David Abbey recently published a book about his 40 years at the New Mexico Legislative Finance Committee, including more than two decades as its director. (Photo courtesy David Abbey)
In 2023, David Abbey retired after 26 years as director of the Legislative Finance Committee and 40 years influencing and crafting the New Mexico budget.
Shortly thereafter, he sat down to detail his experiences. A 340-page book is the end product of that reminiscing.
Called “Forty Years in the New Mexico Roundhouse” — and featuring a Source New Mexico photo on its cover of the state Capitol building at dusk — the book details Abbey’s experiences guiding the state budget through seven governors, starting with Gov. Toney Anaya in 1983, through Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham’s second term, along with dozens of iterations of New Mexico’s Legislature.
As LFC director, Abbey spearheaded the committee’s creation of its own budget proposal and offered nonpartisan, independent guidance to lawmakers and as they developed their own tax-and-spend proposals.
But just because retirement freed Abbey from the nonpartisan requirements of his job doesn’t mean he’s seeking to settle four decades of scores or reveal what he really thought about one governor or another.
“I had some motivations for this book, and improvement is one of them,” Abbey told Source New Mexico in a phone interview. “You don’t get there by throwing stones; you get there by truth telling. I tried to do that.”
The following interview has been edited for concision and clarity.
The cover of Abbey’s new book. He considers it more of a reference than a tell-all. (Photo by Patrick Lohmann / Source NM)
Source: I want to talk about your retrospective, but I thought I’d first start with the current crisis, specifically the cuts to Medicaid and SNAP and rural hospital closures the state is anticipating due to the passage of the ‘big beautiful bill.’ Does what’s happening now remind you of anything in your career, or is this totally unprecedented?
Abbey: I just read your story about [current LFC Director] Charles Sallee’s presentation. He says, ‘Everybody take a deep breath, let’s analyze this.’ That would be what I recommend, as well. And we don’t really know yet what the impacts are. I’m concerned about overstating it, and I’m definitely concerned about a lot of things we need to do in the state. If we get too preoccupied with the [cuts to] federal funds, we’re going to miss other stuff.
And have I ever seen anything like this? We’ve seen severe crises, and I think we’re well-positioned to deal with the federal funds situation.
You write in your recommendations at the end of the book that ‘it’s as if New Mexico is a hoarder,’ regarding how the Legislature hasn’t responded to huge oil and gas surpluses by cutting taxes all that much. Does the current federal funds cut make you think differently about that?
That comment about hoarding was pertinent to our tax structure, and it needs attention. I don’t think you can use [the] risk of a downturn in oil and gas or [a reduction in] federal funds to ignore it. It’s certainly true that it validates being cautious, but not to ignore it. I think we’ve ignored it. The Legislature basically did virtually nothing this year [on this issue], and the governor vetoed what little they did.
Why do you call the 2010s, when Susana Martinez was governor, ‘the lost decade’?
Every year, the state was limping along, trying to patch together budgets. It was an extreme [period] of status quo when our rankings then weren’t that different than now — near the bottom. And so the early childhood initiatives had merit, but they got, for example, squeezed out by Gov. Martinez [who] was preoccupied with tax cuts even when there wasn’t money. There were some initiatives that had merit, like early childhood and pre-K and home visiting and health care, mental health, and they were left behind, so we lost a decade through failure to address [those] initiatives.
As they revamp the state’s behavioral health care system this year, state Democrats frequently reference all the behavioral health contracts the Martinez administration canceled. Do you agree the damage done in the last decade to the behavioral health system took this long to catch up?
I think there was severe damage, but that was 11 years ago. We’re into the seventh year of the new governor. It’s past time to be forward-looking rather than backward-looking.
Do you think the Legislature did that this year? Did they take a big enough swing?
I think they really tried. Yeah, it’s a vexing problem. And I suppose just kind of a slight concern: It looks to me like the solution had to do with putting the leadership [of the behavioral health reforms] in the judicial branch and that’s not really the function of that branch of government. So some questions about that. But there was enough money to address that in a recurring way, and they tried.
Another of your recommendations to the Legislature is that ‘education trumps everything.’ To what do you attribute the longstanding leadership failures in the Public Education Department?
We need to take 100 buckets to three fires, not 100 buckets to 100 fires. Reading proficiency at the early grades — that’s the big fire. I’m a strong believer in extended learning time. That goes back two decades. Anaya wanted more learning time. [Gov. [Garrey] Carruthers wanted more learning time. In the COVID area, just when Sen. [Mimi] Stewart’s ‘plus’ initiative was taking root, teachers and parents pushed back on it.
You recount a lot of the corruption that’s surfaced in New Mexico politics over four decades and contend that paying lawmakers could help alleviate that. What do you think about moving away from the 30-day/ 60-day session set-up we have now?
In activity levels, the Legislature has a robust interim process. Many of the committees meet monthly. [Lawmakers] get per diem. Now they get pensions. Now they have aides. So the Legislature has made a lot of investments to make the volunteer work of legislators easier. So all that interim work could be more effective in getting stuff ready for the session.
I think a good example of that is the criminal justice stuff [where the governor and the Legislature failed to pass criminal justice legislation during a special session last summer]. There’s a lot of finger pointing about who’s to blame and who wasn’t ready. But the reality is, that’s interim work. And if you had a 60-day session every year, those extra days aren’t going to make up for rolling up their sleeves during the interim and getting the bills ready for the beginning of the session, whether it’s 30 or 60 days.
What do you think is the largest misperception New Mexico residents have about how the Legislature works?
I don’t think they realize they’re volunteers. They think they’re hanging out in Santa Fe living off the fat of the land. The reality is, in my 40-year history, a lot of the state’s leadership came from the Legislature…it’s a pretty long list of strong leadership coming from the Legislature, especially dealing with the hard times. The Legislature did a terrific job, and I don’t think that’s valued.
What were the biggest changes you saw during your 40 years?
You know, unfortunately, I would say not enough change. [That’s what] Chapter 13 [is] about, ‘Show me your metrics.’ We haven’t seen enough change. We certainly have had times of great fiscal constraints, and in certain times, money has been pouring in, and we haven’t been able to make money pouring in improve results. So, not enough change.