[LWVNM Action] Legislative Special Session April 5th - HB2 Junior Transparency and probably suspending/reducing the state gas tax

[Judy Williams]

Sen. Peter Wirth publishes his Junior projects.  Judy

On Sat, Mar 19, 2022 at 1:20 PM Richard Mason via Action <
action at mailman.swcp.com> wrote:

> From NM Indepth
>
> *Update: Shortly after publishing the following newsletter on Friday,
> Senate President Pro Tem Mimi Stewart, D-Albuquerque, wrote in an email to
> New Mexico in Depth that lawmakers would include transparency in a revised
> junior bill during an upcoming special session. She said lawmakers would
> use as a model new transparency measures passed last year for capital
> outlay allocations. “I wish we had done this originally but we think we
> have an answer to how to make those changes,” she wrote. *
>
> *Later on Friday, Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham and legislative leaders
> announced a special session of the Legislature would convene on April 5, to
> take up a revised junior bill and consider measures they can take to help
> New Mexicans in the face of rising inflation.*
> ------------------------------
>
> After sending out our newsletter
> <https://nmindepth.com/2022/03/11/veto-of-dark-spending-bill-outrages-lawmakers/>
> last week about lawmakers’ outrage over the governor vetoing their dark
> spending bill, I had a moment of deja vu. Why? One lawmaker, Rep. Joy
> Garratt, D-Albuquerque, quickly sent me information about how she spent her
> portion, of the $50 million spending package, and another, Rep. Roger
> Montoya, D-Velarde, said on our Facebook page that we could find his
> appropriations on his website.
>
> It felt like I was about to redo a year-long project from 2019 when I
> asked all 112 state lawmakers to tell me how they were spending their
> individual slices of public infrastructure money, known as capital outlay.
>
> To recap, a few weeks ago Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham vetoed Senate Bill
> 48, in common parlance called the “junior bill”, and lawmakers have rattled
> the cages since then to call themselves into an extraordinary legislative
> session to override her veto. It’s called junior because it’s a special
> supplementary spending bill to the annual state budget.
>
> The junior bill doesn’t happen every year, but when it does, each lawmaker
> gets the chance to earmark a portion of the bill – worth $50 million this
> year – to projects in their districts or across the state. The House and
> Senate each received $25 million, with each House member able to earmark
> about $360,000 and each senator about $600,000 for projects.
>
> Arguments abound about whether or not allowing lawmakers to earmark public
> money as they see fit is good public policy.
>
> Separate from that question is whether or not that information is public.
> Currently, the public can see what projects are funded but not which
> lawmakers requested money to pay for them. In other words, how individual
> lawmakers spend public money under their control via the junior bill is
> kept from the public.
>
> That needs to change.
>
> We’ve fought this battle before. Until recently, the annual state
> infrastructure spending plan contained private earmarks made by individual
> lawmakers.
>
> New Mexico In Depth first reported on the secrecy in capital outlay
> spending in 2015, when the Legislature denied our public records request
> for individual lawmakers’ capital outlay allocations. It took six years to
> make those earmarks more transparent thanks to a concerted effort by a
> group of lawmakers as well as advocacy and media organizations. One can now
> easily find on the Legislature’s website how a particular lawmaker
> allocated public infrastructure money
> <https://www.nmlegis.gov/Publications/Capital_Outlay/SFC%20SUB%20SB212%20by%20Sponsor%20with%20Governors%20Actions,%202022.pdf>
> under their control.
>
> In 2019, after the state senate killed the capital outlay public
> disclosure bill, I asked every lawmaker to send me a list of projects they
> had funded in the public infrastructure bill. It took the better part of
> that year for me to assemble an inventory of projects
> <https://nmindepth.com/2019/12/27/most-but-not-all-lawmakers-make-spending-choices-public/>from
> 97 lawmakers. An additional 15 lawmakers that year refused to provide the
> information, or just didn’t respond.
>
> More than a few lawmakers told me how transparent they were in 2019 as
> they pointed me to their websites or shared their spending requests.
>
> With junior, the public shouldn’t have to spend a year trying to ferret
> out how lawmakers are spending public money. The public shouldn’t have to
> wait six years for state lawmakers to disclose how they spend public money
> and I shouldn’t experience deja vu.
>
> By law it should be public information, not subject to whether a lawmaker
> wants to provide it.
>
> When she sent me her junior bill allocations, Rep. Garratt wrote: “all
> “junior” money allocations should be public—that’s taxpayer money. I think
> there is agreement on that.”
>
> Most lawmakers believed capital outlay spending should have been public in
> 2019 when I requested they hand over their earmarks.
>
> I assume that remains true. If lawmakers override the governor’s veto of
> the junior bill, or pass a new junior bill whenever they meet again, they
> should make their spending public.
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