The lawmaking season is upon us once again. The 30-day 2024 legislative sessionstarts next Tuesday at noon and as we have since 2013, New Mexico In Depth will be in Santa Fe.
It’s our 12th legislative session at New Mexico In Depth. And, as always, we’ll cover a number of topics we’ve reported on over the past year.
Here’s a short (but not complete) list:
• The harm alcohol does. We’re still No. 1 in the nation when it comes to alcohol-related deaths.
• Missing and murdered Indigenous women and relatives. Despite high-flying rhetoric, the state hasn’t been as ambitious at tackling this crisis among the state’s Indigenous population as some elected officials would have you believe.
• Education. Will lawmakers deposit money into a trust fund that tribes and pueblos are empowered to manage on their own? Or will they continue to simply dole out annual grants to Native communities?
• Transparency and ethics. As the state awaits word whether the latest elected official to be charged with corruption will go to trial or agree to a plea deal, we’re going to examine the laws and regulations that serve as guardrails for elected officials and policy makers and what the Legislature is doing, or not, to strengthen public trust.
• Health care. The state’s urban and rural areas don’t have enough medical and health care professionals, but the rural areas get the worst of it, as we reported this past fall.
This year marks my 19th year of journalism reporting on or editing stories about the New Mexico Legislature. I started with the Albuquerque Journal, then moved to the New Mexico Independent in 2008, the state’s first, and groundbreaking, public policy and politics digital nonprofit news organization. During those years, our team webcast legislative committees and floor sessions — along with a few lawmakers — giving people not physically at the Roundhouse a way to watch their elected officials at work. That effort led to the wholesale webcasting by the Legislature that we have today. Then I spent a year and a half at the Santa Fe New Mexican before working with Heath Haussamen to create New Mexico In Depth, a nonprofit news organization fully rooted in New Mexico that has been reporting on the statehouse and investigating issues across the state since 2013. We kicked off our work back then with a multi-part series examining the tenure of then-governor Susana Martinez.
Over two decades, I’ve seen lawmakers and elected officials in Santa Fe come and go. I’m on my third governor and fifth House speaker. My repository of stories now includes funny or poignant memories from 20 years observing the Roundhouse. And, as my kids remind me, I am not immune from retelling a few of them.
It’s not uncommon these days for me to run into current or former elected officials and policy makers and ordinary New Mexicans, whether at the Roundhouse or in Santa Fe or in Albuquerque. And usually we will reminisce, sometimes laughingly, sometimes poignantly, about the people we remember — previous governors, lawmakers, cabinet secretaries, lobbyists, advocates — but also gripping debates and behind-the scenes machinations we witnessed.
So here I am, going into another session watching the law making, and the lawmakers – the veterans and the new corps – as they debate and pass or kill highly consequential laws that deeply impact people’s lives.
The beat goes on.