About a third of the money, $450,000, will go to prevent layoffs and furloughs at Magistrate Courts; District Courts Bernalillo County, Curry County and San Juan County; and Metro Court in Albuquerque.

The other two-thirds, $925,000, will be used to avoid furloughs or layoffs at state agencies in the executive branch, including state museums and monuments and the Alcohol and Gaming Division.

Gov. Bill Richardson

As 2009 staggers into the history books, exhausted and a bit lighter in the pockets than when it first appeared on the scene, let’s acknowledge this: the year gave us plenty to write about.

Accusations of pay-to-play, former elected officials getting indicted, electoral surprises and an occasional David toppling a Goliath — 2009 produced it all, giving the year a healthy luster of newsworthiness despite its threadbare look.

The year showed incredible stamina, in fact, with a steady drumbeat of scoops, gotchas and revelations, exhausting many a political junkie and news professional. And 2009 didn’t take long to demonstrate its capacity to shock.

On the fourth day of 2009, an announcement in Washington landed in New Mexico with all the percussive power of a bombshell: Gov. Bill Richardson was withdrawing as President Obama’s commerce secretary, citing a federal corruption investigation into how his administration conducted business.

And the news kept coming.

Some 360 later, the year is ending the way it began — scrutiny, including from federal prosecutors, on how the state invested its money over the past half decade.

In between those two bookends, the state of New Mexico also came to the disturbing realization that it was broke, Albuquerque’s longtime mayor fell short of winning a third four-year term — knocked off by a long-shot two-term GOP state lawmaker — and two former elected officials found themselves on the business end of a criminal indictment.

It’s unclear whether what transpired this year will change the political dynamic here in New Mexico, or lead to more government transparency. But before The New Mexico Independent gets back into the daily grind, let’s take a deep breath and reflect on the busy year that was.

Click here to begin with: Scandals

Employees were notified in writing after lunch that they will lose 18 hours of pay, or 1.5 hours per paycheck, between January 9th and June 25th, unless the Legislature appropriates more money for the court’s current fiscal year when it meets in January.

Executive Officer and Chief Clerk Juanita Duran told The Independent the court had asked for more money, but only got a partial loan, so it still faces a $131,130 operating shortfall to cover employee salaries and benefits in the 2010 fiscal year.

“We’ve had a 22 percent increase in caseloads, but the legislature has slashed our budget 8.1 percent over the last two fiscal years,” Duran said. “This loan only covers the shortfall through the legislative session next month, so we had to ask our hardworking employees to take the furloughs.”

The court, which received its first $142,700 emergency loan in September may have to ask the Board of Finance for a third loan in March or April if lawmakers, who convene in January, don’t quickly appropriate more money. Duran said in addition to asking for at least the forecasted shortfall they need the legislature to appropriate money to pay back the $211,187.55 they’ve already borrowed.

The director for the Administrative Office of the Courts Artie Pepin told The Indpendent that if lawmakers don’t approve the money and actually make more cuts to the court that administrators may have to shut down drug courts and other treatment courts because while money may be available to operate them from the general fund there may not be enough employees to run them.

Anticipating furloughs, Duran said her goal has been to cross train employees and find new ways of increasing efficiency.

“Now we’ve gone to work teams where we put everyone together. This is helping us stay above water. I think we’ve been very proactive very resourceful at looking anyway we could put in any type of efficiencies,” Duran said.

“…It’s very frustrating when people are standing in line and they want you to work faster. We’re doing the best we can with what we have.”

Criminal cases, Duran told the Independent, will not be affected by the furloughs because of court rules are specific regarding timelines — especially arraignments and pre-trail hearings.

Judges will not be furloughed because the state’s constitution prohibits publicily elected officials’ salaries from be adjusted during the term of service. But effective January 4 the clerk’s office inside the court will only be open to the public from 10 a.m. until 4 p.m.

“Employees will still be working, but we need the extra time to allow clerks to enter documents without interruption,” Duran said.

