Stu Ingle hallmark: Results over politics

It was January 1987.

It would be the year of "Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall" and "Walk Like An Egyptian," but first, a Republican lawmaker from New Mexico's arid eastern Plains was about to break the state political norms.

He was going to move in with a Democrat.

Stuart Ingle, the Portales Republican, and Tim Jennings, the Roswell Democrat, had plenty in common. Both were party moderates and former students of New Mexico Military Institute. Both had agricultural roots, Ingle in dryland farming and Jennings in ranching, and they just generally got along.

But when the two decided to share an office at the Roundhouse in 1987, it wasn't a feel-good bridge-building move. It was a real estate move.

"Stuart and I both wanted a good office," said Jennings, who is now the mayor of Roswell. "We didn't want to have an office over in the other building or somewhere else where we were 10 miles away from our committees."

Ingle and Jennings got what they wanted: a prime spot right off the Senate floor that they shared for a couple years, though Jennings said it "made both sides mad."

It was a move that in some ways epitomized Ingle's approach to his nearly 40 years of lawmaking: practical and more focused on the result he wanted than on sticking to a party line.

Ingle stepped down earlier this year. Now 75, the Portales farmer was a keen student of New Mexico's political system and landscape and had a hand in shaping many structures that still exist in the state today, including the lottery scholarship and drivers license systems, according to several longtime colleagues.

That he accomplished so much as a rural Republican is a testament to his ability to work across the aisle and find middle ground, said former Sen. John Arthur Smith, a Democrat from Deming.

"That's not something maybe the public appreciates now because they want their elected officials to go out there and challenge the governor if they're not in the same party," said Smith, a moderate who was ousted from his own seat in 2020 by a progressive challenger from his own party. "... I think there was common ground with Sen. Ingle and myself and a few others that weren't there to torpedo the process. They were there to try and make the system work."

State Sen. Steven Neville, a fellow Republican from Farmington, agreed.

"He really didn't think about the politics so much as what needed to be done and whether it was the right thing to do," Neville said. "That's Stuart's big trademark."

From farmer to lawmaker

Ingle was born in Clovis and grew up in Portales, where his father ran a business buying broomcorn, a once-plentiful crop in the region that was used to make brooms.

After high school Ingle's father sent him off to the New Mexico Military Institute for a year, "to learn study habits," Ingle said.

He attended Oklahoma State University studying animal science and nutrition, and became the first college graduate in his family. He returned to New Mexico and became a dryland farmer, growing wheat, grain sorghum or haygrazers on land west of Portales.

"You have to be a little bit of a gambling nature," Ingle said of his longtime profession. "You're hoping it's going to rain, but you don't know whether it will or not."

The call to politics came from Mickey Barnett, a lawyer who held the state Senate seat in Portales from 1980 to 1984. Barnett, a Republican, was planning to move to Albuquerque and wanted Ingle to run for his seat. Ingle said he demurred - at first.

"I said, 'Well, Mickey, I've never even been to Santa Fe,'" Ingle told The News in a recent interview. "'I don't know anything about that stuff.'"

But when then-U.S. Sen. Pete Domenici and then-U.S. Rep. Joe Skeen added their voices to the mix, Ingle decided to throw his hat in the ring.

It was a good year for the GOP, with Ronald Reagan beating Walter Mondale in a landslide, and Republicans around the country riding the red wave to victory. Ingle was among them, trouncing Democratic opponent Roger Hardaway.

Ingle said his first day at the Roundhouse was nerve-wracking.

"My gosh, it scares you to death. You have to wear a coat and tie and all that stuff," Ingle said. "They start calling the roll and pretty soon, there's your name. ... You kind of try to choke out a 'here.'"

More challenging than finding his way around the labyrinthine corridors of the Capitol building, though, was learning to navigate the political landscape.

"When you have a vote up there, everybody tells you how smart you are," Ingle said. "The thing you always have to remember is, the instant you don't have a vote, most of those people won't know you."

