This is not the time for Las Cruces to raise GRT

On Las Cruces’ voting ballot right now, the city council is asking us to increase the gross receipts tax. Our GRT is already significantly higher than Albuquerque's. The proposed increase would make our taxes higher than Santa Fe, Ruidoso, Sunland Park and elsewhere.

This a really bad time to increase taxes. Many families are struggling to make ends meet due to the higher cost of living over the last few years, including higher prices for gas, housing, food, and clothing. The city’s budget has increased by over 40 percent since 2019, yet they are still asking us for more money?

City flyers say higher taxes “will provide increased public safety and improvements to city streets and parks.” These promises are disingenuous, given that the mayor and city council have refused to limit what the money can be used for in any meaningful way. The ballot text could have ensured that the funds wuld actually be used for public safety, streets and parks, but city council did not do this.

Instead, the ballot text includes open-ended wording which would allow the money to be used for essentially any capital improvement project that the city council wants. These taxes taken from the families of Las Cruces could very easily get diverted into things that the people never would have agreed to fund, such as hygiene stations for the homeless (which were proposed by city council last year) or no-sobriety-required homeless housing (like the Desert Hope homeless housing project on the corner of Foster and Pecos, which has devastated the surrounding neighborhood with drugs, crime and violence). 

The mayor and city council also could have built in a sunset date on the tax increase, to make sure it does not become a forever tax. But they refused to do this. By state law, the city council already has the power to increase taxes by a smaller amount anytime they want to, without the public voting on it. They are waiting to see how we vote on this tax increase before deciding whether to go ahead and impose their own tax increase. If we vote to increase taxes, city council may see that as a green light to impose an additional tax increase.

I don’t think this is the right time to take more money from the families of Las Cruces. And with three city council positions up for election next year combined with a mayor who has no veto power, they can’t make any guarantees on what the money will be used for. I’ll be voting against the tax increase.

Sarah Smith is Vice Chair of the Coalition of Conservatives in Action in Las Cruces and she co-leads the New Mexico Freedoms Alliance.