Staff will take their furlough time, three-quarters of an hour, every Friday. Employees in the other 12 judicial districts have not been ordered to take furloughs.

Bernalillo County Metropolitan Courthouse. Photo by Peter St. Cyr

In November, Gov. Bill Richardson announced that, due to the state’s budget crisis, he would order 20,000 state workers in the executive branch to take five days off work without pay. Among those furloughed are public defenders, who unlike law enforcement, prosecutors and judges, are part of the executive branch. The chief public defender says the governor’s office has given him some flexibility, but the furloughs could end up costing the state even more if the rights of defendants are affected.

This year about 50,000 criminal defendants have sought legal representation from the New Mexico Public Defender’s Office, which oversees 167 full and part-time attorneys, in addition to paralegals, investigators, and support staff. Dangler says he’s already struggling with budget cuts. After the state Supreme Court raised concerns with the governor’s office, Chief Public Defender Hugh Dangler was given the ability to shift some furlough dates for critical personnel. But the already stressed department will be operating on a skeleton crew while police continue to make arrests and prosecutors will continue to work on cases.

“You can’t subject the Constitution to budget cuts–people have the right to counsel,” Dangler told The Independent in an interview. Despite the state’s budgetary woes,  criminal suspects still have the right to talk to attorney and ask for bail without spending longer than normal time in jail waiting for legal representation, Dangler said.

If the furloughs mean that some people don’t get access to an attorney–that could be a problem for the state.

“These are people’s rights, these are people’s lives. They’re entitled to our help, and we’re entitled to give it to them,” he said.

Several concessions have been made to ensure that defendants have access to representation.

New Mexico Chief Justice Edward Chavez sent a memo to courts across the state urging them not set court calendars for furlough dates. Judicial calendars are rigidly scheduled, so the option to allow some public defenders to work on furlough days, attending arraignments and trials, eases some of the concerns raised by judges, court clerks, and prosecutors.

The goal during budget cutbacks is to keep the criminal justice system going forward, Artie Pepin, director for the Administrative Office of the Courts, told The Independent.

“We can’t proceed without assigning them an attorney if the attorneys are all unavailable,” Pepin said. “The court really doesn’t have much of an option to wait to arraign those people until the public defenders are available.”

Bernalillo County District Attorney Kari Brandenburg, whose own 2nd Judicial Office has been hit with cuts totaling more than a million dollars, said even with skeleton crews operating in the public defenders’ office, court cases could be delayed or continued to another date, so she and other prosecutors are looking at ways to resolve criminal cases more quickly.

“One of the things I didn’t realize eight or nine years ago when I came into this job is how dependent we are on other systems and agencies in the criminal justice system,” Brandenburg said.  “When any one agency is having issues it really impacts all the agencies. So we will be impacted by whatever happens to the courts and public defenders. We will do the best that we can.”

In addition to full-time employees, the Public Defenders Department contracts with over 130 private lawyers, who serve in areas of the state where the Department does not have staff offices and when there are co-defendants in conflict cases.

Dangler said he’s already trimmed his budget and is now using money saved from unfilled positions to make up for budget cuts.

“We can sustain the current level of cuts,” Dangler said. “But if the Legislature makes more cuts in January all bets are off.”

As Stateline reports:

In preparation, many are taking stock of every position in state government to determine what effect job cuts and the possible elimination of whole departments will have on revenues, expenses and the quality of government services.

Will that happen in New Mexico? That remains to be seen. State lawmakers convene next month in Santa Fe for a 30-day legislative session whose main responsibility is crafting next year’s budget. According to some, New Mexico may confront a $1 billion shortfall next year.

Black joblessness has long far outstripped that of whites. But surprisingly the disparity as the recession has dragged on has been even more pronounced for those with college degrees, compared with those without, according to the New York Times. Education, it seems, does not level the playing field — in fact, it appears to have made it more uneven, the paper reports.

College-educated black men, especially, have struggled relative to their white counterparts in this downturn, according to figures from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The unemployment rate for black male college graduates 25 and older in 2009 has been nearly twice that of white male college graduates — 8.4 percent compared with 4.4 percent.

