Impasse on tax package extends into New Mexico legislative session's final hours

Yahoo

21-03-2025

Sen. Carrie Hamblen (D-Las Cruces) on the Senate floor Wednesday, March 19, 2025. (Danielle Prokop / Source NM)
With fewer than 24 hours left in the 2025 session, New Mexico lawmakers on Friday tried to breach a rupture between the House and Senate on a proposed package of tax benefits that would cost $126 million in the coming year and more than a half a billion dollars over the next four years.
After one meeting earlier in the day ended in a failure to produce a compromise, lawmakers spent much of Friday in negotiations with the members on finance committees in both chambers.
Lawmakers on the panel had said they would reconvene at 4 p.m. However, that time came and went without a meeting; According to Senate majority spokesperson Chris Nordstrum, as of publication, the meeting had been delayed indefinitely, he said, but could happen on Friday night or Saturday morning.
The rupture emerged notably during floor debate on Thursday, when the Senate removed the means for paying for the package: a 0.28% tax on oil paired with a reduction in natural gas taxes contained in House Bill 548 and expected to generate $130 million in revenue.
The House wouldn't concur with the Senate's changes, requiring negotiations between the chambers.
On Friday morning, the conference committee made up of three senators and three representatives met to hammer out the two chambers' differences on the tax package.
For a bill to pass out of the concurrence panel, it must receive support from the majority of both chambers, Legislative Finance Committee Chief Economist Ismael Torres explained to the committee. Agreement doesn't have to be unanimous, but at least two senators and two House members must vote in favor of a compromise.
In the first round of negotiations, the conference panel agreed to add House Bill 417, which would direct nearly $10 million in liquor excise tax revenue to the Tribal Harms Alleviation Fund rather than the General Fund; and to remove Senate Bill 393, which would have exempted the Ruidoso Downs and Casino — which the June 2024 wildfires in Lincoln and Otero counties impacted — from taxes for the next five years.
The bicameral panel tried to put the oil and gas tax changes back into the tax package, but two of the three senators voted against it.
Sen. Carrie Hamblen (D-Las Cruces), chair of the Senate Tax, Business and Transportation Committee, told panel members the Senate wants to avoid bringing HB548 back into the package.
'We feel that that would prevent the rest of this from going through,' she said.
Rep. Derrick Lente (D-Sandia Pueblo), who chairs House Taxation and Revenue, said HB548 is good tax policy because the oil and gas industry had net profits upwards of $10 billion in 2024.
If the Senate isn't willing to create that tax, he said, 'I don't know if we have a path forward, only because I am not in the business — nor would I want to be an advocate for — sacrificing bills to see if we can hold bills hostage or do whatever it takes to raise $130 million.'
In response to Lente in the morning meeting, Hamblen said senators do not want to use any bills as a 'sacrificial lamb' to pay for the tax package.
'However, I do have the confidence in the staff who have already started to look at multiple pathways to do that,' Hamblen said.
Options to get money into the package remain limited because lawmakers already passed the budget for the upcoming year on Thursday.
They could pursue a zombie bill to amend the budget, or pay for the tax package out of reserves, which would require legislative action. They could also find some other revenue source to add to the package, or take some of the tax credits out of the package, Lente said.
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