At Week's End; 315; Ethics/Salary Bill

You At Weeksend, we examine a proposal whose sponsors say would ensure ethical conduct by members of the legislature, coupled with a bill as a measure to establish a salary for state lawmakers. We'll talk with the authors of the bill, they believe passing the measure would add to the body's professionalism.

On Weeks review, Roger Morris and other journalists tell us what's going on in Santa Fe this week as the legislature opens its 1990 session. Next at Weeksend. Hello, I'm New Boggs at Weeksend. With the New Mexico legislature now in session in Santa Fe, members are scrutinizing the body of bills before them, included among this year's proposal and ethics and pay package that would scrutinize them. Two legislators, Democrat Pauline Eisenstadt and Republican Don Silva, have proposed the creation of a legislative ethics commission to ensure ethical conduct by state lawmakers. They say an ethics commission also would add professionalism to the legislative post, providing an ethics agency where currently there is none.

The two believe an ethics commission would help restore ailing public confidence in state lawmakers, tied to the ethics proposal as a second plan that would give New Mexico legislators a $15,000 a year salary. Currently they receive no salary, instead they are allotted $75 a day for hotel and meal expenses during their stay in Santa Fe. Having a salary for lawmakers requires a constitutional amendment to be decided by voters. In Santa Fe, some lawmakers say there are now too many inconsistencies in the ethics and pay bill to assure passage. We are joined by the authors of the bill, Representative Pauline Eisenstadt of Corralis and Representative Don Silva of Albuquerque. Thank you for being with us. Mr. Eisenstadt, you have been quoted as saying that this bill is not the result of misconduct by any one legislator. Does it mean that misdoing or misconduct has become so persuasive among lawmakers reflects an ineffectiveness in the existing system for dealing with such issues?

A couple of responses, Neil. One, I think you have seen that there is a quarterly profile of New Mexico citizens put out by the Institute of Public Affairs of the University. Every quarter they ask the question, how would you rate the performance of New Mexico's governor and legislature? Every quarter I look at that and I'm just made. We get less than 30% approval. You have to wonder why. This certainly is not directed at any individual legislature in our state, but it is a national kind of a concern. The public wants more accountability from their public officials. One of the ways they want to do that is through an ethics commission or an ethics board. They want us to police ourselves. They want us to be more professional. I also serve on the National Council of State Legislators Board of Directors. And they have done a survey of states. And the second most important issue discussed nationally after education being number one

is ethics. Well, Representative Silva, you mentioned the legislature policing themselves. Representative Silva, the bill would put the legislature itself in charge of the monitoring process, but would not do more to bolster public confidence if the Watchdog Group were a citizen group? Well, Neil, we look at that when we put this ethics package together. It's not something we've taken lightly, but the fundamental concept, and it's in our constitution right now, in that we decide who sits with us. It's a peer society. And that's one of the fundamental concepts of it. We judge ourselves. It's typical of the code of ethics of the bar association, the engineers association, the broadcasters association. Every group is a peer society in that sense. And in that sense, one of the fundamental concepts is a peer society. The other fundamental concept we used was that standards of conduct of any group is a function of the leadership of that group.

And that's why the commission is made up of the leadership of both House and Senate. Is that going to be an impediment, Representative Biden, staff, though, to the conduct of daily business in the legislature, the fact that the legislative leadership, plus a sizable number of members, would be sitting on this commission or these committees, isn't it going to take a lot of time? No, we don't even anticipate they'll be functioning during the session. You know, we only have a 30 day and a 60 day. What we envision for the ethics commission is that, primarily, they're going to be issuing advisory opinions. We have put in money for a staff and executive director and a secretary and money to hire an attorney if necessary. What we envision is, as a citizen legislature, even if we get the pay package through, it's only 15,000. We have a lot of potential gray areas which are conflicts of interest. Let me give you some that I have experienced personally. I've been asked to serve on a number of boards of directors. Almost all of them are non-profit. You know, I wouldn't be paid, don't make a nickel.

But on some of them, there is a small appropriation from the state. Now I vote on the state budget. It's two or three steps removed. But still, is it appropriate for me to serve on a board that gets money from the state? I think no. So I have gotten off boards that have money from the state. But I checked with... That was a voluntary act on your party. Yes, yes. Yes, no. Now it would be presumably... I think it would be an issue that I would want to get clarification from the ethics committee. Would you favor that? Yes. What we're doing is, we're not presupposing or putting in the ethics package a set of ethical standards. What we are saying is, it's a peer society and a functional leadership. The first order of business is to develop a set of standards of conduct. There are other situations, for example, as a citizen legislature, we all have conflicts. One that I'm familiar with is, you can bid on, every once in a while, the General Services Department needs real estate to rent offices to government agencies.

