Governor, Legislature feud over crime with special session just days away

Gail Chasey, Mimi Stewart, Javier Martinez, Peter Wirth and Christine Chandler announce lawmakers' lack of consensus on the governor's agenda for the upcoming special session at a news conference in Santa Fe on July 15, 2024. (Photo by Austin Fisher / Source NM)

Closed-door disagreements about the special legislative session on crime spilled into public view Monday, with the governor and top legislative leaders hosting dueling press conferences blaming each other for an impasse just days before lawmakers are set to convene.

At a Roundhouse conference room, lawmakers accused the governor of presenting half-baked half-measures to the state’s long-standing problems at the intersection of mental health care, drugs and crime.

“We do not believe these concerns can be effectively remedied in a very condensed special legislative session,” said House Speaker Javier Martínez (D-Albuquerque).

Meanwhile, about 60 miles south of the Roundhouse, Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham used a homeless encampment in Albuquerque as a backdrop for an impromptu news conference. She urged residents to call lawmakers and tell them to introduce her legislation at the special session.

“They were never serious about supporting any of these issues in the first place, and my message for them on behalf of the business owners and the people living here is: shame on you,” the governor said.

Martínez said legislative leaders are serious, but they have deep concerns about the proposals’ potential to harm people facing mental health crises.

“We are not afraid of hard work,” he said. “We’re also not afraid of standing up for what is right, right now, and potentially rushing these bills is not right for New Mexico.”

The governor’s agenda would make it easier for police to involuntarily commit people with psychiatric diagnoses or for courts to hold them in jail. It would also ban loitering on certain medians across the state and raise penalties for having a gun if someone has a prior felony conviction.

Standing near First Street and Arvada Avenue near Albuquerque’s downtown, the governor said leaders at the Legislature told her Friday they wouldn’t work on any bills and that their members hadn’t read her proposals. She said lawmakers also canceled a meeting with the governor at her residence. And lawmakers canceled hearings on proposed legislation at an interim committee meeting set for Monday morning.

“We ought to be coming together as a state,” Lujan Grisham said. “We can be compassionate. We can provide tough love. We can solve affordability issues, but we have to do that collectively as a state. We have to get off this merry-go-round.”

Amid the legislative gridlock, a spokesperson for the governor said Lujan Grisham is seeking a Republican sponsor for one bill cracking down on organized crime.

In a statement to Source New Mexico, spokesperson Jodi McGinnis Porter said the governor’s team had “conversations with Republican leaders about potentially strengthening the state’s RICO (Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations) laws during the special session.”

Spokespersons for House and Senate Republicans did not immediately respond to requests for comment Monday afternoon. New Mexico Republicans have also been critical of Lujan Grisham’s plans for the special session .

Gov would entertain ‘modest changes’ to her bills

High-ranking lawmakers from both chambers said Monday they have not been able to reach a consensus on Lujan Grisham’s legislative agenda.

The New Mexico Constitution requires special sessions only address what the governor lays out in a proclamation. The proclamation isn’t set for release until Thursday morning before the session’s noon start, according to members of the governor’s office.

But there’s little control after the proclamation is issued. The rules committees in each chamber decide whether a bill is “ germane ,” and there’s no means to appeal those decisions.

Oh, the germaneity!

Still, Lujan Grisham could veto any bill introduced and passed at the session that isn’t one she endorsed. McGinnis Porter said that the governor is “open to good ideas about how we can make New Mexico safer.”

She also said Lujan Grisham would be “willing to listen to lawmakers who may propose modest changes to bills she has already proposed.”

But lawmakers don’t like the bills the governor has already proposed, Martínez said at the news conference.

“Unfortunately, what several weeks of meetings and conversations have also shown us is that the proposed policies are not the kind of meaningful solutions we need right now,” Martínez said.

Senate Majority Leader Peter Wirth (D-Santa Fe) said special sessions “only work when the bills are cooked.”

“We’re not saying we disagree with making changes; we need more time,” Wirth said.

Wirth said there was initial support when Lujan Grisham first announced the session, but that soured.

The areas of law the governor wants to change are “extraordinarily complex,” said Wirth, who is an attorney in his private life.

Senate President Pro Tempore Mimi Stewart (D-Albuquerque) said special sessions are only effective when proposals are vetted in advance, so lawmakers can walk into the chambers with confidence that the laws they’re about to pass would be good for New Mexicans.

“It would be irresponsible of us, as legislators, to ignore this very real fact,” she said.

Critical voices still need to be consulted, Stewart said, pointing to last week’s letter to the governor by mental health care providers and advocates which asked her to call off the special session.

