Lawmakers gave the attorney general $1 million in 2022 to help find missing Indigenous people. The money hasn’t been spent. 

Nearly two years after state lawmakers set aside $1 million for the New Mexico Attorney General’s office to create an online portal to track cases of missing Indigenous people, and potentially give tribes grants to help in that search, the office hasn’t spent the money. Lawmakers in early 2022 considered the need so great they attached an emergency clause to the legislation, meaning then-Attorney General Hector Balderas could have started spending the money that February instead of months later, the usual practice for most new laws. 

An audit of programs completed earlier this year, though, revealed the funds weren’t used while Balderas was in office, according to Lauren Rodriguez, communications director for Balderas’ successor, Raúl Torrez. Balderas couldn’t be reached for comment. 

Despite Torrez taking over more than 10 months ago, the money continues to sit untouched. Part of the reason, according to Rodriguez, is that about six months after lawmakers appropriated the money for the attorney general’s office, the FBI created a database of Indigenous people missing from New Mexico and the Navajo Nation, to which all law enforcement agencies, including tribal, can submit information. But other provisions in the statute haven’t been met, either.

Attorney General to Investigate School Discipline at Gallup McKinley Schools

New Mexico Attorney General Raúl Torrez is opening an investigation into disproportionately harsh punishment of Native American children by Gallup McKinley County Schools.  

New Mexico In Depth and ProPublica reported in December that Native students are expelled from New Mexico public schools at a much higher rate than other children, and that Gallup McKinley, with the largest Native student population of any public school district in the U.S., is largely responsible. 

The district, which includes large swaths of the Navajo Nation in northwestern New Mexico, enrolls a quarter of the state’s Native students but was responsible for at least three-quarters of Native expulsions, according to student discipline data. The district’s annual expulsion rate was 4.6 per 1,000 students, at least 10 times as high as the rest of the state during the four school years ending in 2020. 

Superintendent Mike Hyatt disputed those findings, claiming his district misreported long-term suspensions to the state Public Education Department (PED) as expulsions. But Gallup McKinley’s rate of student removals from school for 90 days or longer, regardless of what those removals were called, remained far higher than the rest of the state, an analysis by the news outlets confirmed. 

Gallup McKinley officials did not respond this week to questions about Torrez’s intention to investigate the district’s discipline disparities. The Attorney General’s office has traditionally defended public bodies accused of wrongdoing, rather than investigate them. Torrez, who took office in January, expressed dismay that it’s taken this long for the Attorney General’s office to investigate agencies and school districts suspected of violating New Mexicans’ civil rights.

Crisis of missing and murdered Indigenous people brings federal commission to Albuquerque

Savanna Greywind. Daisy Mae Heath. Ashlynne Mike.The reading aloud of those names and five other missing or murdered Indigenous women and girls followed by a moment of silence opened a three-day hearing of the Not Invisible Act Commission in Albuquerque on Wednesday. 

The federal commission — made up of tribal leaders, law enforcement, service providers, impacted families, and survivors — has traveled the country this year, visiting Oklahoma, Alaska, Arizona, Minnesota and California to hear testimony from people most affected by the crisis of missing and murdered Indigenous people. 

Testimony gathered in those places and in Albuquerque this week and Montana next month will inform a final report due in October. Its purpose is to help Congress, Interior Secretary Deb Haaland and U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland improve how federal, state and local government agencies respond to the crisis. Confusion among governments over jurisdiction and a lack of dollars and dedicated personnel often impede investigations, many advocates and law enforcement officials say.“The families are tired,” Amber Kanazbah Crotty, a commissioner and Navajo Nation Council delegate, said.

Supreme Court Case Could Reshape Indigenous Water Rights in the Southwest

A close-up view of center-pivot irrigation watering corn on Navajo Agricultural Products Industry farmland. (Photo courtesy of NAPI)

Tucked away on the northern New Mexico portion of the 27,000-square-mile Navajo Nation is a green oasis in an otherwise arid, often overgrazed landscape. The region, which received only 3.8 inches of rain in 2020, is home to one of the largest tracts of contiguous farmland in the continental United States. Water from Navajo Lake flows through 70 miles of canals before heading down an additional 340 miles of lateral irrigation ditches to a sea of roughly 700 central pivot-irrigated circles. There, the Navajo Agricultural Products Industry, known as NAPI, grows blue cornmeal, whole sumac berries, and juniper trees, among other culturally relevant foods under the Navajo Pride label.

Torrez: School discipline disparities would be priority for new civil rights division

A school bus takes students home in rural New Mexico. Image: Marjorie Childress/New Mexico In Depth

New Mexico Attorney General Raúl Torrez wants the Legislature to make explicit his power to investigate possible civil rights violations in New Mexico, with a focus first on children, including racial disparities in school discipline and problems at the state’s troubled child welfare department. Torrez cited recent reports of a “pattern of disparate penalties or discipline meted out to various groups, particularly Native American students,” as well as “some very serious issues” at the state Children, Youth and Families Department (CYFD) to explain why he has urged the Legislature to create a civil rights division within the Attorney General’s office. 

“We need to get directly involved in protecting the civil rights of our citizens,” Torrez said in a February interview with New Mexico In Depth. “Our first priority will be looking at children.” 

New Mexico In Depth and ProPublica reported in December that Native American students are expelled from New Mexico’s public schools far more frequently than other student groups, in large part due to practices at the Gallup-McKinley County Schools district. Gallup-McKinley, which enrolls more Native students than any other public school district in the country, has expelled children at least 10 times as often as the rest of the state in recent years.

