By Carter Bundy
The substantive issue in the middle of the back-and-forth between sitting legislators and nonprofits is ethics. The nonprofits communicated with the public about their opinion of the ethics of certain legislators and their donors’ influence.
The legislators in turn sued, claiming that the nonprofits were really just political organizations who themselves won’t reveal donors (the Center for Civic Policy wisely has revealed the bulk of it donors since the lawsuit, even though legally it didn’t have to).
It’s a legal near-certainty that the nonprofits’ actions are protected First Amendment speech. There’s not a court in
Many argue that paying legislators and moving to public financing would eliminate much of the appearance of impropriety and would allow more independence by legislators. But there’s another reason to pay legislators that is at least as compelling.
Outgunned. Badly.
This week I attended the Albuquerque City Council Finance Committee hearing. The first thing that struck me was how many different types of issues come before just that one committee.
The next thing that occurred to me was how complex some of the issues are. The third thing I noticed was how completely outgunned the councilors are just by proponents of one project.
The project in particular that brought this home was the request for $130 million in taxpayer money to subsidize Winrock’s infill development. I haven’t studied that project enough to say whether I think it’s a good use of taxpayer dollars to pick up the infill infrastructure costs that are normally absorbed by developers, but that kind of request deserves lots of scrutiny.
The question is simple: whether taxpayers will bear the costs of internal infrastructure that are normally borne by developers.
The answer is far from simple. It depends on massive amounts of data, arguments, assumptions, perspectives, philosophical analysis, budget and revenue projections, legal issues, environmental impacts, market forces, demographic changes, growth impacts and other policy considerations to weigh.
And yet these decisions are being made by people who make $10,000 a year at a part-time councilor job.
The committee room was stacked with many of the very best of New Mexico’s full-time lawyers, lobbyists, economists and presenters — and that was all for one developer on one project.
The good news is that councilors of all political stripes asked tough, smart questions. Democratic Councilor Sanchez asked good questions about financial projections. Democratic Councilors O’Malley and Garduño repeatedly asked about the rationale for taxpayers funding the project (the “expert” lobbyists’ answer: Take our word for it, the private sector won’t develop this project without the subsidy.).
Republican Councilors Winter and Harris asked whether the new revenue projections for Winrock would just cannibalize revenue from other parts of the city. With Coronado and ABQ Uptown each a seven iron away from
The full-time, well-educated, well-prepared financial consultant responded with an incredibly unsatisfactory answer: “We took all that into account in our numbers (My paraphrase).” When asked for details, he responded that the city would grow enough so that Winrock wouldn’t be cannibalizing other retail and entertainment venues in the city, and that the new Winrock would keep dollars from going to neighboring towns.
Leaving aside the question of whether taxpayers in Albuquerque, Rio Rancho and Belen should get into bidding wars against each other to the benefit of developers, the scary part about the answer was that Winrock was asking the council to trust their complicated projection formulae for regional revenue growth over the next 25 years.
The Finance Committee didn’t take any final action on the $130 million taxpayer subsidy, but it did move it forward for consideration by the entire council. Between now and then, are talented city economists and staff going to evaluate the assumptions, projections, numbers and complex issues like cannibalization?
I hope the answer is yes, but even the very talented state and local staff who work on these and dozens of other issues can’t possibly hope to keep up with a full-time battery of economists, lawyers and lobbyists working on each individual development.
The councilors (and at the state level, legislators) then have to make sense of the barrage of information just for that one project, with the majority of information coming from the side that seeks to take money from taxpayers.
Tip of the iceberg
Now take the above example and multiply it by dozens of complicated, crucial issues, many of which have full-time advocates and experts. And we expect our state legislators to confidently and quickly move on universal health care? Or environmental policy? Or education? Or public safety? Or retirement security? Or economic development? Or poverty reduction? Or infrastructure? Or transportation? While holding down full-time jobs elsewhere?
The scope of study and knowledge required to handle this work alone justifies paying our legislators full-time salaries, certainly at the state and major city/county level. My favorite proposal is to tie the salaries to the average household salary of New Mexicans. Now there’s an incentive to work for a better economy.
Regular constituents benefit
No one is advocating a year-round session, but with the scores of interim committee hearings already taking up weeks of time each year, it’s more than apparent that governing a state of two million people requires more than a 30- or 60-day commitment.
Constituents often complain that their city or state leaders should be more responsive to neighborhood and individual issues. Between increased time to study issues and develop sensible legislation and time to look after constituent concerns, there’s no shortage of work ready to be done right now by city councilors, county commissioners and state legislators.
Deeper pools of candidates, more time to develop expertise on issues, higher-quality legislation, less reliance on the say-so of lobbyists, less appearance of impropriety, better constituent service. There aren’t many single steps we can take to address all these issues, but paying our state and major city/county legislators a reasonable salary in exchange for full-time work is one of the easier ones.
Bundy is the political and legislative director for AFSCME in