Political career

Over the next four decades, Ingle grew into a canny operator, longtime colleagues said. He served as minority leader for years, and was particularly knowledgeable about state finances, said Smith, longtime chair of the Senate Finance Committee.

Ingle's political savvy included an unusually reliable gut feeling about which bills would pass muster with whatever governor was in office at the time and which wouldn't.

"He just had ... an ability to interpret what was saleable to the executive branch," Smith said. "That's not something you learn."

While Ingle held conservative views, he was above all a realist, and came to be known as a moderating voice in the Republican Party.

In 2015 and 2016, Ingle and Smith joined forces to forge compromise legislation over the hotly contested question of whether undocumented immigrants should be able to obtain drivers licenses as New Mexico moved toward compliance with the federal Real ID system.

Smith said he and Ingle were both initially firmly in the camp of then-Gov. Susana Martinez, a Republican, who was opposed to measures that could allow people in the country illegally to get licenses. But Smith said they started to hear from employers in their districts concerned about effects on undocumented employees.

"Stu and I said, 'You know, maybe we need to reassess this, it's not working well for this state,'" Smith recalled.

The pair spearheaded the implementation of a two-tier system that would allow people - including undocumented residents - to obtain what was then called a driving authorization card if they were unable or unwilling to get a Real ID. At the behest of immigration advocates, that legislation was later reformed again to the system currently in place today, which allows undocumented state residents and others to use a simpler process to obtain a standard driver's license.

It was more practicality than ideology that got Ingle involved with the effort to legalize the lottery in the state, and with setting up the state lottery scholarship, which now has been awarded to more than 144,000 students in New Mexico.

"It was going to be here, and we weren't going to stop it," Ingle said. "We just had to try to make sure that we kept control of it to where we knew the state was getting its share of the money."

Colleagues said Ingle always cared more about results than party affiliation.

"When it came to state politics and the state of New Mexico ... the question that had to be running through Stu's mind: Is it good for the party or is it good for the state?" Smith said. "Stu Ingle was one of those people who would say it had to be good for the state before he would support it."

Aneurysm

In April 1995, a decade into his political career, Ingle's then-wife found him on the kitchen floor. He had suffered a massive aneurysm.

Ingle was taken to a hospital in Texas, where he underwent a lengthy surgery. He was kept sedated for days.

"I finally woke up, and I didn't even know where I was," Ingle said.

Ingle was a smoker at the time, and was craving a cigarette.

"I remember asking a nurse, ... 'Can I get out of bed and go smoke a cigarette?'" Ingle said. "She looked at me and she said, 'You know, Mr. Ingle, you don't have any luck left.'"

Ingle followed her advice and said he never smoked again.

It took him more than half a year to really recover, Ingle said.

"I was extremely fortunate to come through the surgery as well as I did," he said.

Retirement

Ingle announced in October that he was stepping down. Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham will select Ingle's replacement ahead of the 30-day legislative session that starts in mid-January. The seat will be open for election next year.

Ingle said he hoped to give his appointed replacement a year on the job before that person has to run again.

Now that he's out of office, Ingle said he's planning to spend more time with his family.

Now divorced, Ingle has a daughter in California and another in Texas, each of whom has two daughters of their own.

He still owns property near Portales, though he has mostly retired from farming himself. Ingle said his croplands are leased out to other farmers, while his grasslands are being used by cattle ranchers. Ingle sold most of his farming equipment a few years ago, but still does some work on his land -- checking on fences, and making sure the cattle are in their areas and there's plenty of water for the livestock.

Ingle was recently offered a job as a lobbyist for an organization he declined to name, and said he is considering that offer.

Ingle said New Mexico's energy reserves and trust funds have put the state in a "tremendous situation" going forward.

He said one measure he always hoped to make was right-to-work legislation to guarantee that workers would not have to be forced into a union as a condition of employment.

Ingle said centrism, which is rarer by the year in the current political climate, is a path to progress.

"There's good ideas and good senators and representatives on both sides of the aisle," he said. "You have to hopefully work together for the betterment of the state and make sure that the people out there that we represent are served, and not just a political party."