Moving on to news from the Internet, more than 3,500 offenders registered in New York have been kicked off the social networking giants Facebook and MySpace in the months since the state implemented a law requiring sex crime convicts to register their e-mail addresses, as well as their dwellings, according to the Associated Press.

The story goes on to report:

Both MySpace and Facebook have long had policies banning sex offenders, and have routinely used state registries in the past to block tens of thousands of convicts from joining.

But the task of identifying convicts among millions of users has been both tricky and labor-intensive, and the companies said Tuesday that New York’s new law and others like it in 24 other states are streamlining the process.

A emotionally charged battle continues in the world of climate science, as a scientist at the center of an uproar over pirated e-mails from the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit announced Tuesday that he is stepping down as the unit’s director during the investigation, the Washington Post reports.

Is a battle brewing between the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times over  local news coverage in NYC? Seems like it. Apparently Journal owner Rupert Murdoch is ready to unveil a $15 million New York edition of the Journal, which would position the paper as a local news source, according to the New York Observer. The Journal historically has focused on business, and meatier, national and international stories which often appeared on its front page. But ever since Murdoch bought the Journal he has worked to move the Journal past its business news niche to become a source for general news and become a direct competitor of the Times. At the same time the Times has shrunk its local news coverage, getting rid of a stand-alone Metro section. The Journal is apparently trying to exploit that move by the Times.

The initial plan for the furloughs, which would include all employees except for “critical public safety and welfare positions,” is as follows:

The draft plan outlines the following possible furlough days:

Thursday, Dec. 24, 2009 (Friday, Dec. 25 is a paid holiday)

Thursday, Dec. 31, 2009 (Friday, Jan. 1 is a paid holiday)

Friday, Jan. 15, 2009 (Monday, Jan. 18 is a paid holiday)

Friday, April 2, 2009 (Furlough day would replace 4 hours of administrative leave)

Friday, May 28, 2009 (Monday, May 31 is a paid holiday)

As reported by The Independent last week, the plan “is projected to save nearly $11 million with the furloughs, which will work out to the rough equivalent of a 2 percent salary cut for state workers.”

File photo

Gov. Bill Richardson on Thursday pledged to axe 1,000 vacant state jobs, ordered nearly 20,000 state workers to take five furlough days and cut state agencies.

Those actions, along with the promise to eliminate at least 84 state jobs held by political appointees, represented the governor’s answer to New Mexico’s worsening financial situation.

“I won’t pretend that these actions will solve all our budget problems, but it’s a start,” Richardson said at a midday news conference at the state Capitol.

As painful as the decisions were, state lawmakers said Thursday that they would have been less painful had the governor not delayed them for months while hoping for an economic rebound powered by federal stimulus dollars.

“They were forewarned in July,” state Sen. John Arthur Smith, a Democrat from Deming, said in reference to the Richardson administration. “There was a group of us that envisioned where we were headed and it was going to be painful. The governor would have done well to start looking at the expenditure side in July rather than waiting until November.”

Richardson, who has repeatedly said his administration has saved millions of dollars through a hiring freeze this year, reiterated that point Thursday.

A hiring freeze he ordered earlier in the year has resulted in 2,900 vacancies across state government, Richardson said defiantly.

The governor and state lawmakers’ sharp words are coming as they attempt to plug most of a $650 million budgetary shortfall this year even as more ominous financial clouds darken the horizon: A projected $1 billion shortfall already predicted for next year’s budget.

Richardson acted Thursday on a budgetary fix the Legislature approved during an October special legislative session. But the governor used his line-item veto authority to sidestep much of the Legislature’s bill, striking out a major provision that had ordered him to make 7.6 percent cuts at agencies under his control.

To make up for the cost savings he vetoed in the Legislature’s bill, Richardson issued an executive order requiring state agencies to cut spending. The cuts varied in severity, department to department, depending on a mix of factors, including how they might affect public safety, education or health care.

