Money for area projects reduced

By Bill Donovan
Staff writer

GALLUP — McKinley County officials will be learning in the next few days just how generous the state Legislature is this year.

But County Manager Tom Trujillo is already prepared to be disappointed.

“We’ve been told that we are not going to get as much as we hoped,” he said.

The county had put in some $2 million worth of requests, mostly for road construction money, but also funds to help pay for a new sheriff’s building and a juvenile detention center.

The way the system works is these projects are funded by the area’s representatives and senators, who get a set amount each year from the state Legislature to fund capital improvement projects in their districts.

This year, however, the legislators have been told that they won’t be getting anywhere near as much as they have in the past, said Evan Williams, a planner for the Northwest New Mexico Council of Governments. Williams has been serving as the planner for McKinley County and he has been in Santa Fe acting as an advocate for the county.

He said legislators have been told they will be getting basically a third of what they did last year. Representatives, who received $2.1 million last year will be getting between $750,000 and $800,000. Senators will go down from $3.1 million to about $1.2 million.

The money that goes to the legislators comes from the state’s severance taxes, which are also used to pay for the major road projects in the state.

As construction costs have risen — by more than 38 percent in the last couple of years — the state has had to funnel more and more of these severance tax revenues to shore up GRIP II and other major capital improvement projects.

Trujillo said he expects that all of the requests will be cut back severely and some, like for new voting machines, may be cut back as much as 80 percent.

He said that he also knew that each legislator and senator has requests from other agencies, such as the city, the schools ad the Gallup-McKinley Chamber of Commerce, that have to be recognized as well.

“This is especially bad for those who will be up for re-election this year,” he said. “It’s very disappointing.”

Williams agreed that legislators will have a hard time this year deciding which projects to fund.

“They’ll be trying to make everyone happy with a lot less money,” he said.

One criteria that many legislators will probably use is to postpone funding for projects that won’t be ready for construction this year for one reason or another.

He said legislators are expected to work on their capital projects requests this weekend so officials for the counties, cities and school should learn early next week which of their projects have received funding.