by John Tyczowski
news@dailylobo.com
New members in the Legislature may mean this year’s session will end in UNM’s favor.
This year’s Legislature has the largest freshman group in two decades, with nearly 35 new senators and representatives participating in this session, said Marc Saavedra, UNM’s director of government relations. It is possible some of them will be more sympathetic to UNM’s legislative requests, including to measures to ensure the future of the New Mexico Lottery Legislative Success Scholarship, he said.
“We’re off to a good start this session,” he said.
UNM is pushing for legislation that would keep the Lottery Scholarship fund from running out. If nothing changes, its funding will run dry by July of this year.
Saavedra said a bill to save the Lottery Scholarship has been in the works for the past four years. The amount of money the bill required to keep the scholarship afloat had stopped its passage, he said. But for this legislative session, which started Tuesday, he’s confident the bill will pass because they’re using different tactics and the pressure is on.
“It’s like the recent fiscal cliff situation in Washington,” he said. “Sometimes a crisis deadline has a way of pulling things together.”
UNM is also advocating for legislation that gives incentives for graduate and professional students to work in New Mexico after graduation, Saavedra said. Specifically, it’s pushing for tax credits to businesses that hire these in-state students. The same bill made it to the last day of the session in 2012, and was poised to pass but never went to a vote, he said.
“In the end, the bill simply ran out of time,” Saavedra said.
That bill, sponsored last year by Sen. Timothy Keller (D-Albuquerque), will enjoy added support from the Taxation and Revenue Committee this session, Saavedra said.
“We hope that this can help us go even farther this year,” he said.
In addition to the Lottery Scholarship solvency efforts, the Educator Retirement Fund solvency efforts, and solvency efforts for all University retirement funds are high on the agenda.
The Health Sciences Center is requesting $250,000 to create a task force to plan the new College of Public Health. UNM President Robert Frank’s expertise and support in the planning stages of the college add a level of prestige to the bill, Saavedra said.
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“Before coming to UNM, President Frank was the dean of public health at both the University of Florida and Kent State University,” Saavedra said. “He had plenty of experience to draw upon to work to create this new task force.”
