Lori Martinez

Affordability and economic opportunity: Housing, food, utilities and other necessities have become increasingly expensive for New Mexicans. What specific actions should the Legislature take to make life more affordable while creating more stable, well-paying jobs in Doña Ana County?

Working families in Doña Ana County aren’t short on effort. They’re short on breathing room.

First, let’s pass paid family medical leave. Nobody should lose a paycheck and their family’s stability to care for a newborn or a dying parent. As a single mom and a social worker, I’ve watched families lose ground over exactly that.

Second, stop handing our best incentives to out-of-state corporations while local small businesses get leftovers. The businesses that hire here, bank here and sponsor the Little League team deserve the same protections we hand companies that will leave the day the subsidy ends. I also want to reduce gross receipts tax pyramiding, which taxes the same dollar over and over and hits small businesses hardest.

Third, build the workforce here instead of importing it. I lead an organization focused on education from cradle to career in Doña Ana County. This county has NMSU, Doña Ana Community College, agriculture, aerospace, manufacturing, and more. What we lack is the connective tissue between training and jobs that pay well.

Fund hands-on experiences like internships, apprenticeships, career & technical education. Fund and implement the Wage and Career Ladder for early childhood educators, to ensure fair wages and ensure New Mexico can sustain universal childcare for the long haul. Quality childcare access is supportive to families and education, and an economic driver. 

Affordability is not one bill. It’s childcare, housing, infrastructure, wages, access to health care, and acknowledging the everyday reality of most New Mexicans.

Education: New Mexico has substantially increased spending on public education but continues to struggle with student achievement. What should the state do differently, and how would you measure whether those changes are working?

More money has not produced better results because we starved our education system of funding for decades and then spent money without examining the model.

New Mexico has been out of compliance with the Yazzie/Martinez ruling since 2018. That’s not a budget problem, it is a will problem. The court told us precisely who we are failing: English learners, Native students, students with disabilities, and low income students. That's most New Mexico students. Fund a system built for those students and those needs instead of across the board increases that get diluted.

Fund bilingual and biliterate education, culturally and linguistically relevant curriculum vetted by the communities it represents, and work-based learning opportunities (internships, apprenticeships, etc) that we know produce results. We don’t need small pilot projects, we need to commit to what works.

On measurement, test scores alone will not tell us what is working, and they move too slowly to course correct. I want to track what moves the needle sooner and predicts later outcomes. We also need stability in our Public Education Department’s leadership. We’ve had six cabinet secretaries in the last eight years. 

I’ve spent 23 and how they affect our children. A child who is hungry, unsafe, or doesn’t have their basic needs met won’t come to school with a brain that is ready to learn, no matter how good the teacher is. Our teachers need support. 

Crime, behavioral health and public safety: What changes should the Legislature make to improve public safety and address violent crime, substance abuse and repeat offenders, and how should the state balance law enforcement and incarceration with behavioral-health treatment and prevention?

Violent crime deserves accountability - I’m not going to pretend otherwise. But we’ve been running one experiment for decades, using jails as our behavioral health system, and we aren’t safer for it. 

What I would change:

Build capacity so people have somewhere to go. Crisis stabilization, detox/treatment beds, child crisis centers/respite care, and mobile crisis teams so a behavioral health call doesn’t default to an officer with a gun. Our state needs this, and doesn’t have enough of it. Prevention is harder to measure so people don’t want to fund it, but it’s what saves our communities. 

Fund competency restoration and treatment for people too ill to stand trial, so they’re not simply released and rearrested. That’s the repeat offender problem most people are actually describing.

Pay, protect, and keep the workforce. We can authorize every program we want, and none of it matters if we don’t have enough mental health clinicians in the state. Health insurance companies should not be allowed to restrict how many providers are credentialed in a geographic area - it limits access to mental health care just to ensure maximum profits for them. Same with privately funded prisons, who profit off the number of bodies in detention and not on rehabilitating the human being. 

Again, fund prevention, the only thing that reduces the number of victims instead of reacting afterward. School-based services, substance use prevention, and support for families before the crisis.

Enforcement and treatment are not opposites. We’ve badly underbuilt one of them.

Water and economic development: Southern New Mexico needs economic growth but also faces limited water resources and increasing demands for energy and infrastructure. What standards should the state require of major new developments, including data centers, and under what circumstances should New Mexico decide a proposed project's costs outweigh its economic benefits?

Water is the limiting factor on everything in southern New Mexico, and we keep making decisions as though it isn’t. All it would take for New Mexico’s economy to collapse is a water crisis at the same time we run out of oil & gas without planning for alternate sustainable revenue sources. That is my nightmare.

I oppose Project Jupiter, a corporate data center pushed through at the expense of people in the south valley with no transparent process. I support a statewide moratorium on data centers until we have regulatory standards worth the name.

Criteria that should be applied when considering proposed projects: 

1) Projected economic impact & specificity regarding the numbers. Ex: How many short/long-term jobs, & how many will go to New Mexicans?

2) Environmental impact on land, air, water. Require impact assessments wherever development touches cultural sites or land/water rights. Projects should be held to greenhouse gas reduction targets in state law, and be required to offset their water use or emissions.

3) Community engagement that captures the concerns of the people most affected;

4) Community benefit agreements with specific benchmarks, & enforceable clawback provisions if project developers don't keep their promises;

5) Transparency standards, including what communities & lawmakers must have access to before decisions are made. 

Costs outweigh benefits when projects consume a public resource we can’t replace, in exchange for a job count that doesn’t survive scrutiny. A few dozen jobs are not worth an aquifer. The math doesn’t work, and our survival depends on it.

The Bulletin asked each Dona Ana County candidate four questions to allow voters to assess where the candidates stands on important issues heading into the election. The questions vary for each office, but are the same for every candidate running for the same office.