“We respect their expertise in these matters, and agree that more thoughtful and rigorous work needs to happen before we enact any new laws,” Stewart said.

‘Enough is enough’

The governor’s staff found two business owners nearby who spoke at the street corner news conference about their daily challenges and fears for their safety near the encampment.

Albuquerque Mayor Tim Keller also spoke and said the stretch of Arvada Avenue where he stood had been swept twice a week for months, only to see criminal activity and the encampments return each time. He said he urgently needed the state’s help to end that cycle.

Albuquerque is throwing out the belongings of homeless people, violating city policy

The governor said there simply isn’t enough time to wait.

“If these individuals will not seek care, and break laws and come right back to the streets, there is nothing we can do to interrupt this chaos,” Lujan Grisham said. “Shame on us if we’re not going to come together and find solutions to make our businesses safer and, more importantly, our families safer.”

Speaking in front of press and television cameras, a member of her staff read out the office phone numbers of House and Senate Democratic leadership, urging the public to call on them to move forward with her agenda.

“I apologize for the amount of time this has taken all of us to get right here on the ground and say ‘enough is enough,’” Lujan Grisham said.

The issues Lujan Grisham has raised are urgent and important, Martínez said. He said people in Ruidoso and in Northern New Mexico, who are dealing with the aftermath of wildfires, have “other urgent and pressing needs as well.”

“Our caucuses are ready to step up and help,” Martínez said.

One piece of legislation that could be introduced at the session would provide aid to those affected by the South Fork and Salt fires, according to the governor’s office, potentially in the form of zero-interest loans to local governments who are dealing with the ongoing disaster.

Roundhouse one step away from giving millions for Hermits Peak-Calf Canyon fire recovery

Public meeting canceled

The Courts, Corrections & Justice Committee was scheduled to meet with the governor’s staff on Monday morning, but the meeting was canceled because “we were at a place where we didn’t feel it would be a productive exchange,” said Chair Christine Chandler (D-Los Alamos).

“We’ve seen the draft bills, we’ve given feedback on the draft bills, and I think it’s fair to say there will not be consensus in the committee to move forward on the bills,” she said.

On July 11, Chandler told Source New Mexico that language in the bills around civil commitment and criminal competency was “not tight enough” to prevent being overly broad and punitive.

“We’re talking about liberty interests, right? And that means they have to be very tightly drafted and clear,” she said. “Because we do not want any unintended consequences where people who should not be committed are being committed. That’s a big deal.”

Chandler is also concerned the median safety bill , which would make it a crime for pedestrians to loiter on medians fewer than 36 inches wide on fast-moving streets across the state, is too blunt a tool to reduce pedestrian deaths.

She said the governor’s office needs to present data showing that the bill would survive a First Amendment lawsuit by being narrowly-tailored enough to reduce deaths without unnecessarily limiting speech.

No lawmaker has signed up to sponsor NM Gov’s panhandling bill

Her panel will reconvene on Tuesday and Wednesday to hear the rest of their pending agenda, she said at the news conference in Santa Fe. But there is one major change, according to the agenda: The governor’s office is no longer scheduled for a “potential follow-up” presentation Tuesday afternoon.

Committee Vice Chair Joseph Cervantes (D-Las Cruces) crashed another legislative meeting on Monday morning in Socorro on his way up to Santa Fe.

Chandler and Cervantes both chair the judiciary committees in their respective chambers, meaning any legislation amending criminal statutes would likely have to clear their committees to have any chance of becoming law.

Cervantes questioned whether the governor’s initiatives make sense at a statewide level. He also pointed to the governor’s median safety bill, widely seen as an effort to reduce panhandling, as an example of where a state law would make little sense in small towns such as Lordsburg.

“Is it a statewide problem, or a Bernalillo County problem?” Cervantes said.

Cervantes also noted that one of the governor’s requests is to increase prison time for people convicted of possessing a gun after having previously been convicted of a felony, saying that effort is ineffective in deterring crime.

NM governor wants more prison time for people convicted of felonies who face new gun charges

“The people that’ll be advocating for that – increasing it again – will be the first ones to tell you it has not made one bit of difference,” he said.

The governor, at her news conference in Albuquerque, defended the panhandling bill as one way to make a dent in the state’s rate of pedestrian fatalities – the nation’s highest.

“​​This is a way to start to manage these high-traffic areas, keep more New Mexicans safe, keep the person on the median safe,” she told reporters. “If I wait for everything to be … perfect, we won’t do anything.”

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