Trouble in State Land Office Land

I would have never heard of this story if I didn't read Duke City Fix. I read the online version of the Albuquerque Journal daily. I only read the print version once a week or so (Sundays and occasionally I'll pick one up on the way home to pretend that I can do the crossword puzzle).

I was glancing through the Journal's website today (most of the news is about UNM football's first game), and never saw a mention of it. I go to the New Mexico & The West and the Metro sections, but it wasn't in there. So where was it? What was it?

Online, it was buried in the North section, somewhere that is very, very hard to find from the AbqJournal front page. Luckily, Coco over at Duke City Fix was good enough to post a link to the story.

What is the story? Well, you may have heard that Pat Lyons and the State Land Commission brought in a company to build the world's largest solar power plant (pdf). It was to be built near Deming (which causes more confusion in why this latest article is buried only in the Journal North section -- those of you who know where Deming is know that it isn't very far north at all). It turns out the financier for the project isn't exactly fiscally responsible.

[T]he Phoenix man tasked with raising $1.5 billion to finance the massive solar generating plant near Deming has a history of unpaid debts, tax liens and unpaid child support, court records show.
And he recently served time for forgery in a life insurance scheme.

Source: ABQJournal

Unfortunately, the Albuquerque Journal doesn't show where in the paper version of the newspaper each story was printed on (like the Washington Post), so we can't compare how the previous news stories compare to this one in news placement without going to the library and looking through the stacks.

EDIT: You can read Jim Baca's take over at his blog, Only in New Mexico. You can also contribute to a candidate who (hopefully) would not be tricked by a con-man here.