After the recent Special Session of the New Mexico Legislature, the city of Las Cruces is starting to focus on the 2017 legislative session.
Amid the New Mexico Budget crisis, Larry Horan, Lobbyist for the City of Las Cruces, says one of the biggest concerns will be potential changes to the cities hold harmless payments.
“During the Special Session we saw legislation that would have changed how the cities are getting paid their hold harmless distribution,” Horan said. “That was amended and the legislation that dealt with that didn’t actually take any of that money away. But in the upcoming 60 day legislative session, the state is still looking for money, so that’s still a source of potential revenue for the state.”
City Councilor Greg Smith says currently the hold harmless money is being used for projects that could help save the city money over time.
“It’s a significant amount of money,” Smith said. “And even more significant to us and that’s why we’re so concerned about it. We’ve been trying to use it in a way that is going to benefit the city of Las Cruces over a period of time. So, we’ve looked at ways that it can go into infrastructure that we know we’re going to need to do eventually, into facilities that we know. So, if we’re hitting some of those things early then it doesn’t cost us as much as it will overtime when these things fail.”
Lobbyist Larry Horan says in addition too looking at hold harmless, the city is also looking at potential economic development legislation.
“Hold Harmless is always going to be our number one,” Horan said. “Protect local funding sources, and there is several other issues that they came up with including capital priorities to help generate funding and generate job activity in the city of Las Cruces, and they had a couple of economic development ideas. That had to do with liquor licenses and distilling of spirits, kind of like craft brews that we’re looking at, so some new things that we haven’t been doing in the past.”
City Councilor Greg Smith says the city is also looking at health and public safety initiatives for the city that could improve quality of life and increase economic development, such as looking at the feasibility of building a mental health facility or crime lab in Las Cruces.
“That is an opportunity for us to say that could actually help us with economic development,” Smith said. “People need to feel safe where they are, and even though we’ve been reducing our violent crime here locally and that’s a very good thing, we’ve unfortunately seen an uptick in things like robberies and burglaries. That’s not helping people feel safe, so the crime lab I think will be one of those things where you can actually look at what are we going to do to help solve these crimes, more quickly, more efficiently, and more accurately.”
The city is looking at capital outlay projects that include body cameras for the police department, playground equipment improvements, a new squad vehicle for the fire department, among others.
