Polis said the support will help the town “create dozens of new jobs in western Colorado and retain many more.”

More specifically, the grant will provide business, financial, and marketing training for local entrepreneurs and existing businesses.

“This will invigorate our business community and encourage entrepreneurs who have been contemplating starting a business or expanding a current business, but need assistance, as well as training to take the next step,” Lisa Piering, Rangely Town Manager, said in a statement.
 
By Garry Boulard

Image Credit: Courtesy of Unsplash

Design work is expected to begin next year on a project seeing the remodeling of a long-standing middle school in Carlsbad.

Located at 800 W. Church Street, the brick P.R. Leyva Middle School was built in 1940 with support from the New Deal’s Public Works Administration and measures around 170,000 square feet.

Officials with the Carlsbad Municipal School District have long contended that the structure, also known as the Carlsbad Intermediate School, is in need of a general upgrade. That upgrade is primarily in response to the district’s continued enrollment growth: built for around 600 students, the P.R. Leyva school last spring housed nearly 850 students.

That upgrade has gone from the talking stage to the reality stage with the passage this spring of a $300 million bond mostly targeting the construction of a new high school, but with $84 million allotted for work on P.R. Leyva.

Built at a cost of $300,000, the school was regarded as the ultimate in modern educational facilities upon its openings and hailed by the Carlsbad Current-Argus for a design that included “light brick, trimmed in ornamental stone and tile, and glass brick.”

If all goes as anticipated, the upgrade work on P.R. Leyva could begin sometime in 2026.

By Garry Boulard
​Image Credit: Courtesy of Unsplash

A plan that would see the purchase of the industry giant U.S. Steel by a Japanese company is proving one of the very few things in this election season that the candidates of both major parties agree on.

Late last year it was announced that the Tokyo-based Nippon Steel had agreed to buy the nearly 125-year-old U.S. Steel for a record $14.9 billion. That announcement was celebrated by officials with both companies, as well as economic analysts, who said the purchase/merger would keep the legendary Pittsburgh-based company in business.

But the plan has since been met with the stern resistance of any number of U.S. public officials, starting with former President Donald Trump, who earlier this year said that if he is returned to the White House he would block the deal “instantaneously.”

“We saved the steel industry,” Trump said after meeting with Teamsters president Sean O’Brien. “Now, U.S. Steel is being bought by Japan. So terrible.”

Add to those critical of the deal: Democrat Presidential Nominee Kamala Harris. Speaking in Pittsburgh, Harris said U.S. Steel "should remain American-owned and American-operated," adding that it is "vital for our nation to maintain strong American steel companies."

The move has been equally condemned by President Biden, Republican Vice Presidential Nominee J.D. Vance, and Pennsylvania Democrat Senator John Fetterman.

Despite the bipartisan blowback, U.S. Steel has said it remains determined to proceed with the transaction. In a statement sent to the publication The Hill, the company said the Nippon Steel acquisition is the “best deal for our employees, shareholders, communities, and customers.”

The statement added that the purchase will “strengthen the American steel industry, American jobs, and American supply chains,” while also enhancing the domestic steel industry’s “competitiveness and resilience against China.”

Founded in 1901 by the legendary financier and banker J.P. Morgan, U.S. Steel for decades has been an industry behemoth, often called the backbone of the nation’s economy. 

Although the company recorded revenues in excess of $18 billion last year, its productive capacity has declined from around 65% of all the steel manufactured in the U.S. a century ago, to just 12% today.

In a joint statement, U.S. Steel and Nippon said they expected the transaction to be finalized by the end of this year, “subject to the fulfillment of the remaining customer closing conditions, including the receipt of required U.S. regulatory approvals.”

By Garry Boulard

In an effort to geographically expand its offerings, Northland Pioneer College, which is based in Holbrook, Arizona, is working on plans to build new facilities in Kayenta, some 173 miles to the north.

The school, which serves a student base located in Navajo and Apache counties, operates several campuses in a roughly 21,000-mile northern Arizona service area. The new building plans for Kayenta are designed to provide additional higher education classroom space in a town of around 4,700 people.

Those plans will see the construction of two structures in a growing industrial park near the Kayenta Indian Health Service facility, which is located at 394.3 U.S. Route 160, otherwise known as the Navajo Trail.

As anticipated, the project will see the construction of one building which will house classroom and lab space, and a second structure to serve as the new library for the town of Kayenta.

In a statement, Richard Chanick, the school’s head of workforce and economic development, said the project is the result of a spirit of cooperation between Northland Pioneer College and the Town of Kayenta.

“We believe this type of collaboration ensures the long-term success of the project,” remarked Chanick. “This project would not be possible without their support.”

Funding for the project has taken a significant step forward with the awarding of a nearly $9 million grant from the Arizona Commerce Authority. That funding is coming in the form of an Economic Resources Transition Grant.

An exact timetable for when work on the two new buildings will begin has not yet been announced. But earlier press accounts have reported that the facilities are expected to be completed by the spring of 2027.

Founded in 1974, Northland Pioneer College has an enrollment of around 6,700 students, up from the roughly 1,000 it started out with during its first semester. Near the end of its first year, the Arizona Daily Sun noted that the college’s philosophy was to provide leaning “where people live.”
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That meant providing programs in such diverse fields as auto mechanics, welding, and emergency medical training via a series of mobile labs.

​By Garry Boulard