Serving Clovis, Portales and the Surrounding Communities

State Legislature gearing up

The state Legislature won’t officially convene until noon on Jan. 15. But hundreds of bills have already been pre-filed for the 60-day session.

As of Thursday, 335 bills, memorials or resolutions had been pre-filed in the House of Representatives and the Senate, with 83 percent of the legislation in both chambers being introduced by Democrats.

The Senate will be made up of 28 Democrats and 16 Republicans for the session and the House will have 46 Democrats and 24 Republicans, including 20 non-incumbents — 15 Democrats and 5 Republicans — who are not eligible to pre-file legislation.

Local legislators have pre-filed a dozen bills, with Sen. Pat Woods, R-Broadview, leading the way with seven. Sen. Stuart Ingle, R-Portales, has already filed a trio of bills and Rep. Randy Crowder, R-Clovis, has pre-filed two, one of which has already received considerable attention.

If approved, House Bill 115 would establish a law against making terroristic threats, a fourth-degree felony.

Crowder said he received a note from a Clovis constituent shortly after the Aug. 28, 2017, shooting at Clovis-Carver Public Library concerned about the rash of threatening phone calls to area businesses that followed the shooting.

District Attorney Andrea Reeb told The News the state’s laws lack an appropriate, strict statute to prosecute people who make these kinds of threats to schools or public buildings. She said currently cases are prosecuted under simple assault or interfering in the educational process, which are either a misdemeanor or petty misdemeanor.

“We just haven’t updated statutes to deal with the times,” Reeb said.

The bill outlines five characteristics that would make a threat terroristic in nature, including placing a person in fear of great bodily harm, preventing the occupation of a building or place of assembly and interrupting public services or communications.

Crowder said language is included to distinguish between a threat that was truly terroristic or something intended to be a prank, noting “the fine line between a prank and a terroristic threat.”

“You would hate to see a high school kid pull a prank and wind up with a fourth-degree felony,” Crowder said.

Crowder also introduced a bill that would allocate $7.5 million in state and federal funds for wastewater management. Crowder said he has carried similar bills over the past three years, which have all passed.

Woods introduced a bill that would require SNAP recipients to either work, volunteer, go to school or a combination of the three for 20 hours a week.

“It is my thought that would help them learn how to be productive citizens in our society,” Woods said.

Other legislation Woods introduced would, if approved, privatize building inspections, re-institute a requirement for highways to be fenced to deter livestock and allocate $350,000 annually to purchase New Mexico-grown fruits and vegetables for schools and juvenile detention centers, which Woods said would benefit both students and the state’s farmers.

Woods told The News that other bills he is working on for the session but has yet to file include doing away with the public utility regulations for electric vehicle charging stations and crackdowns on both robocalls and repeated Inspection of Public Records Act requests from individuals.

Ingle’s pre-filed bills include educational retirement changes, Affordable Housing Act oversight and removing gross receipts tax on the transportation of unprocessed milk.

While incoming freshman legislators, of which eastern New Mexico has three, cannot pre-file bills, they did share with The News some of the topics they hope to address during the session.

Rep.-elect Martin Zamora, R-Clovis, said he plans to introduce a bill shortly after he’s sworn in that would make it illegal for vehicles to block access to a handicap parking space, even if they are not actually parked in the space.

“It’s kind of a simple bill for us to get started with and then learn the process and what it takes to pass the bill,” Zamora said. “It’s not really intense but it’s something important for the people that are handicapped.”

Rep.-elect Phelps Anderson, R-Roswell, said education will be one of his focuses of the session.

“The impact of education affects every local school district in New Mexico,” Anderson said.

Rep.-elect Jackey Chatfield, R-Mosquero, cited schools, senior citizen centers, water and roads as issues he hopes to tackle during the session.

All of the bills pre-filed for the upcoming session our available on the Legislature’s website: http://www.nmlegis.gov

 
 
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