Trying to make sense of vetoes

March 11, 2012

Trying to make sense of vetoes

Funding for drainage improvements in Tortugas was approved, but a drainage system in Mesilla Valley farms was vetoed.

Technical equipment for the Gadsden Middle School Family Resource Center made the cut, but air conditioning upgrades for the Gadsden district did not.

Road projects for Airport Road in Santa Teresa, Canal Road in Hatch, Kit Carson Road in the county and Luna Azul Road in Chaparral got the green light, but improvements for 4th Street in Anthony and Carona Road in the county were given a stop sign.

If that seems arbitrary, the explanation given by Gov. Susana Martinez to explain her vetoes of nearly $23 million in capital improvement projects did little to bring clarity to her decisions.

“Let me be clear: every project in this legislation likely has merit. A line-item veto does not indicate my feelings toward the worth or value of the project,” she told The Associated Press. “My job is to ensure we are spending capital dollars in the most responsible way possible.”

If the "worth or value" of a project did not factor into the governor's veto decisions, what did? I posed that question Friday in an email to Scott Darnell, the governor's spokesman, but didn't get a response.

Doña Ana County did better than most in the capital outlay process. Funding for the East Mesa Public Safety campus, Mesilla Valley Regional Dispatch Authority and NMSU's Hershel Zohn Theater and Branson Library were all approved. But money that would have allowed the new municipality of Anthony to build its first City Hall got the ax.

The governor and Legislature have been fighting about capital outlay ever since I went to Santa Fe in 2003, and probably long before then. It doesn't seem to matter if the governor is Bill Richardson or Susana Martinez, the argument has always been the same. The governor wants to pool a larger percentage of the money to be able to tackle large-scale projects, while the legislators want to divide it into smaller chunks to be able to be able to fund more projects in their district.

“Legislators divided up the funding among themselves and doled the dollars out to various projects within their districts — regardless of whether the local community identified the project as useful or necessary, regardless of whether the project was adequately funded (or a plan existed to adequately fund it), regardless of whether the project was an appropriate use of severance tax bonds, and regardless of whether a better alternative funding mechanism existed for the project,” Martinez told The AP.

As I read that, I closed my eyes and could hear Richardson saying the exact same thing.

Legislators have taken some steps to improve the capital outlay process. A memorial passed last years calls for the Legislative Finance Committee, the Department of Finance and Administration and the Legislative Council Service to collaborate on a process to prioritize, review and monitor capital outlay projects.

But the basic tension will always be there. The governor, who is limited to two terms, will always want to make a big splash (such as Richardson did with the spaceport and Railrunner), while legislators will always want to please as many people as possible.

And the governor can always use the line-item vieto of the capital outlay bill as a weapon — though none will ever admit it.

When former Sen. John Grubesic wrote a scathing letter about Richardson published in the Santa Fe New Mexican years ago, the joke making it's way through the pressroom was not only would all of his capital outlay projects that year be vetoed, but Richardson was sending bulldozers to knock down projects approved in past years.

Walter Rubel is managing editor of the Sun-News. He can be reached at wrubel@lcsun-news.com or follow @WalterRubel on Twitter.