Governor calls for special session for July, saying "public safety needs real results"

Apr. 17—New Mexico lawmakers are coming back to Santa Fe this summer for a dayslong special session focused on public safety, though guns and pretrial detention are off the table.

Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham announced Wednesday she will call the Legislature into a special session July 18 "to take up additional public safety protections" she said New Mexicans are demanding.

"While we made some progress toward a safer New Mexico during the 30-day session, we agree that we must do more," Lujan Grisham said in a statement. The Democratic governor has called four other special sessions during her tenure.

"The special session in July will enable us to deliver additional statutory changes that reduce the danger and risk New Mexico communities face every day," she said. "The best proposals for making our state safer will be under consideration, and I welcome input from my colleagues in the legislature."

In a telephone interview, the governor said she preferred holding the special session right away but agreed to hold off after consulting primarily with Democratic leaders who wanted lawmakers to get through the June primary "and not to use this as a political issue" that would prevent them from taking action on commonsense solutions.

"They productively convinced me that more time, particularly on some new ideas, would make for a better, more prudent special session, and I agree now," she said.

The governor anticipates the special session will last two to four days.

"It's really going to depend on how many bills that we agree on," she said. "I can say, 'This is the agenda, and that's it. Now pass them.' Well, that doesn't give me the votes. I have prided myself, even though I've called quite a few special sessions, that it's for this intended purpose, and we're going to come out of it with real results. Public safety needs real results and particularly in mitigating risks that are building in our communities. I can't wait another year before rebuilding runways to do that."

Republicans assailed the governor's decision.

Rep. Gail Armstrong, R-Magdalena, said the special session reflects a "lack of leadership."

"There were a lot of public safety bills in the 30-day," said Armstrong, who serves as House Republican caucus chair. "Why couldn't we have prioritized them then?"

Sen. Craig Brandt, R-Rio Rancho, echoed the sentiment, saying special sessions are intended to deal with issues the Legislature couldn't tackle during a regular session. He questioned why the governor was waiting until July if the public safety issues are so pressing.

"We had 30 days to deal with this, but we're going to deal with it in two or three?" asked Brandt, the Senate Republican whip. "What are some of the unintended consequences that are going to happen in some of these bills? We've seen this happen before, where we've come in and done bills and then we end up finding out later, a couple years later, the unintended consequences are worse than the issue we were trying to deal with."

Senate Majority Leader Peter Wirth, D-Santa Fe, said in a statement the July date gives lawmakers enough time to build consensus on public safety legislation that can pass both chambers of the Legislature.

"Discussions between the Governor and legislative leadership to date have focused on bills from the recent 30-day session that required more work due to their legal complexity, namely: criminal competency, felon in possession of a firearm and panhandling," he said. "We have agreed additional gun safety and pre-trial detention bills will wait for the sixty-day session in January."

Lujan Grisham said she recognizes she doesn't have the votes to pass such measures, at least not with the current makeup of the Legislature.

"I will bring the bills I didn't get over the finish line, including an assault weapons ban, in the 60-day session," she said. "I'm going to be pushing hard during the interim."

House Speaker Javier Martínez, D-Albuquerque, said building consensus ahead of the session will be key.

"These are generational problems that my colleagues and I, including the governor, are tackling, so any opportunity to make headway, I think, is a good one," he said. "If the special session is one of those opportunities, then we welcome it."

Sen. Michael Padilla, D-Albuquerque, said Senate Democrats will caucus Thursday "to discuss [the special session] to figure out what's involved."

Rep. Nathan Small, D-Las Cruces, who was in a Legislative Finance Committee hearing at the Capitol when news of the special session was announced, said it was "interesting to see the announcement today. Obviously we have a lot of work to do between now and then."

Lujan Grisham didn't list specific pieces of legislation she wants lawmakers to consider, signaling she doesn't want to box the Legislature in but is open to their ideas.

"In a political world, when I drive it, it has a certain response," the governor said. "When they drive it, it has a different kind of nuance to it. This becomes more of a partnership, and we didn't have time to do that in a 30-day session, and now we do."

The governor has previously advocated for four pieces of legislation in particular, including a bill that would send criminal defendants who are found incompetent to stand trial to a mental health or behavioral health treatment program and what she has called a "civil counterpart" to that proposal.

Lujan also has advocated for a measure to restrict panhandling.

In a recent interview with New Mexican Opinion Page Editor Inez Russell Gomez, the governor said she has seen people lying down in roadways and chasing vehicles, including hers.

"This has to end because someone on the streets is going to get killed," she said. "A child is going to get killed. A motorist is going to get killed or kill someone."

The governor told Russell Gomez she would consider including a bill increasing penalties for some crimes, such as being a felon in possession of a firearm.

Rep. Alan Martinez, R-Bernalillo, said he wasn't surprised the governor called a special session because she's been "threatening" one since the end of the 30-day session Feb. 15.

"What I am surprised is how far in the future she did it," he said. "I'm waiting to see what the real agenda is going to be. I hope we do tackle meaningful crime legislation. I'm all on board if that's what we're going to do."

Martinez, however, said he's not a "big fan" of special sessions.

"When we get together to look at one issue that's important to the administration, I kind of feel like we're having it forced upon us," he said. "Let us look at it over the interim. That's what the interim committees are for. Let us vet these ideas. Let us kick it around. Let us come to a compromise. Having it done in two days, I think, is a horrible idea."

Rep. Rod Montoya, R-Farmington, who was recently elected minority leader of the state House of Representatives, said he's going to ask the governor to place "border-related crime issues" on the call.

"If she's going to make a call based on crime, we need to deal with fentanyl, and that's a border issue," he said. "We need to take the fentanyl crisis seriously."

Montoya said he'd like to see a bill to increase penalties around fentanyl.

"They've said we can't treat addiction as a crime, but we're talking fentanyl," he said. "It is a public health crisis. We've got to get it off the streets."

Follow Daniel J. Chacón on Twitter @danieljchacon.