D  e  s  e  r  t     E  x  p  o  s  u  r  e    March 2006

30-Day Dud

The legislature drops the ball again—and keeps its doors closed so we can't see why.

 

Does anybody know what just happened? With the recent state legislative session, I mean—it seems like the whole thing was like a very bad date. First there was a long seduction, lots of the legislative equivalent of wining and dining, and then wham! bam! the whole session was consummated in a mad rush so rapid the taxpayers barely had time to figure out who was tangling the sheets.

Admittedly, the legislature had an overfull plate (to abruptly switch metaphors) for an already frantic 30-day session. But recent history suggests that neither the process nor the results would have been much different in a 60-day stint—or 90 days or 120 days, for that matter. The New Mexico State Legislature is simply dysfunctional, and resists any attempts to make its arcane and secretive workings more transparent. Witness the failure in the just-completed session to require legislative conference committees to open their meetings—where the real decisions on key bills and hundreds of millions of dollars in taxpayer funding get made—to the public. The 2006 rush to judgment also rejected limits on large cash contributions to candidates and a requirement for disclosure of more campaign finance data.

In short, your money gets spent in secret meetings by legislators whose influence may or may not have been bought and paid for (but you'll never know). And the real decisions all happen so fast that the weeks of grip-and-grin meetings earlier in the session seem like a sham. You can contact your legislator and feel like you've had your say—but the real say comes in a frenzy of closed-door conferences and a few frantic hours at session's end.

Even that wouldn't be so bad if the good-old-boy (and -girl) politicking actually got done what the majority of New Mexicans want accomplished. But this is the system that in previous legislative sessions has repeatedly failed to ban cockfighting or to force the fish and game department to stiffen regulation of trapping, two topics that we've covered extensively in these pages. (See the March 2005 issue on cockfighting and the September 2004 and June 2005 issues of Desert Exposure on trapping.) Surveys have consistently shown a clear majority of New Mexicans want something done about cockfighting and trapping abuses on public lands. Yet nothing happens. Similarly, last session and again this year, the legislature grappled with restrictions on payday loans (see our June 2004 issue), which victimize those least able to pay their usurious fees—but failed to take action.

Other critical problems languish for lack of legislative action. Among the measures that died in the final rush of the 2006 session were tougher penalties for repeat domestic-violence offenders and longer sentences for gang-related crimes and sex offenders. Efforts to relieve the "pyramiding" of New Mexico's enterprise-stifling gross-receipts tax likewise failed. The legislature couldn't figure out a way to raise the minimum wage while addressing the concerns of southern New Mexico agricultural and food-packaging interests, so nothing got done.

Even closer to home, what happened to the $5 million request for a new Silver City public library and southwest research center? In the fading hours of the session, this important piece of the general obligation bond issue package simply disappeared. Even those who'd traveled to Santa Fe to lobby for it were left scratching their heads well into the following week—unsure when or how it had been cut or who was responsible. Presumably, the lamentable local bickering over where a new library should be located gave somebody in Santa Fe an excuse to excise the funding, but not even those closest to the question really know.

Somehow the legislature did find the time to pass most of the spaceport funding. In those 30 hectic days, however, we can't help but wonder if the legislators really had the time to consider the complex questions we explored in last month's in-depth article on the spaceport ("Have Spacesuit, Will Travel"). If Virgin Galactic's heavily hyped space-tourism venture winds up like a 21st-century Hindenburg—or gets beaten out by newly announced competition (see this issue's Tumbleweeds section)—will legislators look back and, like us, wonder numbly, "What happened?" The spaceport might yet be the ticket to southern New Mexico's high-tech future, but we can't help noticing that the first launch—originally scheduled for this month—has already been postponed.

Your representatives in Santa Fe also made time for the truly important business of considering an official "State Cowboy Song." Thank goodness stuff like domestic violence and usurious lenders didn't distract them from debating such urgent concerns.

We could do more than merely shake our heads in dismay if this November offered a real chance to punish area legislators who dropped the ball on key issues and who voted against opening conference-committee meetings to the public. But the sad fact is that many legislators from both parties will run unopposed. If you don't like their performance or they didn't really listen to their constituents—well, tough.

You know, the US has recently spent billions of dollars and thousands of lives trying to bring representative democracy to far-off places like Afghanistan and Iraq. Even the Palestinians have embraced democracy, although the US and Israel aren't too happy about how they voted. There's talk of democracy sweeping the world, or at least the Middle East.

Democratically elected representatives putting the will of the people into action —now there's a concept. Maybe New Mexico ought to try it.

David A. Fryxell is editor of Desert Exposure.

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