“For whatever reason the Legislature made a hasty decision during the special session, particularly when it forced a blanket cut of 7.6 percent on top of previous cuts on most state agencies,” Richardson said. “They did not take into account the impact these cuts would have on critical services.”

In a series of news releases leading up the decision, the Richardson administration said the Legislature’s budget bill would force the state to slash Medicaid (the government’s low-income health insurance program), shutter two prisons, release hundreds of non-violent offenders and close state parks.

Richardson made sure to drill home to the media Thursday that his actions averted the closure of state parks and prisons. And Medicaid, estimated to lose $150 million under the Legislature’s budget fix according to the Richardson administration, would lose only $28 million.

Furloughs and elimination of jobs

Meanwhile, Richardson said, he chose the furloughs — in which state workers take days off without pay — and the elimination of vacant jobs instead of laying off state workers. The state is projected to save nearly $11 million with the furloughs, which will work out to the rough equivalent of a 2 percent salary cut for state workers. It is unclear when furloughs will begin, Katherine Miller, Richardson’s budget chief, said.

It also was unclear how much the state could save by doing away with 1,000 state jobs.

“I don’t want layoffs. I don’t want people to lose their jobs. We are not at that stage,” Richardson said.

Richardson’s explanation didn’t inoculate the governor against criticism from state employee unions.

“It is very unfortunate that they’re balancing the budget on the backs of 20,000 hard-working middle class people,” Carter Bundy of American Federation of State, County, Municipal Employees, Council 18, said Thursday. ASFSCME represents about 6,500 classified state workers in New Mexico.

A balanced approach

Bundy and some state lawmakers said on Thursday that the governor could have avoided furloughs had the Legislature been able to consider tax increases during the special legislative session. With a narrowly worded proclamation, Richardson effectively prohibited state lawmakers from considering any tax increases.

“It is unfortunate that the Legislature and governor could not take a more balanced approach to solving this fiscal crisis, by raising some revenues to minimize the amount of cuts to critical public services,” said Democratic Sen. Eric Griego of Albuquerque.

Richardson has since said the Legislature must raise taxes during the January legislative session. The state’s projected $1 billion shortfall for next year is too large to close through cuts alones.

In everyday terms, that $1 billion shortfall represents nearly $1 out of every $5 the state spends on services, meaning state lawmakers have a big challenge ahead. Many lawmakers acknowledge that closing that shortfall will require a mix of tax increases and spending cuts.

State lawmakers challenged Richardson not only on his overall approach to fixing this year’s budget, but on individual actions as well.

Anger over Medicaid cuts

One sore point with some lawmakers was Richardson’s decision to cut Medicaid. In recent weeks several lawmakers have said their budget protected Medicaid and never intended to cut the program despite the Richardson administration’s pronouncements to the contrary.

“They were already being underfunded as it is,” state Rep. Jose Campos, D-Santa Rosa, said of Medicaid. “Taking out another 1 percent is just going to be creating more harm than good.”

Richardson cut $5 million in state funding from the program, but because of the quirks of Medicaid funding, that resulted in an additional loss of $23 million in federal matching dollars. The state and federal governments jointly fund Medicaid, but the federal government is the senior partner, providing a 4 to 1 match for every New Mexico dollar that is spent on Medicaid (counting federal stimulus dollars).

Political appointees

Richardson said he was prepared to sacrifice like all New Mexicans, and pointed to his decision to eliminate 84 jobs usually held by his political appointees.

“A lot of individuals will lose their jobs,” Richardson said of his political appointees.

But Rep. Nate Cote, D-Las Cruces, didn’t buy that answer. He noted that more than 60 of those jobs are already vacant, a statement Richardson disputed Thursday afternoon.

“So really, he’s getting rid of very few,” said Cote, who was one of the first to propose cuts to the governor’s political appointees during the special session. “Personally, I don’t think it’s enough. … He probably has 20 people that are occupying those positions that are leaving anyway.”

“I don’t think he’s sacrificing much by doing this,” Cote said. “Meanwhile, I think he’s sacrificing some of the hard-working state employees with furloughs.”