Legislators own property. Could they, on a competitive basis, bid their property for use by a state agency? That's something that would need an advisory opinion. I, in eight years in the legislature, I have gone to the Attorney General twice to ask if we could participate in a state contract on a competitive basis. The answer was no. Well, the personal conduct of legislators come into this. For example, something that happens, we've seen a number of instances in the newspapers in recent months, legislators in the press for something that happened that cast the whole body in a bad light and in the public eye. Will that be taken into account by ethics? No. What we envision this ethics commission dealing with are issues outside of the law, you know, the conflict of interest areas. Things that are now not in the gray area. Things that are in the courts stay in the courts. We don't see any role for the commission playing in something that is a legal situation or in the presently working its way through courts. I'd like to move to the pay raise for a moment here.

Some critics see this as a possible ploy, or not pay raise, excuse me, but some critics see it as a possible ploy to establish a salary for legislators since the two-hour companion measures, sort of a trade-off representative, Silva. Some people have a reminder of what Congress recently did along the same line. Is it going to be an obstacle? We don't think it's an obstacle, Neil. In fact, we had talked about doing this well before Congress came up with the idea, this is the third time an ethics bill has been put in in successive sessions, not to the depth and study this one has had. Our real driving force is to raise the image and the professionalism of legislators while we're talking about two packages, there are other packages coming in, companion measures on how the process works when we meet length of sessions, there's a series of things, these are just two of them. Even though you had talked about it and considered it before Congress passed its ethics pay raise bill, might you not bear some damage from that, though Congress sort of snuck theirs through to

use that expression? You have not sneaking this through. We have talked to the media, we have talked to legislators, they've all gotten packages even over in the Senate before we've even officially submitted the bill. Well I understand, too, the ethics bill can pass and the voters could turn down the pay raise, so they would not be tied there. One could stand without the other, but on the question of the money, $15,000 a year has been proposed, now 42 senators I figured it in 70 representatives and it adds up to about a million, $600,000, will New Mexico's finances stand at this point? Respond to that, Neil, I can leave this information with you, there are only four other states that do not pay legislators in the entire United States. Most states pay a per dem, they pay expenses plus a salary, in our- The salary comparable to this? More, considerably more.

We are among four states that do not pay at all. The reason for salary, there's more than one reason, but we feel the pool needs to be broadened. Someone needs to be able to go to Santa Fe, rent their hotel room and pay for their meals and still pay the mortgage back home. It's $75 a day. You cannot do that. Your question was initially requested as to whether the New Mexico can afford that. Our state budget is $1,800,000, presently the legislative budget, the feed bill hasn't passed yet, but the last feed bill was less than one half, one percent of the whole budget for legislative expenses. My question to you is we can't afford not to deal with this issue because we need to have professional legislators who are not burdened with money problems. I've had some of my colleagues, as I go around with this salary package say to me, I can't afford to be here anymore. I think I'm going to run for county commission. Can you believe?

I mean, the county commissions throughout the state, the commissioners pay and the legislators don't. Representative Silva, I'm going to throw at you some words that you're not guilty of, either of you, but some of your fellow legislators have said it on the salary question. We've heard from people in Santa Fe, both House and Senate, opponents of the teacher pay raise that higher pay will not for teachers will not make for a better school system. But that argument not also will be made for, in the case of a salary will not make for better laws. I don't think making a paid legislature makes for better laws necessarily. Those don't follow and I think get the same thing follows in the school teacher situation. I think what it does do, though, is it opens the opportunity for serving in the legislature to other people, people who now can't afford to be in. So I think I think it might indirectly kneel in that it would open the pool and you'd get better competition so that hopefully with competition the better candidates would rise to the top and we would have it.

In addition though, there's so many good legislators now and they should be rewarded. This shouldn't be a burden and it presently is for many of my colleagues. When I go to national meetings for this Board of Directors, it's generally money out of my pocket. It's always money out of my pocket. The public can say, well, you knew that, you know, when you ran. I did, but I've gotten smarter since I've been there. You found that you got there. There was more than you thought or expected. Well, we both understand. Very briefly, we have less than half a minute remaining though. We have now less than a month in this session and a heavy schedule. Is it going to go through? If the public and if the media supported, then we can respond. Are you getting public respond? Yes, tremendous support. You can light a fire under a piece of legislation in two days. It can pass both houses. I've seen that happen. Will this pass? I think it's 50-50. Thank you. We'll be watching as we go along through the course of this session. Thank you very much. Thank you.

Representative Pauline Eisenstadt. Next, Roger Morris and other journalists give us an update on activity this week at the legislature on Weeks Review. Good evening. Roger Morris, welcome to Weeks Review. We'll be discussing the big stories of the week and looking also at some stories that may have been neglected. Joining me today are Helen Goswaw, state editor of United Press International based in Santa Fe and Fred McCaffrey, political columnist for the Santa Fe reporter. Fred, the event of the year in Santa Fe, the legislature began this week, tell us about the great affairs in the state capital.

