As New Mexico In Depth has reported periodically over the years, New Mexico has one of the weirdest ways of dedicating public money toward brick-and-mortar projects. One of the consequences of its almost entirely unique approach to “capital outlay” is a portion of the public dollars sit unspent for years.
The Legislature’s budget arm, the Legislative Finance Committee, is out with its latest report tracking how big that unspent pile is. The first sentence of the report sums up the situation: As of June, “outstanding capital outlay balances totaled an estimated $5.9 billion across roughly 5,600 projects.”
That’s a lot of money. To those of us who follow how public dollars are spent — New Mexico In Depth has followed how money is spent on brick-and-mortar projects on and off for nearly a decade — the figure is not surprising. Public dollars sitting unspent is a chronic problem for New Mexico.
To be fair, nearly a quarter of the $5.9 billion is money authorized during this year’s legislative session. It takes time to spend money on big construction projects and other infrastructure. But that still leaves more than $4.5 billion that’s unspent from previous years.
What’s most eye-catching in that pot of $4.5 billion is the list involving projects where, according to the Legislative Finance Committee, there is “no activity, no or minimal reporting … significant challenges or delays, or significant unspent funds.” That list totals $347 million unspent as of June (out of $402 million), the Legislative Finance Committee says.
The list of projects with large unspent balances includes $4.75 million of the $4.95 million state lawmakers appropriated in 2021 for a sports stadium and multipurpose center in Albuquerque. As you might recall, Albuquerque voters defeated a $50 million bond to help pay for a stadium that the city’s soccer team, New Mexico United, would use. That killed the need for the state money for the stadium.
But there is a resurrected campaign to build a stadium at the Albuquerque Balloon Fiesta Park. My sense is that the $4.7 million unspent for an Albuquerque stadium might be appropriated for that project if it is successful.
Following how a state spends money on brick-and-mortar projects might make most people’s eyes glaze over. But not me. In a sense, the spending is akin to a hidden budget involving public dollars that most don’t think about much.
I was fortunate in that I had already reported on another state’s regimen for spending public dollars on brick-and-mortar projects before moving to New Mexico. That state’s process wasn’t perfect and room for corruption or influence peddling was abundant. But how the state spent money was much more systematic — rational is a word economists might use in this situation. It gave me something to compare New Mexico’s process to. And New Mexico’s way of spending public dollars on brick-and-mortar projects didn’t seem all that well planned or thought out.
As one national expert told us in March 2015, “It certainly wouldn’t be in the textbooks about how to do capital improvement planning. In fact, it would be the illustration about how not to do capital improvement planning.”
In the decade since New Mexico In Depth published that particular article, New Mexico state lawmakers have begun disclosing which projects they ask the state to appropriate money for. Who knows? If New Mexico’s policy makers keep reforming the way they spend money on brick-and-mortar projects, a decade from now those of us who follow the spending may write that the system is much more systematic or, rational, as economists might say.