Another email to keep for the whole session:  How you can play a key role in our lobby team!

There are five members and staff who will be here with me virtually every day of the session:

Council 18 Political Coordinator Josh Anderson

Council 18 President Andrew Padilla

Council 18 E-Board member, Local 1211 President, and HSD employee Joel Villareal Council 18 E-Board member, Local 1380 President, and DoH employee Patrick Gutierrez

Los Lunas Corrections Local President 3422 and Corrections Officer Zach Garcia

One of the trickier parts of looking out for 10,000 workers at a legislative session is that several thousand bills will be introduced.  There can be bills that are good or bad for public employees that don't necessarily get all the media attention of things like the budget.  There can be tax or budget bills that impact our funding.  Sometimes someone will even try to sneak in a bill to privatize our jobs.

No lobbyist, or lobby team, can read all 2,000 bills (nor would it be a good use of time).  But with hundreds of members receiving these updates, you may know of a bill that hasn't caught our attention yet.  Even if we would have caught it eventually, y'all may be able to give us a head start of several days.

This weekend, please go to www.nmlegis.gov and go to the "Bill Locator".  If you see something that might affect our members in your agency, university, cities or counties, water utilities, or just the general fund, shoot me and Josh an email and we'll check it out.  If you hear rumors about a certain type of bill, especially if you know the sponsor of the bill, let us know.  Having hundreds of members watching every bill introduced means it's more likely that we'll be able to kill a bad bill early or help push through a good bill!

CURRENT BILL LIST

Finally, as you go through the Bill Locator this weekend, here is a list of key bill numbers we've already identified as important enough to follow, most of which we'll take a position on. 

House Bills (through HB 50):

2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 16, 29, 30, 31, 34, 35, 50

Senate Bills (through SB 73):

10, 18, 22, 23, 25, 28, 29, 30, 31, 34, 39, 42, 47, 48, 49, 50, 51, 54, 56, 57, 59, 60, 65

Additionally, we will be watching Senate Joint Resolution 3 very closely.  Even though most memorials and resolutions are fairly meaningless (nice, but meaningless), this one is a form of a "taxpayer bill of rights" or "TABOR", and it's dangerous.  It is a bill to limit state budgets no matter how much the cost for things like health care, education, and public safety go up.  It ruined Colorado, and we need to kill it here, even in resolution form.

WHY DETAILS MATTER

In the meantime, here's an example of why reading the bills is so important.  This week, a very good friend of our union, Rep. Brian Egolf, introduced bills to add revenue from alcohol and tobacco.  These are exactly the kinds of revenue measures we need to avoid layoffs and minimize or eliminate furloughs and paycuts.  Unfortunately, even though well-intentioned, all of the revenue is earmarked for K-12 education.  

We love education as much as anyone, but why is all of our revenue going to one area of government when we have desperate needs at Corrections, CYFD (including our child care providers), PRC, DOT, TRD, HSD, DOH, Expo NM, DOL (aka DWS), DVR, DCA, Aging, other critical state agencies, and universities?  We hope to work with union ally Egolf to ensure equity in these revenue enhancements.  We were also able to convince the State Federation of Labor to take no position on the bill until the earmarking issue can be clarified.

Gracias a todos, and stay safe in the storms!  --Carter