Senate committee passes nickel-per-drink increase in alcohol taxes

On Wednesday, a Senate committee amended a tax package passed by the House earlier this week to hike alcohol taxes 5¢ per drink for beer, wine, and spirits, greater than the 1¢ to 2¢ increase included in the original proposal. The hike, larger than opponents had wanted but smaller than supporters had hoped for, would be the first in 30 years. 

Research has shown that making alcohol costlier is a way to reduce excess drinking, and supporters argued that a significant tax increase is necessary to combat the state’s alcohol crisis. New Mexicans die of alcohol-related causes at nearly three times the national rate and alcohol is involved in more than twice the deaths statewide as are fentanyl, heroin, and methamphetamines combined. New Mexico’s alcohol taxes do not adjust with inflation and have lost much of their real value since lawmakers last raised them. The 5¢ increase, approved by the Senate Tax, Business and Transportation committee, would bring taxes on wine and spirits back to the real value they had in 2000.

Lawmakers advance effort to pay lawmakers a salary as end of session nears

Eight days are left for lawmakers to decide whether to ask New Mexicans to vote on what the rest of the country already does: Pay its state legislators.If voters approve, House Joint Resolution 8 would amend the state constitution to establish an independent commission that would set  salaries for New Mexico’s 112 state lawmakers. But, first, the joint resolution, which already has passed the House of Representatives and a Senate committee, must jump through more hoops: one more Senate committee and a vote by the entire Senate after which it would go to the House where lawmakers would decide whether or not to accept changes made in the Senate.  

It’s a lot as the 60-day session enters its final week, when lawmakers will parse an avalanche of competing measures. But the New Mexico Legislature has shown how quickly it can move when it wants. 

New Mexico is the only state without  a daily or annual salary for lawmakers, although it provides each a daily payment when they’re in a committee meeting or in session,  and reimburses lawmakers for mileage. Some states pay nominal salaries, like New Hampshire, at $100. But most pay much more, including New Mexico’s neighbors: Arizona, ($24,000), Colorado ($40,242), Oklahoma ($47,500) and Texas ($7,200).Nearly two-thirds of likely New Mexico voters say it’s time, according to a poll conducted in 2022.While in previous years the idea has languished, this year it has momentum.

Tribal education trust fund on hold until next year, when sponsor predicts it’ll have more support

Advocates of a proposed trust fund that would give New Mexico’s tribes more money and freedom to build out their own education departments have agreed to abandon efforts to get $50 million into this year’s budget in return for making a much larger ask in 2024.The bill’s sponsor, Rep. Derrick Lente, a Democrat from Sandia Pueblo, framed the decision Thursday afternoon as a strategic one.“…do we take the initial $50 million investment this year” or go for more money next year “knowing I will have a seat at the LFC table,” Lente said. 

Lente, as the new chairman of the House Taxation and Revenue Committee, will join powerful lawmakers on the Legislative Finance Committee this year to shape what will become the 2024-25 state budget. 

He hopes to use those months to educate and create support from other policy makers and legislators for the trust fund and the amount needed, he said. The original hope for the fund of $250 million was scaled down this year to $50 million, an amount many observers questioned as too little to generate enough money for the state’s 23 tribes.The idea for the trust fund is that tribes would use annual interest earned on the money for language revitalization efforts, resources such as internet access, and career readiness programs, among other priorities. The annual revenue stream would give tribes greater autonomy to shape their own education programs. 

House Speaker Javier Martínez, D-Albuquerque, and budget committee chairman Nathan Small, D-Las Cruces, have given him assurances that the education trust fund proposal will be part of the 2024 budget discussions, Lente added.Martínez confirmed Lente’s understanding of next year’s budget process, saying lawmakers would “absolutely” talk about the education trust fund with plans to ask for much more than $50 million. “That’s been my life’s work,” Martínez said, speaking of his efforts to tackle entrenched problems created by historic neglect of the needs of underserved communities. Lente spoke of his ascension to the House’s tax committee chairmanship as part of a “paradigm shift happening in the House” this year — a shift “that is creating opportunities we’ve never had before,” Lente said. 

On the first day of this year’s session Martínez was elected House speaker and chose new people to chair several House committees, including Lente and Small, who replaced the longtime chairwoman of the House budget committee.

Deaths due to drinking rose sharply in 2021

More than 2,200 New Mexicans died of alcohol-related causes in 2021, according to new estimates from the Department of Health, capping a decade in which such fatalities nearly doubled and setting a new high-water mark in a state already beset by the worst drinking crisis in the nation. The updated data arrive as lawmakers draft legislation to reduce alcohol’s harms for the upcoming session. 

Laura Tomedi, an assistant professor at the University of New Mexico College of Population Health, drew on the data at a late-November hearing of the interim Legislative Health and Human Services Committee. Tomedi, who from 2013 to 2018 led the health department’s substance abuse epidemiology section and served as its alcohol epidemiologist, told lawmakers the state’s death rate had been “going up and up and up” for years. But she described the latest trends — a 17% uptick in 2020 and another 13% jump in 2021 — as a “concerning, sharp increase.”

This spike in deaths coincided with the pandemic, she said, when “​early indications are showing that alcohol use increased quite a bit.”

The mortality data, which are the most comprehensive estimates of alcohol’s full impact on New Mexicans’ health, account for all causes of death brought on by drinking including injuries in motor-vehicle crashes and violence in which the victim was intoxicated, and illnesses such as liver disease and cancer. Illness deaths due to chronic drinking made up a growing share of alcohol-attributable deaths, accounting for 62% in 2021, compared to 38% resulting from acute intoxication such as injuries and poisonings.