Sto­ry by GAIL ALEXAN­DER

Mervyn Dil­lon is out as PNM’s To­co / San­gre Grande can­di­date.  The con­stituen­cy ex­ec­u­tive has been asked by the par­ty to widen its pool of nom­i­nees.

And PNM’s La Brea unit has al­so been asked to widen its nom­i­nee pool; there­fore, this af­ter­noon’s screen­ing for La Brea has been pushed for­ward to an­oth­er date.

PNM PRO Lau­rel Leza­ma Lee-Sing ear­li­er this morn­ing   briefly said the par­ty has asked To­co S/Grande to widen its nom­i­nee pool and the same ap­plied to La Brea. She gave no fur­ther in­for­ma­tion or re­sponse to queries.

The PNM’s screen­ing team last week se­lect­ed crick­eter Mervyn Dil­lon for the can­di­da­cy. Af­ter com­plaints from some To­co quar­ters, the screen­ing team re­viewed the de­ci­sion.  The out­come was the move to ask To­co / San­gre Grande to get more nom­i­nees, ef­fec­tive­ly re­vok­ing the choice of Dil­lon.

To­co / San­gre Grande had pre­sent­ed six nom­i­nees, in­clud­ing an al­der­man, in­cum­bent MP Glen­da Jen­nings-Smith and ac­tivists. It was con­firmed that Agri­cul­tur­al So­ci­ety head Dhanoo Sookoo, who al­so had sub­mit­ted a nom­i­na­tion, was screened for the seat.

But yes­ter­day, par­ty of­fi­cials made it clear that not on­ly Dil­lon, but all those who were screened for the seat in the first batch of nom­i­nees, were out.

It is ex­pect­ed that the nom­i­nees, whom the To­co unit will now find, will be screened next week.

La Brea had had four nom­i­nees to present for to­day’s screen­ing. This arose af­ter the two nom­i­nees pre­sent­ed last week—fron­trun­ner, ex min­is­ter Robert le Hunte, and MP Nicole Olivierre—were not ac­cept­ed by the screen­ing team. The unit was ad­vised to seek more nom­i­nees.

On Mon­day, the area’s par­ty groups sub­mit­ted votes for four peo­ple. But the ex­ec­u­tive which had sup­port­ed Le Hunte con­tin­ued to do so.

The four nom­i­nees got sup­port from a to­tal of 10 par­ty groups out of the area’s 19 par­ty groups. Le Hunte re­ceived sup­port from nine. He orig­i­nal­ly com­mand­ed sup­port from 16 of the 19 groups.

The ex­ec­u­tive now has to con­tin­ue look­ing for nom­i­nees.

This evening (Thurs­day 4 June 2020) nom­i­nees for Lopinot / Bon Air West are sched­uled to be screened.  An ini­tial sev­en peo­ple were not ac­cept­ed last week. Four nom­i­nees were re­ceived this week.