The 2025 New Mexico legislative session is a 60-day session. It begins January 21 and ends on March 22, 2025. Legislation is already being prepared for the upcoming session by the legislature. Democrats will hold a sizable majority in both legislative chambers. In the NM House, Democrats have the majority with 44 Democrats to 26 Republicans. In the NM Senate, Democrats have the majority with 28 Democrats to 14 Republicans.
New Mexico Senate President Pro Tem Mimi Stewart, D-Albuquerque, announced that New Mexico Democratic lawmakers are crafting a crime package for the upcoming 60-day session that could include setting up a new trust fund to bolster behavioral health treatment programs statewide. Although the bills are still being finalized, Stewart said the legislative package will concentrate on expanding mental health and substance abuse and drug treatment options. The goal is to have treatment programs all over the state. Senator Stewart said the legislation will include bills dealing with firearm safety and the large number of individuals deemed incompetent to stand trial.
According to Stewart, the money needed to expand such programs will come from the creation of a new state trust fund that would spin off annual distributions in future years. Lawmakers have already created such trust funds for early childhood programs, statewide conservation projects and higher education amid an ongoing state revenue boom. Surging oil production in southeast New Mexico’s Permian Basin has resulted in the state having a projected $13.4 billion in revenue for the coming budget year, or about $660 million above current spending levels.
CONFLICT WITH THE GOVERNOR
Stewart said the crime package Senate Democrats are crafting has been developed largely without input from the Governor’s Office. She said it will address many of Governor Lujan Grisham’s crime-related priorities. It will include changes to how the state deals with repeat offenders who are found incompetent to stand trial.
While New Mexico’s violent crime and property crime rates both dropped in 2023 compared to the previous year, the state still posted the nation’s second-highest violent crime rate. New Mexico also had the nation’s fourth-highest suicide rate in 2022. According to Kaiser Family Foundation data more than one-third of adult state residents reported anxiety or a depressive disorder in 2023,.
This past summer, spiking violent crime rates were a major point of conflict between Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham and legislative leaders from both parties. Lujan Grisham called lawmakers into a special session in July, but that session was adjourned after five hours and none of her legislative crime-related packaged passed. Democrats rebuffed several of the governor’s public safety proposals, saying they weren’t ready and could cause more harm than good. That included reforms to what happens to those deemed incompetent to stand trial. Lujan Grisham said after the special session that legislators should be “embarrassed at their inability to summon even an ounce of courage to adopt common-sense legislation” intended to make New Mexicans safer.
State lawmakers responded to the Governors criticism by highlighting data showing millions of dollars allocated for public safety initiatives over the past 5 years that has gone unspent by the Lujan Grisham administration, due largely to high public safety position vacancy rates and other staffing issues.
Senate Republican Minority Leader William Sharer, R-Farmington, said he would need to study further the proposed crime legislation before deciding whether he would support it. Sharer said he’s not convinced spending more money on treatment programs will fix New Mexico’s crime problem and he said this:
“Something changed in the last few decades. … The crime problems in Albuquerque weren’t in Albuquerque 20 years ago, at least not at this level.”
LEGISLATORS LOOK AT OVERHAULING BEHAVIORAL HEALTH SYSTEM
According to the National Center for Health Workforce Analysis (NCHW), the number of behavioral health providers in New Mexico has increased in recent years. NCHW also found the gap between the projected demand and supply of addiction and mental health counselors is expected to steadily grow over the next decade.
On November 18, the Legislative Finance Committee meet and discussed overhauling the states behavioral health system. Senator Mimi Stewart, whose Senate district encompasses Albuquerque’s International District said this:
“We just don’t have a good, solid statewide behavioral health system.”
Stewart noted it was former Gov. Susana Martinez’s dismantling of the state’s previous mental health care system in 2013 that caused the problem. A decade ago, then-Gov. Susana Martinez’s administration largely dismantled the state’s behavioral health care system by freezing the Medicaid funding of several key providers, alleging fraud and abuse. Martinez brought in 5 out of state providers who eventually failed and left the State. The New Mexico providers were cleared by the Attorney General, but many of them simply went out of business and the system has never fully recovered.
BEHAVIORAL HEALTH FUNDING GOES UNSPENT
In addition to a crime package, state lawmakers will likely do something about New Mexico’s less-than-adequate behavioral health system. It’s clear that New Mexico lawmakers know there’s not enough behavioral health resources to handle the issues. It’s also clear that throwing money at the system is not making it better, especially when its not spent.
