Poor speaker of the house Ben Lujan just can’t catch a break. Fresh off a whipping at the roundhouse, he’s now crossing swords with the highway department.
Hold up, don’t feel too bad for him. He put his kid, with a questionable education and no experience, in Congress. He’s got a good stream of favors coming that way.
But the mean old state wants to buy his property in Arroyo Seco AND make him take down his illegal billboard. Come on, all together: ahhhhhh.
Working to help him out are former highway department secretary Rhonda Faught and public relations gate-keeper S.U. Mahesh. The Albuquerque Journal satated in a story Sunday there’s a few “top officials” in the state highway department who are also lifting some weight.
The situation is simple. If your property is in the path of a highway project, some good people from the highway department have a slew of public meetings for years. That’s been going on here since 2003.
When they finally decide on a route, they come to the landowners one by one and sit down with drawings and explanations and eventually a cash offer. It’s up to the landowner whether to say, “Gimme my money,” or, “Heck no, I want more.”
It is then up to the state to decide whether to pay more or go to court. In 31 of the 42 cases of land condemnation for the Arroyo Seco corridor, the landowners have accepted the offer. Six are holdouts and others are either still negotiating or moving toward condemnation. Lujan says he won’t sell. That means he’s heading to court.
When landowners are going through the above described process, the highway department builds a folder with a running narrative of who has said what. Copies of letters, notes of phone calls, appraisals and offers would be in these folders. And that’s true of every deal in the corridor except for Lujan’s.
His folder contains a negotiator’s report, which claims Lujan has only received one offer and a document that once said “revised offer” but now says “offer.” Mahesh says it was originally a typo. Only one offer has been made. Strange that Lujan has flatly turned down the alleged only offer.
Another interesting point in the sign negotiation is that Lujan is quoted in a big city daily saying he didn’t know the sign was illegal. Former SUN reporter Nathan Gonzales did a complete story in July 2003 on illegal signs in north Santa Fe County. Lujan was contacted at that time so he knew it was illegal then. Of course nobody at Santa Fe County would dare to force the speaker to abide by the law.
And that’s what this whole thing comes down to, Lujan needs to abide by the same laws the rest of us do. When he’s holding the gavel in the roundhouse, he can do all the petty little questionable deals he wants. He can create bills to waste taxpayer time and punish those who criticize him.
But when the highway department comes knocking on your door, you have to eventually answer it, either by taking a check or going to court.