The New Mexico Legislature and Gov. Susana Martinez are at odds over how to spend a projected $250 million surplus for fiscal year 2013.
Last year, the governor’s budget proposal focused on removing unnecessary costs. This included salary cuts for the governor’s office and trimming administrative expenses in public schools.
This year, the legislature proposes to give money back to programs that had funding cuts, including Medicaid and public-employee pay. The governor wants to use about half of the money to extend tax cuts to businesses. The loss in revenue would be offset by the surplus funds.
Senator Jerry Ortiz y Pino (D, Bernalillo) said the main difference between the Democrat-controlled legislature’s budget and the Republican governor’s recommendation is how to use extra revenue forecast to come in this year. Legislators said the increase in projected revenue came partly from natural gas and oil sales, which generate funding for the state, as well as from taxes.
“I have one major problem with immediately cutting taxes as soon as we have a slight increase in revenue,” Ortiz y Pino said. “We’ve just gone through three consecutive years of belt-tightening. The current budget is still a long way below our recent spending levels. This means we are just slowly restoring things to where they were before. Cutting taxes will make this recovery all the slower.”
Sen. Pete Campos (D, Guadalupe, Mora, San Miguel, Santa Fe, Torrance) said while the executive proposal suggested new money for K–12 public schools, the legislators urged for more emphasis on higher education, including funding for UNM. The legislature recommends $25.6 million more for higher education than the governor’s recommendation.
At the beginning of the legislative session, the governor’s office submitted a proposed list of expenditures for the upcoming fiscal year, which begins on July 1. The Democrat-controlled legislature countered with its own proposal. Both were then submitted to the House Appropriations and Finance Committee, which has since been striving to turn those proposals into House Bill 2.
Rep. Conrad James (R, Bernalillo) said the final budget will be a product of legislative and executive recommendations.
“We look at the two compared budgets and we try to come to some sort of an agreement about the best budget,” he said. “It’s usually a combination of the legislative suggestion and the governor’s executive suggestion.”
Along with debate on the budget comes discussion about collecting the revenue necessary to support it, as well as benefits it would provide to people such as educators and veterans. In the statement attached to the governor’s budget, she mentions House Bill 10, also in committee, which would give a $1,000 tax credit to businesses that employ veterans.
Marilyn Melendez Dykman, director of the UNM Veterans Resource Center, said she hopes the legislature will include the tax credit in the final budget.
“A lot of returning vets are unemployed,” she said. “I think that it’s important to give (returning veterans) the opportunity to reintegrate into society — to provide all the skills they learned in the military to the workforce.”
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Veterans benefits is just one area demanding inclusion in the budget, and the members of the appropriations committee must decide how much money it should receive.
Members of both branches, regardless of party affiliation, agreed on the importance of education and Medicaid, although they do not always agree on how each of these should be funded.
Sen. John Sapien (D, Sandoval) said Medicaid is a major portion of the budget that requires a lot of revenue.
“There’s a hole in the Medicaid budget that we need to fill, in terms of dollars spent that we didn’t have,” he said. “We have overspent the Medicaid budget in past years to fill that back up and also provide an increase. That’s definitely one place where we’ve concentrated resources.”
While lawmakers face some difficult compromises in how to appropriate estimated revenues, they seem to agree on certain issues. Rep. Larry Larrañaga (R, Bernalillo) said the differences between the two budgetary proposals are slight.
“The major differences were obviously ‘how much money do we use’ or ‘(how much) do we think we’re going to have in added revenues,’” Larrañaga said.
Amid committee debates concerning fiscal year 2013 and discussions about revenues and benefits, lawmakers agree that the stability of New Mexico’s financial state is the priority.
“My biggest goal is that we have a balanced budget,” Sapien said. “The 30-day session is constitutionally exclusive to achieve a balanced budget. All other things are up to the governor.”
