The Seal of the State of New Mexico inside the Roundhouse on Jan. 10, 2024. (Photo by Anna Padilla for Source NM)
As New Mexico In Depth has reported periodically over the years, New Mexico has one of the weirdest ways of dedicating public money toward brick-and-mortar projects. One of the consequences of its almost entirely unique approach to “capital outlay” is a portion of the public dollars sit unspent for years.
The Legislature’s budget arm, the Legislative Finance Committee, is out with its latest report tracking how big that unspent pile is. The first sentence of the report sums up the situation: As of June, “outstanding capital outlay balances totaled an estimated $5.9 billion across roughly 5,600 projects.”
This article was first published by New Mexico In Depth . It is republished here with permission.
That’s a lot of money. To those of us who follow how public dollars are spent — New Mexico In Depth has followed how money is spent on brick-and-mortar projects on and off for nearly a decade — the figure is not surprising. Public dollars sitting unspent is a chronic problem for New Mexico.