Sanchez on Guv’s freeze: So what?
Tuesday, October 27, 2009, 3:38pm
Sen. Michael Sanchez said today the budget-reducing legislation passed by the state legislature last week will have minor effects on local schools.
He put the final cut to school districts’ budgets at less than one percent. He said the more significant impact is to state employees, with state departments hit by a 7.6 percent cut.
“The state employees are just finally figuring out what happened to them,” Sanchez said.
He said the amendment by Sen. Eric Griego to cut $150 million worth of capital outlay projects will have no impact.
“His amendment is a ‘nothing’ amendment. It doesn’t add anything. Those projects are frozen anyway if you think about it realistically and logically,” he said. “How can you get $150 million worth of projects done in a two-month period? You can’t.”
He said the reason project cuts weren’t made at the special session is because “no one wants their projects cut,” which would have bogged down legislation.
To Gov. Bill Richardson’s freeze on capital outlay projects, which was announced yesterday, Sanchez said: “So what?”
“Did he freeze any of his projects?” Sanchez said. “The interchange in Belen. The money for a solar energy company. He didn’t seem to mention those.”
Sanchez, who pointed out the legislature took no capital outlay money at the 2009 regular session but the governor did, said the governor needs to take a look at freezing his own “special projects.”
“That’s fine with me,” he said. “Stop it all. There are projects out there that need to be stopped.”
He said protecting any one area from cuts means the solution will be found somewhere else, which is what happened during the special session when the legislature wasn’t allowed to consider taxes.
“The governor’s playing games with words right now, in my opinion, saying, ‘Oh they’re going to cut services to Medicaid,’” Sanchez said. “That wasn’t the intent in any way, shape or form. What the thought process was behind the amounts that had to be cut from the state agencies is that maybe they would have to start trimming the fat out of those agencies. There’s a lot of fat in agencies: new cars, new computers, decorations for offices. There’s just a lot of fluff. We’re hoping he’ll take a look at that. But we’ll see what he does.”
Sanchez said the state can’t tax itself out of the debt but needs options on the table.
“We’ll close the corporate loophole. We’ll do taxes on liquor, alcohol, sweets. We’ll probably — and it’ll hurt the cities — we’ll start collecting on food and medicine again,” he said, adding, “We can’t keep giving the higher income people the break that we gave them, even though it filters down a little bit.”
He said $2-million in Valencia County projects were discussed at the special session and circulated on lists to either be cut or have their funding sources swapped, shifting them from the general fund to severance tax bonds.
He said many of the listed projects had been completed anyway, using the example of the Dennis Chavez Elementary School gym. Some of the gym’s money — $148,500 — was on the chopping block but the gym was constructed two years ago. Some of the funding from projects appeared to involve only the projects’ remaining balances because the projects had been completed.
Sanchez thought he had a pretty good special session in terms of bringing people together to start working on solutions.
“It was a tough session,” he said. “If not the toughest session I’ve been in, it was one of the toughest.”
He said the state could be $600 million to $1 billion in the hole by January.
He also said that while he’s still considering running for governor he hasn’t announced any decision because he wants to remain focused on January’s session and the serious issues facing New Mexico.
