Nick Seibel, publisher and editor of the Silver City Daily Press, covers top stories each week on the Silver City Report. This week we hear about a business recovering from a fire, events in Silver City experiencing funding cuts and COBRE Consolidated Schools getting ready to chose the next superintendent.
Susan Morée:
So Nick, there was a fire in the hay barn at Country Girls Nursery and Feed Store. Tell us what happened.
Nick Seibel:
Yeah, that's been a couple of weeks ago now. It was a major disruption because Country Girls is right on US 180, not far at all from Albertson's. It's sort of right there on that commercial strip where a lot of the retail business of Silver City takes place. And the fire broke out in the hay barn. The investigation so far doesn't lead anyone to believe there was foul play involved there, but it was dry and windy. And there was response from basically every fire department in Grant County to suppress that. Fortunately, it didn't damage any structures, either at Country Girls or any of the surrounding businesses, but it did damage not only the hay, but a lot of the other feed supplies that the Country Girls had. So, we had a nice story in last Wednesday's e-edition about the Country Girls folks, and there's just sort of the community outpouring of support that has happened for the store. Owner Kendra Wolfe told us that, you know, the hay customers that usually just come in to buy hay and over the past couple of weeks have been coming in and saying, ‘hey, we're going to buy some plants and take them to friends’ or, you know, just find extra things that they can buy from the store to help support them as they have to replace that significant part of their inventory. They said they expected to be restocked on everything by last weekend. So hopefully things are smoothing out for the people over at Country Girls.
Susan Morée:
And Silver City, we spoke a few weeks ago about the town having a budget shortfall, and you've done some more work on looking into how that's going to impact groups who are having events in Silver City. Tell us about that.
Nick Seibel:
March the 6th was when the town issued a press release saying that they were going to discontinue funding of events in the community. And that was a pretty big chunk of change. In fact, it's sort of already caused the discontinuation of at least one event, the Red Paint Powwow, which had been planned to resume again this year. They were kind of the first ones who found out because they had a commitment from the town last year that was sort of an ongoing commitment to help sponsor the powwow. And when they showed up last fall and said, ‘hey, we're getting ready to go for 2026.’ The town kind of kept putting them off and they eventually said, ‘we need a decision now.’ And the town said, ‘okay, we're not going to be able to do it.’ The members of Mimbres RegionalArts Council is another that's been impacted. They were set to receive $25,000 from the town for sponsorship of the Silver City Blues Festival, which is coming up here next month. And so that was a major chunk. And it was part of an ongoing commitment. The town had basically committed that they were going to fund the Blues Festival in diminishing amounts over five years to allow them to sort of build up a base of support and be able to wean themselves off of that, you know, sort of looking at situations like that potentially might happen. So it's been a major impact. Tour de Gila had an $80,000 commitment from the town of Silver City. Fortunately, they had another sponsor that allowed them to repurpose some money they already had there. About $471,000 got spent on event sponsorships in fiscal year 2024, $452,000 in the last fiscal year. So yeah, big impact on some, you know, events, large and small in the community.
Susan Morée:
And COBRE Schools has picked two finalists. Tell us about that.
Nick Seibel:
That's right. Bernice Gutierrez and Carla Spaniel are the two superintendent finalists for the COBRE Consolidated Schools. They had two epic closed sessions last Tuesday and Thursday to go through all six semi-finalists that they had on their list and picked those two. They'll be in Silver City on Thursday at 5 p.m. at the COBRE Administration Office. I'm having a public forum. It'll be an opportunity for the public to get their first look at the two folks who we're assuming one of them will be the next leader of that school district, which has been some rough years recently and definitely is looking for some stable leadership going forward.
Susan Morée:
And where can readers find more about these stories, Nick?
Nick Seibel:
You can find online at scdailypress.com.
