Opinion: A look at legislative halfway mark

Halfway through this year’s legislative session and we’re close to another pandemic relief package for New Mexicans.

Senate Bill 1 (SB1) passed its original chamber Feb. 15 with unanimous support. It’s on to the House side now and will likely become law soon. Its primary beneficiaries will be New Mexicans who earn less than $15 per hour and some but not all restaurants and bars.

SB1 is intended to help essential workers who earn less than $31,200 a year by giving them a $600 rebate when they file their 2020 state income taxes. It’ll also help food and drink establishments, but not fast-food joints by giving them a four-month tax break on their gross revenues, allowing them to keep their gross-receipts tax revenues starting in March and continuing through June.

That $200 million bill, along with some other relief packages, are at the top of the legislative agenda this session, but of course there’s a lot more going on in this 60-day session.

Meanwhile, my favorite think tank, the nonpartisan Think New Mexico, is busy as always during this session. (This is why it’s called a “results-oriented” think tank; after pushing out various good-government reforms with white-paper reports every year, the Think team then lobbies for applicable legislation, or against bad bills, as their way of advancing the practical interests of New Mexicans.)

This time around, they’re covering a lot of legislative ground. In Think’s latest update, six pieces of legislation were outlined to: rein in predatory lending (SB66); make financial literacy a graduation requirement (HB163 and SB170); repeal the tax on Social Security for most New Mexican recipients (HB19); restructure the PERA pension board (HB162); prohibit a sales tax on delivered groceries (HB55); and make the process of funding capital outlays for infrastructure more transparent (HB55).

Of that last one, HB55, Think New Mexico’s latest email says this: “This bill could finally bring some sunlight to a process in which the legislature spends hundreds of millions of dollars of public money on a variety of projects while keeping the sponsors of those appropriations secret.”

That’s all related to the “Christmas Tree Bill,” one of the last bills passed each session as an allocation of state funds for capital outlay or infrastructure projects, and it hits close to home for our own state Sen. Pete Campos.

Not only is Campos a pro at bringing the bacon home to his district — probably the biggest reason why he’s been re-elected to the Senate eight times — but he also wrote his Ph.D dissertation about it in 2003.

Think New Mexico, in its 2015 report on the capital outlay process, quotes directly from Campos’ work:

“He wrote that the Christmas Tree Bill was rightly seen by ‘constituents, bonding companies, and those who may consider relocating to New Mexico as archaic, parochial and political.’ He called on New Mexico to adopt ‘a central, apolitical planning process to identify, prioritize, and recommend for final approval by the Legislature and the governor the projects that should be funded.’”

Campos has his own related bill — SB305 this year — which would overhaul the process as he and the think tank have been advocating for years.

If Campos could champion what Fred Nathan, executive director of Think New Mexico, calls “transformational” legislation that would reform the process, perhaps it would be his greatest accomplishment in his 30 years in the state Senate.

Tom McDonald is editor of the New Mexico Community News Exchange. Contact him at:

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