Economists and other state officials estimate that weak tax revenue has left the state $440 million or so short of what it needs to cover expenses for the year that ends June 30. Gov. Bill Richardson and state lawmakers are negotiating over what to do about the shortfall, what to take off the table as an option and what to leave on. An October special session is scheduled to bridge the budget gap.

But in the spirit of optimism, or for you pessimists out there who think I’m foreshadowing the state’s future — call it prophecy, perhaps — here’s a reminder that some other states are in much worse shape than the Land of Enchantment.

The Wall Street Journal reports that today state government employees in several states are taking an unpaid day off – called a furlough — while other states are shutting down offices.

Here’s an excerpt:

California drivers can’t line up to renew their licenses Friday. Wisconsin natives can’t order copies of their birth certificates. Georgia consumers will have to postpone registering complaints with state watchdogs. And stranded motorists in Maryland may have to wait a little longer for highway-department help.

Across the country, cash-strapped state governments are shutting down business for a day at a time to save money. State offices are shuttered Friday in California, Maine, Maryland and Michigan. Rhode Island had planned to join them until a judge on Thursday blocked its closure plan.

The authors of the story go on to report that states across the country have turned to furloughs rather than layoffs for various reasons.

The furloughs, which basically act as salary cuts for state workers, are the latest response to plunges in tax revenue because of the recession. State legislatures have struggled to cover shortfalls that have ballooned to $168 billion, or 24% of their general-fund budgets, for the current fiscal year, which for most began July 1, according to a report released Thursday by the left-leaning Center on Budget Policy Priorities.

Consumers have reined in spending, eroding sales-tax receipts, while job losses have cut income-tax collections. States have already responded by raising fees and tapping rainy-day funds, and are now forced to deal with wage costs, which make up about 13% of their budgets, according to the Rockefeller Institute of Government in Albany, N.Y.

For political and practical reasons, states have been reluctant to lay off workers, policy analysts said. Instead, furloughs have become the hot trend in budget management, in part because the savings are “easy math” to state officials, said Scott Pattison, executive director of the National Association of State Budget Officers.

More than 20 states have considered furloughing employees, according to anecdotal reports as well as data compiled by the National Conference of State Legislatures, the WSJ reports.

Of course furloughing employees isn’t the only way to trim costs.

Already there’s talk from the New Mexico Human Services Department of cutting Medicaid, the joint federal-state health insurance program for the low-income, to help balance the budget and to prepare for a loss of federal stimulus funds at the end of calendar year 2010.

So take this post in whatever spirit you want — New Mexico is in better shape than other states, or we’re all headed toward a steep cliff. But until we see what budget measures Richardson and the Legislature agree to this fall we’re stuck in a netherworld between hoping that we’re doing better than other states and the realization that with a budget agreement we may not be.

Which reminds me of another maxim: Ignorance is bliss.

The influential lawmaker told Jim Williams of KUNM radio that state lawmakers have a few options when they meet this fall for what likely will be a special legislative session dedicated to the state’s finances. New Mexico, like other states, is adjusting to the national economic downturn. Although New Mexico finds itself in a much better place than many other states, hard decisions may dominate the agenda.

It was after telling Williams he opposed a tax increase that Smith uttered the L and F words: layoffs and furloughs.

“Other options we have out there are furloughing, layoffs, cutbacks of exempt personnel,” Smith told Williams. “The administration certainly has the flexibility to exercise those administratively without a special session.”

Exempt personnel is a technical term for political appointees in state government who owe their jobs to Gov. Bill Richardson.

The Deming Democrat reiterated that furloughs or layoffs of exempt personnel were options “in lieu of tax increases, because I don’t sense that there is a consensus for a tax increase.”

He said the governor might not go for those options, but instead could help cobble together an agreement on a tax increase. But Smith predicted that the governor would have to campaign across the state to build up support for such an option.

Stay tuned. I have the sense that the prelude to the special session is going to get more interesting.