Española resident Ryan Martinez speaks out about frustrations with a homeless encampment near his home during a town hall meeting Tuesday night. It was the third of three announced stops on Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham's tour across the state highlighting public safety issues.
Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham on Tuesday made Española her third stop on an impromptu public safety tour, hearing from more than a dozen people who spoke up to say they are very concerned about crime, drug addiction and homelessness.
TJ Lopez, a resident of northern Rio Arriba County, said he thanked the governor, on behalf of his daughter, for expansion of early childhood education, but he was worried about the rest of her life. He asked for more sheriff’s deputies in his area.
“What is there for her to look forward to if she can’t be safe?” he asked.
The governor responded that the Legislature has spent heavily on police recruitment and retention in recent years.
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The town hall in the city of around 11,000 people, also a rural hub in northern New Mexico, started as some people are up in arms about a homeless encampment along the Rio Grande. Previous visits were to Las Cruces and Albuquerque, the two biggest cities in the state. Lujan Grisham suggested at the town hall that her tour was not over.
The governor started the town hall tour after lawmakers refused to take up a slate of public safety measures during a special legislative session she called on July 18. At Northern New Mexico College on Tuesday, attendees passed by a table stacked with petitions from the governor’s office that asked the Legislature to “prioritize the well-being of New Mexicans.”
“We are right on the precipice,” Lujan Grishamsaid around 9 p.m. at the Nick Salazar Center for the Arts Theatre, which filled with more than 200 people and slowly emptied throughout the night. “We have to fix it.”
The governor’s special session agenda would have made 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.
Lujan Grisham took more than a dozen questions in Española for nearly five hours on a wide variety of topics related to mental illness, crime, homelessness and drug abuse. Several who spoke began their comments with mentioning how many loved ones they’d lost to drug overdoses, including one woman raising a young relative born with disabilities due to drug exposure in the womb.
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“My cousin literally was dropped off at my home four years ago, and since then I’ve had to advocate on my own. I’ve got no guidance or no help. I’m tired. I’m tired of crying,” said the woman, who didn’t give her name.
Alongside Lujan Grisham were the mayor and police chief of Española, the governor of the Santa Clara Pueblo and several high-ranking staff members. Attendees applauded loudly when she called for stricter penalties on fentanyl dealing and on clearing out the homeless camp in town.
The governor did not directly address why she made Española the third of three announced stops for the tour. She did note that she would like to replicate the city’s panhandling ordinance that went into effect in November 2022.
“We want it statewide, and we want the enforcement tools to do it statewide,” she said.
The Española ordinance bans people from loitering on unpaved medians and medians that are less than 36 inches wide. The governor wants to ban loitering on medians that are less than 36 inches wide in areas where traffic speeds are 30 mph or higher.
Lujan Grisham said New Mexico was becoming known as a state that is less strict about public camping, encampments and other aspects of homelessness, which she said is drawing people from other states to come and live on the streets here.
“When you have this environment, it’s permissive. So other states are saying, ‘You should go to New Mexico. Nothing will happen. You won’t get arrested, and if you do, you’re out in 12 hours.’”
The day of the governor’s town hall, the New Mexico Coalition to End Homelessness released its point-in-time count, an estimate of homelessness trends in the state. It found homelessness is continuing to rise throughout the state, both in Albuquerque and towns like Española, to its highest points since at least 2008.
The survey included responses from about 1,000 people living unsheltered in New Mexico outside of Albuquerque. Of them, about 280 told surveyors they were from out of state, including 56 people from Texas, 24 people from Colorado and 39 people from Arizona. The survey did not specify how many people in Española were surveyed.
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Four questions from residents related to the homeless encampment that has caused tension in the area. On Monday, city staff arrived at the encampment but did not clean it, as they’d threatened to do, according to Española City Councilor Sam Ledoux . The lack of action frustrated Ryan Martinez, an Española and employee for the state Health Care Authority.
Martinez listed off all of his frustrations with the encampment and the crime he said was associated with it. He called on the city to clear people out.
“We have this encampment here in town next to the river, like I say, in the middle of our community, and it seems like our city is enabling these people,” he said.
Española Mayor John Vigil apologized to Martinez for what he said was his mistake in trusting “city staff” recommendations on how to handle the encampment. He promised that the city would take action soon to clear people out and said the City Council would be taking the lead on next steps.
Lujan Grisham said the state’s approach to encampments should be to reach out to those who are living there and connect them with services.
“But also you make it clear there’s accountability, that services doesn’t mean that you can steal and you can be a felon and you can do open drug use, which is a crime,” she said. “So I really want New Mexico cleaned up.”
The governor’s team wrapped up the town hall around 10:15 p.m., nearly five hours after it started.
“Be safe as you get home,” she said to the roughly dozen people who’d sat through the entire meeting.
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