Tom Taylor (Photo by Heath Haussamen)
House Minority Leader Tom Taylor, R-Farmington, says there won’t be any quick fixes in the upcoming special session of the Legislature to address the massive budget shortfall.
“I don’t see our growth coming back at some magnificent clip,” Taylor said. “I think we’ll see it on the other side of the recession.”
“So for now,” he said, “we need to deal with recurring expenses. We need to get the budget back to a point where there’s extra money, rather than shortfall in the future. Our budgeting needs to be conservative, so we end up with a few extra dollars every fiscal year.”
One thing is certain, Taylor said: Education funding will take up the “Lion’s share” of the discussion in the session that begins Saturday because it accounts for the bulk of the state budget.
“We know for a fact going in that there is little consensus among members of the Legislature, and that lack of consensus crosses party lines to some degree,” he said.
Lawmakers have to deal with a shortfall that is somewhere between $650 and $700 million in the current fiscal-year budget. That’s on top of a pending shortfall of more than $200 million in last year’s budget. Taylor wants the bulk of the fix to come from cutting recurring expenditures.
“Beyond that I know there is a group that wants to raise taxes. There’s a group that agrees with my point of view with cutting recurring expenses, and another group that agrees with the governor’s point of view,” he said.
Taylor said he has confidence in state agency managers’ ability to make the appropriate decisions to trim their own budgets. he thinks lawmakers and the governor should tell them how much they have to cut and then let them decide how to do it.
“There’s all sorts of creative ways to get more efficient,” Taylor said. “Everyone knows government is not 100 percent efficient. But the only people who know where the bulk of the efficiencies are, are the people inside.”
Governor rejects lawmakers’ proposals
A group of lawmakers presented three proposed budget fixes to the governor last week. One called for 3.5-percent cuts across the board and 2.5-percent salary cuts for government and educational workers. Another excluded Medicaid and education from cuts but would implement 16-percent cuts across the rest of government. The third would implement budget cuts of 4.7 percent across government, including schools.
After analyzing the proposals , Gov. Bill Richardson has said he cannot support the education cuts in two of the three.
In a prepared statement, Richardson’s spokesman said, “Governor Richardson has studied the legislative proposals and finds the cuts to education unacceptable because of the severe impact to teachers and kids. The governor wants one proposal from the Legislature, not three, that makes fiscally responsible cuts without hurting schools.”
Lawmakers today are working on a fourth plan to show the governor. Taylor said the legislative leadership and the governor remain far apart.
A complex problem
Taylor said the current budget problems are complex, and he believes numerous factors will keep New Mexico’s economy down longer than he expected.
“This thing that we have now is more than just oil and gas revenue losses,” Taylor said. “We also have a decline in gross receipts, and declines in personal and corporate tax revenues.”
Taylor said it was clear to him, going into the regular session earlier this year, that the state was dealing in an “amazingly” unusual economy — especially in the oil and gas industry.
“If you look at it historically, whenever you have spikes in price of the natural gas and oil, on the other side you see a precipitous cliff, and it usually goes below its previous numbers. Then it takes a while for it to level off,” he said. “By the end of 2008 it looked to me that we reached a point there was no way to sustain current funding levels. I didn’t think it would ever hold.”
Taylor is Packing for a week
Taylor told NMPolitics.net that he anticipates the session will last longer than three days.
“I don’t gamble. I wouldn’t put any money on anything. It will be it will be longer than three days. Internally, I’m packing for seven,” he said.
Taylor added that there’s “an outside possibility” that lawmakers won’t resolve the current shortfall during the special session, instead plugging last year’s pending shortfall of more than $200 million and leaving this year’s much larger shortfall to deal with in January.
If that happens, Taylor said he wants state agencies to do their own trimming in the meantime. He said the state workers he’s talked to recognize that something has to be done.
Heath Haussamen contributed to this report.