By Sherry Robinson
All She Wrote
© 2026 New Mexico News Services

In my time covering the Legislature, I watched thoughtful deliberations for the first few weeks of a session. After that the pace picked up, the days grew longer, and hearings stretched into the wee hours and filled weekends. In the final week, hoarse, exhausted legislators were still trying to move legislation, but many a good bill – maybe one you cared about – died because the clock ran out.

This is no way to run a railroad, I thought year after year.

New Mexico’s Legislature is locked in an outdated schedule and structure. Sessions are 60 days in odd-numbered years and 30 days in even-numbered years. Short sessions are devoted to the budget and whatever governors choose to add. It takes reforms and solutions years to lumber through such a system. And our “citizen legislators” are unpaid except for a per diem of $202 a day.

I believe it’s one reason New Mexico remains poor.

It’s been this way since 1964, when the length was changed from 60 days every other year to the current system. Meanwhile, other states extended their sessions and paid their legislators. By 2023 New Mexico had the nation’s only unpaid legislature.

In a stab at modernizing, lawmakers this year passed a bill to pay themselves, but they failed again to lengthen sessions. Both steps are necessary.

House Joint Resolution (HJR) 5 allows voters to decide in November whether to approve a salary of $64,140 beginning in 2029. The amount is the median income in New Mexico in 2024. That’s not an average but a midpoint between lowest and highest. The cost would be about $7.6 million a year.

New Mexico’s payment would be on the high side. The average salary for state legislators in 2025 was $47,904 a year, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures (NCSL).

Rep. Cristina Parajón, D-Albuquerque, and other young, female sponsors talked about how difficult it was to balance jobs, family, student loans and legislative duties. Republicans and a few Democrats opposed HJR 5 in both chambers. Some feared that candidates would run for the paycheck and not to serve the public, while others just didn’t think it was a good use of taxpayer dollars.

HJR 5 is based on Alabama’s system. Nobody would say Alabama is governed by free-spending liberals, but that state pays its legislators $62,212 a year for a session that’s three and a half months long – more than twice the length of ours. Arizona sessions are six months, Colorado’s are four, and Texas meets four and a-half months, according to NCSL.

While the salary would help out current legislators, the question we should be asking is: How do we get better decision making? The answer is more time to hear and study bills. But that half of the reform failed again. In HJR 6 Rep. Matthew McQueen, D-Galisteo, made his fourth try to get yearly sessions of 45 days. (Attempts by others to get yearly 60-day sessions have also failed.) McQueen also wanted legislators to be able to introduce their bills without governors setting limits on short sessions. An analysis by New Mexico In Depth showed that nearly half of this year’s bills didn’t make the cut.

“If I don’t get a bill passed in a 60-day session, I’m effectively done for two years, because I can’t automatically run it in a 30-day session unless I get permission from the governor,” McQueen told KUNM radio last year. “I’m in my 11th year in the Legislature. I’ve worked under two governors from different parties, and I’ve never received (permission) from a governor.”

Forty-five days is still way too short, but even this small change met defeat. The bill sailed through the House and died in the Senate, which is exactly what happened to his measure last year.

Republicans understand that our short calendars are bad for them. In 2021 Rep. Rod Montoya, R-Farmington, carried a bill like HJR 6, and he was a co-sponsor this year with McQueen.

What we’re talking about here is a more professional legislature that spends significantly more time in session. If our citizen legislators are honest, many would admit that they have merged the sessions with their personal and work lives and really don’t want to spend more time in Santa Fe on the people’s business.

McQueen has said New Mexico isn’t doing as well as it should because issues facing the Legislature are really complicated, and “you’re not going to solve these complicated issues in 60 days.”