Senate Democrats crafting crime package with focus on expanding behavioral health programs

SANTA FE — Top New Mexico Democratic lawmakers are crafting a crime package for the upcoming 60-day session that could include setting up a new trust fund to bolster behavioral health treatment programs statewide.

Senate President Pro Tem Mimi Stewart, D-Albuquerque, said Monday the legislative package will also feature bills dealing with firearm safety and the large number of individuals deemed incompetent to stand trial.

While the bills are still being finalized, Stewart said the package would focus largely on expanding mental health and drug abuse treatment options.

“Having treatment programs all over the state is where we’re headed,” she told the Journal.

The money needed to expand such programs would come from the creation of a new state trust fund that, if approved, would spin off annual distributions in future years.

Lawmakers have already created trust funds for early childhood programs, statewide conservation projects and higher education in recent years amid an ongoing state revenue boom.

Due largely to surging oil production in southeast New Mexico’s Permian Basin, the state is projected to collect $13.4 billion in revenue for the coming budget year — or about $660 million above current spending levels.

While the number of behavioral health providers in New Mexico has increased in recent years, the gap between the projected demand and supply of addiction and mental health counselors is expected to steadily grow over the next decade, according to the National Center for Health Workforce Analysis.

“We just don’t have a good, solid statewide behavioral health system,” said Stewart, who added former Gov. Susana Martinez’s dismantling of the state’s previous system in 2013 amid fraud allegations played a significant role in the current situation.

Stewart, who won reelection last week to a Senate district that encompasses Albuquerque’s International District, said it’s “unbelievable” how many people she sees on the street along Central Avenue.

However, Senate Minority Leader William Sharer, R-Farmington, said he’s not convinced spending more money on treatment programs will fix New Mexico’s crime problem.

“Something changed in the last few decades,” Sharer said. “The crime problems in Albuquerque weren’t in Albuquerque 20 years ago, at least not at this level.”

But he also said he would need to study further the proposed crime legislation before deciding whether he would support it.

Crime emerged this summer as a point of disagreement between Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham and legislative leaders in her own party. The Democratic governor called lawmakers to Santa Fe for a special session in July, but that session was adjourned after five hours and no action on her crime-related agenda.

Lujan Grisham said after the special session that legislators should be “embarrassed at their inability to summon even an ounce of courage to adopt common-sense legislation” intended to make New Mexicans safer.

But lawmakers responded by highlighting data showing millions of dollars allocated for public safety initiatives over the past five years has gone unspent by the Lujan Grisham administration, due largely to high vacancy rates and other staffing issues.

For her part, Stewart said the crime package Senate Democrats are crafting has been developed largely without input from the Governor’s Office. But she said it will address many of Lujan Grisham’s crime-related priorities, including changes to how the state deals with repeat offenders who are found incompetent to stand trial.

While New Mexico’s violent crime and property crime rates both dropped in 2023 compared to the previous year, the state still posted the nation’s second-highest violent crime rate. New Mexico also had the nation’s fourth-highest suicide rate in 2022.

Meanwhile, more than one-third of adult state residents reported anxiety or a depressive disorder in 2023, according to Kaiser Family Foundation data.

The 60-day legislative session begins Jan. 21. Democrats will hold a sizable majority in both legislative chambers, though Republicans are poised to pick up one seat in both the Senate and House of Representatives, based on last week’s general election results.