SANTA FE, N.M. (AP) — New Mexico’s Democrat-led Legislature delivered on a handful of the governor’s major priorities in her calls for public safety reforms, gun control, housing construction and the use of incentives to forge new solutions to climate change, near the close of a 30-day legislative session Thursday at noon.
Legislators forged an annual budget plan that slows down a spending spree linked to an oil production bonanza in the Permian Basin that overlaps southeastern New Mexico and portions of Texas.
Finalized on Tuesday, the budget bill funnels the lion’s share of a multibillion-dollar general fund surplus into a series of trust accounts designed to sustain future spending if the world’s thirst for oil falters, as well as debt-free spending on roadways.
“We could see a day of reckoning a lot quicker than what you think,” state Sen. George Muñoz of Gallup, a lead budget negotiator, told a Senate panel. “You can’t just look at today and say, ‘I’m going to spend this today, and what’s going to happen tomorrow?’”