Sen. Joseph Cervantes
By ESTEBAN CANDELARIA and NATHAN BROWN
The Santa Fe New Mexican
Bills to crack down on crime and improve New Mexico’s behavioral health system took major steps forward Friday and may reach the governor’s desk soon.
House Bill 8, which would reform criminal competency laws as well as cracking down on shooting threats, fentanyl trafficking and drunken driving, passed the Senate 38-3 Friday evening after extensive debate. The bill needs to go back to the House to concur with or reject some amendments made in the Senate Judiciary Committee earlier this week and on the Senate floor.
And Senate Bill 1, which would create a trust fund to improve funding for the state’s behavioral health system, now heads to Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham’s desk after passing the House on a 46-19 vote, joining another behavioral health bill passed the House on Tuesday.
The halfway point of this year’s session was Thursday, and legislative leaders pledged to get bills addressing crime and behavioral health to the governor by then.
Extensive debate, amendments proposed to crime bill
Senators spent nearly four hours debating HB 8 before voting to send it along, with even some senators who said they were disappointed with the package voting for it.
Sen. Joseph Cervantes, D-Las Cruces, who carried the bill on the floor, said the measure represented a good first step toward addressing New Mexico’s larger issues with public safety.
“We’re going to come together to show the state that we’re serious about this,” he said, noting the Legislature still has about 30 days to pass an array of other measures.
As their House counterparts did before them, Senate Republicans on Friday introduced a number of ill-fated floor amendments to squeeze some of their proposals into the crime package.
Those amendments, which mostly failed on party-line votes, were proposed in efforts to bolster a package Republicans felt did not go far enough.
“We did move the ball today,” said Senate Minority Leader Bill Sharer, R-Farmington. “We moved the ball down the field, but we certainly didn’t score.”
One notable amendment came from Sen. Crystal Brantley, R-Elephant Butte, who followed in the stead of Rep. Andrea Reeb, R-Clovis in proposing language expanding the list of crimes juveniles can be sentenced as adults for beyond just first-degree murder to include offenses such as second-degree murder, voluntary manslaughter and armed robbery with a deadly weapon.
The move, she said, was an effort to tackle one of the most significant crime issues facing New Mexicans — youth violence.
“If this is our last opportunity to get some meaningful changes in here that will address specifically the juvenile crime rate that we’ve seen … this is the time to act, before it lands on the governor’s desk,” Brantley said.
Brantley’s amendment failed 16-25. Cervantes told her the Senate Judiciary Committee, of which he is the chair, would be open to considering a bill that would make the same changes as her amendment.
Democrats also voted down amendments that would have created felonies out of the act of operating a stash house and out of the practice of “swatting”, which entails providing false information about a crime taking place at someone’s address for the purpose of making a SWAT team respond there.
Two behavioral health bills down, one to go
Senate Bill 1 would set up a behavioral health trust fund that would distribute 5% of its annual value to fund mental health and substance abuse treatment programs. The original version would have set aside an initial $1 billion to put in the fund, but it was amended in the Senate Finance Committee to take this out.
“No one should have to make 10 calls to find an appointment when they need behavioral health care, and that’s the reality that we are trying to change,” House Majority Leader Reena Szczepanski, D-Santa Fe, said in a statement after the House vote to pass the bill.
It is part of a package along with Senate Bill 3, which sets up a system to draft region-specific plans to address local behavioral health needs, and Senate Bill 2, which hasn’t passed the House yet but would allocate an initial $200 million to kick-start the trust fund.
“This bill is really about the future,” Szczepanski said on the floor. “It is about setting up a framework to ensure that we can pay for behavioral health services not just this fiscal year or next fiscal year but for years into the future.”
Editor’s note: Esteban Candelaria is a corps member with Report for America, a national service program that places journalists into local newsrooms. He covers child welfare and the state Children, Youth and Families Department. Learn more about Report for America at reportforamerica.org.