House Speaker Javier Martínez, (D-Albuquerque), makes final remarks Thursday on the House floor at the conclusion of the 2024 legislative session. Courtesy/Gabriela Campos/The New Mexican

By NATHAN BROWN
The Santa Fe New Mexican

A proposed $50 million Tribal Education Trust Fund sailed through the New Mexico House of Representatives on a unanimous vote last week.

It appeared on track for a swift ride to the governor’s fourth-floor office in the Roundhouse. 

On the last night of the legislative session, however, the bill’s sponsor pulled it from consideration in the Senate, derailing an effort to provide annual cash infusions for schools in the state’s 23 tribal nations and pueblos.

Behind-the-scenes disagreements led to the eleventh-hour decision, Democratic Rep. Derrick Lente of Sandia Pueblo said.

The death of House Bill 134 was one of two big blows to Democratic leaders in the session’s final hours. Another high-priority measure, creating a paid family and medical leave program for workers, met its end in a close House floor vote Wednesday night. Advocates who had pushed for years for its passage were devastated by its defeat but said in a statement “big change takes time,” and they would not give up.

House Speaker Javier Martínez, (D-Albuquerque), struck a similar note at an end-of-session news conference Thursday afternoon, downplaying the party leadership’s failure to secure enough votes in the House for Senate Bill 3 to succeed.

Paid family and medical leave “is not going away,” Martínez said. “The people need it, the people deserve it and we are going to come back next year.”

He noted he went home after every session for 12 years feeling defeated by the failure of a resolution asking voters to approve a constitutional amendment to fund early childhood education. The measure finally made it to the 2022 general election ballot and was approved by statewide voters overwhelmingly.

Martínez promised the Tribal Education Trust Fund and paid leave bills will be back next year.

Another failed bill he promised to bring back is one making changes to the Governmental Conduct Act to make it easier to prosecute public officials for corruption. The bill passed the House unanimously but didn’t get a hearing in the Senate.

“These are bills that are going to come back because this caucus believes in government transparency and accountability,” Martínez said.

Paid leave — in which employers and employees would pay into a fund to cover a worker’s wages for an extended leave — has long been controversial, prompting opposition in the business community. Republicans have unanimously opposed it, along with some more conservative Democrats.

This year’s bill went down by two votes as 11 Democrats joined Republicans in defeating it.

The trust fund, by contrast, was not too controversial among legislators this year, at least in public.

But Lente noted the difficulty in getting all of the tribes and pueblos on board and said there were still many disagreements on the bill he thought should be ironed out behind closed doors.

“I made the principled decision that I don’t believe it’s anybody’s best interest, especially the tribes, to have a public display or discourse of disagreement for everyone else to witness,” he said.

He also said there were some changes proposed in the Senate he didn’t agree with, although he didn’t go into detail about them. 

“They were just changes that I think went against some of the initiatives that I think that we had talked about here in this body, the reason why it passed out unanimously,” Lente said. “In the eleventh hour there were just amendments being proposed of which, again, I wasn’t privy to.”

The details of paid leave proposals have varied over the years. The program in this year’s bill, as amended in the Senate, would have started with up to nine weeks of leave for medical purposes and up to 12 weeks to care for a loved one or for the birth of a child. All workers and employers with more than five employees would have paid into the program’s trust fund.

Opponents argued it would be a burden both on employers and employees, particularly lower-paid workers, and expressed concerns about how workers might abuse the program.

Martínez noted paid leave is “a big topic” and a very technical one. He said he would leave changes to next year’s bill up to the sponsors, whom he lauded for “an amazing job of working with advocates and representatives of industry to improve the bill.”

It is normal for big ideas to take time, Martínez said. He pointed to clean transportation fuels standards, a bill setting targets to reduce pollution from vehicles, which passed this year after several failed attempts.

“We remain committed to adopting policies that uplift working people, that uplift working families,” he said.

Staff writer Daniel J. Chacón contributed to this report.