Santa Fe, NM – Following the Governor’s press conference at the end of the 2015 Legislative Session, residents of New Mexico may be excused for being confused about what actually happened to spending on infrastructure projects across the state. Governor Susana Martinez did not help matters when she levelled false accusations against Senate Democrats.
On Saturday at a widely-covered press conference, the Governor ripped into Senate Democrats for “killing” projects and jobs. This is nonsense that she knows to be untrue. The Governor’s accusations leave out many important details about what actually happened and why.
The short version of the real story is that Gov. Martinez and her close allies, the new Republican majority in the House of Representatives, are blaming Democrats for eliminating funds for capital outlay projects that they themselves stripped from the Senate’s capital outlay bill. They replaced these projects with expensive construction projects the Senate had never seen before. Then they sent the radically revised bill to us less than 18 minutes before 12 noon, the mandatory end of the 60-day legislative session.
In light of these facts, do the Governor’s accusations make sense? A strong dose of sunlight on the details of what happened to the $213 million capital outlay bill in the moments before the close of the Legislature is needed.
Republicans and Democrats in the Senate agreed by a vote of 40-1 to pass Senate Bill 159 (SB 159)- the capital outlay funding bill – and sent it to the House for consideration. The bill appropriated funds for a long list of needed public facility projects, including improvements for dozens of senior centers, public school buildings, public libraries, hospitals, museums, health centers, bookmobiles, courthouses, colleges, universities and other critical community infrastructure across the state. The 40-1 vote in the Senate reflects the strong bipartisan support for the list of state-wide projects slated for funding.
The Senate bill would have guaranteed maintenance and improvements for many of the state’s public facilities using funds from severance tax bonds – which are historically used for fixing public buildings such as senior centers and schools – and distributed them roughly in equal portions around the state. That plan would have created thousands of needed jobs in every community in New Mexico. The bill also would have provided a way to pay for needed repairs to highways and roads responsibly, using $45 million of one-time funds from the state’s healthy reserves.
For three days, the House did nothing with SB 159 as the clock ran down. Then, on Friday, one day before the end of the legislative session, and without any warning, the Republican-controlled House Way and Means Committee took action on the Governor’s behalf. With no historical precedent, it voted along party lines to strip $77 million worth of infrastructure projects from the capital outlay bill that earlier was approved by the Senate.
Instead, the House Committee redirected $57 million in the capital outlay bill to fund highway and road repairs from severance tax bonds, even though highways and roads have other funding mechanisms.
Funding hugely expensive highway projects from capital outlay is irresponsible because it devastates all the other critical maintenance needs of our state’s public facilities. It is also unwise to borrow money to pay for road repairs that may last less than 10 years. The State already has borrowed $1.4 billion for highways and roads. We are now overstretched like a family that maxes out too many credit cards, leaving our children and grandchildren to pay the bill.
Although her stated priority was to repair the highways and roads of southeast New Mexico, the Governor never gave the legislature an official, or even unofficial, list of capital outlay projects she wanted funded. Not only is this a direct violation of the Budget Act, it kept the Senate in the dark about the specific projects the Governor actually wanted in the bill.
In addition to $57 million for highway and road repairs, previously unseen projects in the House Republican’s version of the capital outlay bill included $4 million for construction of a new Spaceport hangar. It would be built adjacent to the existing vacant Spaceport hangar, where space flight has been put off indefinitely.
So why did Gov. Martinez and her allies in the House doom $77 million worth of needed capital outlay projects for senior centers, schools, libraries and so on? It has been speculated as a special favor to her biggest political donors. They hoped taxpayers would foot the bill for expensive road improvements in southeast New Mexico for the heavy rigs that use those roads. They also thought they could shift the focus from their irresponsible behavior by blaming Senate Democrats.