SANTA FE – Gov. Bill Richardson put a smiley face on a special session that left many lawmakers wearing a frown Tuesday as they scattered Santa Fe.

“The winners are kids, working families and our most vulnerable citizens,” Richardson said in a written statement issued minutes after New Mexico’s 112 state lawmakers adjourned following a slow-moving, sometimes entertaining, sometimes not, five-day special session. “While the Legislature did not go as far as I would have liked to cover all children with health insurance, I believe modest, but solid gains were made toward that goal," the governor added.

The House and Senate broke up without giving the governor everything he wanted. But state lawmakers gave him a heck of a lot of what he asked for — despite the repeated predictions of financial collapse from a chorus of legislative Cassandras who said the state couldn’t afford some of what it ultimately passed.

For a state purportedly without money, the list of bills that the Legislature passed seemed to belie the notion of a state without a surplus.

The Legislature approved:

$32.5 million to expand health insurance to low-income children, take 450 people off the developmentally disabled waiting list and to spend for behavioral health 

$55 million to give income tax rebates to thousands of New Mexicans

$200 million for road construction around the state

$7.6 million to permanently increase the state’s "working families tax credit."

$5 million in emergency assistance for flood damage in Lincoln and Otero counties and the Ruidoso area

$4 million to help school districts with fuel costs

$1.9 milion for a program that helps pay heating and cooling bills for low-income New Mexicans

$1.6 million to help the secretary of state run the Nov. 4 general election.

It was a spending spree that several lawmakers predicted would give the Legislature a headache when it gavels itself into the 2009 regular session.

 

"I don’t want to come back here in January and say ‘Dr. No told you so,’" Sen. John Arthur Smith, D-Deming, and co-chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, said facetiously. Smith throughout the session warned his colleagues that the Legislature might have to pick up the pieces when they return in January for the regular session.

Sen. Leonard Lee Rawson, R-Las Cruces, at least found a silver lining in all the spending.

"That may cause us to keep a more frugal ship" when the Legislature returns in January, he said.

But while Smith, Rawson and others called for waiting until January to take up those issues on the special session, others said that doing so would doom them to getting lost in the mix of a regular session.

"If we wait until January … all these issues would have been competing with everything else in January," said  House Speaker Ben Lujan, D-Santa Fe.  "Once we get them out of the way now, then we can address other issues in January that won’t be conflicting or competing issues."

Even if lawmakers addressed most of Richardson’s priorities, the governor definitely didn’t get all he wanted. The amount of money Richardson wanted for tax rebates was halved by the Legislature and money for expanding health care — which was once Richardson’s top priority only to take a back seat to tax rebates — was significantly trimmed.

While some said those cost-cutting actions meant the Legislature bucked Richardson by not giving in to all his demands, the rundown of what cleared the Legislature seemed to suggest otherwise.  

"The only thing that wasn’t addressed was the tax holiday. He got 80 percent, 90 percent. So that’s not too shabby," said Lujan, who is Richardson’s main legislative ally.

For the most part, the session crawled at a snail’s pace until the waning hours of the session, when the Senate and House put on the afterburners, passing big-ticket items in such rapid succession that some reporters ran between the chambers in an attempt to follow the sudden frenetic movement.

Throughout the session, many lawmakers privately — and some publicly, most notably Sen. President Pro Tem Tim Jennings – grumbled about being called to Santa Fe to pass bills in order to burnish Richardson’s bona fides in time for next week’s Democratic National Convention, where he is scheduled to speak.

The governor didn’t respond to such attacks, but Lujan defended the governor’s agenda and his motivations.

"That’s unfortunate people think that way," Lujan said. "This governor doesn’t have any children. He doesn’t have hardly many relatives here. The roads that he is trying to fix is for the public. Every issue he had on that proclamation were to benefit the public, not to benefit himself."