Analysts with the Legislative Finance Committee revealed that between 2020 and 2024, state leaders earmarked more than $660 million for behavioral health resources and initiatives but only spent around $46 million, roughly 8%, and that’s only part of the funding identified. New Mexico state lawmakers have expressed dissatisfaction which was supposed to be a well-funded behavioral health system but which is in fact deficient. Sen. George Muñoz said this:
“I mean, if we had a grade it’d be F, right? … The [behavioral health] system is failing us, and it’s creating crime, homelessness, a lot of other social issues. So we got to get it fixed, or start that direction really quickly. It’ll be a five-to-seven-year fix, but I mean that amount of money sitting around, not getting used is just unreal. … Out of a billion dollars, can you name one thing that we fixed in mental health?”
Lawmakers learned the “Interagency Behavioral Health Purchasing Collaborative,” which was created in 2004 to oversee the statewide behavioral system, has not had a leader in over a year. State Rep. Jack Chatfield asked this: “Why is the reason that, with that much funding, we don’t have a director?” Legislative Finance Committee analyst Eric Chenier responded “We haven’t found the right candidate at this point,” said Eric Chenier, a Legislative Finance Committee analyst. House Minority Leader, Rep. Gail Armstrong reacted by saying “Why would we trust them now to do something that they were supposed to be doing for the last 20 years?”
PROPOSED SOLUTION
During the November 18 meeting of the Legislative Finance Committee, LFC analysts proposed a solution to address the failure to spend monies allocated and restructure the States Behavioral Health System. Specifically, it was propose to restructure the state’s behavioral health system into several, regional districts that will focus on figuring where the gaps are and how to fix them. Adrian Avila, a Legislative Finance Committee analyst said this:
“The reality is, the tailoring of the system needs to be done at the local, regional level. They know what their gaps are, and if they don’t, let’s facilitate them to figure out what those gaps are.”
State lawmakers suggested there’s still a lot of work to be done ahead of the legislative session, but there’s hope two months out. Said state Rep. Meredith Dixon said this:
“I’m very optimistic. We have heard that a number of committees in the interim are working on proposals, very expansive proposals. They’ve had the time to really dive deep into these issues and work together”
Links to quoted and relied upon news source material are here:
COMMENTARY AND ANALYSIS
According to one study, more than 3,200 people charged with crimes since 2017 in New Mexico have been released back into the community after being found incompetent to stand trial. More than 5,350 of the 16,045 dismissed charges were felonies. The dismissals include those charged with first-degree murder, trafficking controlled substances, kidnapping and abuse of a child.
During the 2025 session, the Legislature should seek to create a “mental health treatment court” to function as outreach and a treatment court for the drug addicted and the mentally ill, in a mandatory hospital or counseling settings, and not involving jail incarceration. There is a major need for the construction and staffing of mental health facilities or hospitals to provide the services needed for the mentally ill and drug addicted.
Defendants charged with lesser crimes have been repeat offenders caught in a cycle of being charged, released, arrested again, charged again, and let go after court-ordered evaluations showed they cannot participate in their own defense and ruled they were mentally incompetent to stand trial.
Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham and the Legislature must strengthen and expand New Mexico’s mental health commitment laws, coupled with full funding for mental health facilities and the courts. District attorneys and public defenders must be made a part of the solution by expanding the state mental health commitment laws and allowing the filing of civil mental health commitments that go beyond existing 3-day, 7-day and 30-day evaluation commitments and mandate prolonged mental health treatment.
District judges should be required to order district attorneys to file “involuntary commitment” proceedings against criminal defendants who are found incompetent to stand trial and who would be released without further criminal prosecution for crimes committed.
The 2025 Legislature should enact the governor’s proposal for the involuntary civil commitment of criminal defendants charged with a serious violent offense, a felony involving the use of a firearm, and those defendants who have also been found incompetent to stand trial two or more times in the past 12 months.
The Legislature should also enact the governor’s proposed bill that will broaden the definitions of danger to oneself and danger to others in New Mexico’s involuntary commitment statute that mandates involuntary treatment for people with mental illness. The law should mandate district attorneys to initiate involuntary civil commitments and allow a judge to mandate outpatient treatment.
It should allow individuals, whether first responders, family members or community members who work with mentally ill individuals on the streets, to request involuntary outpatient treatment.
New Mexico has historical surplus revenues with an astonishing $3.6 billion in reported surplus revenue. Now is the time to create a statewide a mental health court and dedicate funding for the construction of behavioral health hospitals and drug rehabilitation treatment facilities.
Funding for district attorneys and public defenders with dedicated personnel resources for the filing and defending of civil mental health commitments must be included.
A statewide mental health court with mandatory civil commitments will get treatment to those who need it the most, help get the unhoused off the streets and help families with loved ones who resist any mental health treatment.”
Far more needs to be done. Warehousing the mentally ill, drug addicted or the unhoused who are mentally ill or drug addicted in jails for crimes committed is simply not the answer. It does not address treatment, nor is it much of a solution.