I even brought my book because I'm going to talk some numbers. You have to do that when you're talking legislatures, you know. The feed bill, that's the bill that pays all the costs of a legislative session in some other things, has already been passed by the House and went over to the Senate. It needed a little tinkering with, so it goes back to the House, but it will probably be passed, wouldn't you think, early Monday, by 10-30 Monday morning, it ought to be enacted, which is good, because then everybody, including the legislators, can get paid. It's for $7.1 million. And I think people hearing that probably think that's high for a 30-day session. But that also includes the money for year-round operations of the legislative finance committee and the legislative council service and the legislative education study committee. And this year, it's got $900,000 or more in it to start a study for reapportionment. Because this is a census year, and we have to, under the one man, one vote rule, we have

to go back and recount everybody in regroup all the House seats and all the Senate seats. That's a very political money. That's a very sensitive time, and that will occupy a great deal of the attention of the coming legislature. And I'm also reporting that, as of the end of the first week, the House had put in 149 bills in the Senate, 100 bills. That's 249 bills, and since the pace at which bills go in, they all must be introduced by halfway through the session. All bills have to have gone into the hopper, but the pace gets quicker as it more bills every day as it goes along. I would say we're going to have, I'm going to say, Helen, you can come back and tell me how crazy I was if I turned out to be 775 to 800 bills in the session. Incredible.

Disastrous. I think that's a real reasonable estimate. We've already got 100, the first week is usually slow. It's slow. And we'll have a rush right before the last few days, possibly another 200 on those days alone. The clerk is just there taking in bills, just on each House, just taking them in. The members are walking up there and throwing bills down so fast, you can't believe it. Is there an illusion in the various constituencies of these senators and representatives that these bills mean anything at this point in those numbers? They can't be, to anybody who really understands. But what a lot of bills are, or sort of, courtesy is to somebody in your district, you know, they're interested in this and you say, I'll get something done about it. And you put in a bill, you can show them that you put in the bill, it dies on the floor on adjournment and you say, well, hey, I'm sorry, but I should try to get that for you. Well, I think a real pack of courtesy bills will be the ones that are being introduced on behalf of Hal Stratton and his criminal reform movement that call for such things as doubling

certain penalties and cutting good time down to a third of a tenth of what it currently is. The chances of those bills actually passing with the millions of dollars that they would cost is unlikely, but they'll be in there. And don't you think even how knows that the chance is small? I think he's very much aware of that. I think that he likes being seen as the attorney general against crime and that shows in the way, in the things that he emphasizes and he'll be happy just to be able to tell everybody that he tried to get these changes made. So is there anything going on here besides posturing in this first week? Well, very little, really, you know, the purpose of a 30-day session is House Bill 2, the General Appropriations Act. And House Bill 2 doesn't become anything till the last 10 days of the session when it, you know, it finally starts to take shape. And as I've said before, it really doesn't come to be until both houses have acted on

it, have not concurred and it goes off to a conference committee and they get behind closed doors and they really divvy things up. Now, I'm not being too harsh, I mean, that's how it goes. Not in the least. Not over-emphasizing the year relevance of all of this. Are there economic projections now open to that? Well, they actually, the legislature this year even began to look forward to the next fiscal year, you know, what we're doing now is voting money that will begin to become effective on the 1st of July of this calendar year. And they heard some reports on how things look the year after the one on which they're now working and they don't look very good. It's hard to be accurate projecting that far ahead. But they're saying the 1991-92 fiscal year will probably have an inflation rate of about 4.8 percent and a revenue increase of about 4.6 percent.

Now you can take those two and put them together and say that's, that means we're not only not going to go forward, we're not going to stay level, we're going to go into a decline. We're going to fall forward. Helen, speaking of revenue, what's the real prospect here for a tax increase or for paying for any of these things? Well, it's been interesting in the last few years that you may be speaking of revenue estimates. They have been fluid in the last few years. Last year, for the session started, there was suddenly jumps of $20 million in what they thought and that they would be having and there's been a little bit of talk that maybe there's some pressure to up the revenue estimates this year, maybe even artificially, so that there won't be any pressure to increase taxes. But with only four days into the session, we've already got three different revenue bills in, two tax increases and the perennial lottery.

And there's Lucky Verrella, representative from Santa Fe, has not gotten his bill in, it calls for a combination of moving money around and taking advantages of some surpluses to raise some revenues. Sam Bihill of Las Vegas, the Democrat from Las Vegas is looking at a strictly, pretty straightforward property tax increase. Dick Minzner has brought back his local option property tax. So a lot of revenue enhancement going on here, I take it that Gary Carruthers advertises himself and will when he leaves office as the governor who did not essentially raise taxes in New Mexico. And yet we've seen a lot of this revenue enhancement going on, this ledger domain behind the scenes. How much of this is Carruthers, how much of it is the legislature itself? Well, I think real typical of Carruthers' position is what he's done this year, which is to say, certainly, I'd love to pay for the pay races, I'd love to pay for these

additional programs, but gee, you know, what can I do? The Republicans don't want it. And so he can take that public posture, and then in the last few weeks when the budget comes down, we'll see just exactly what the Republicans wanted in exchange for their minority of votes to that one. That's, I think, exactly what'll happen, that's when the horse trades get made, we'll find out. Like the Senate Republicans caucus before the session started and said, no way, no tax raises of any kind, well, that won't hold, they'll break, but that's a posture that you adopt so you can bargain with them. So watch not what they say, but what they do. How vicious or how savage is the case maybe, or the politics behind the scenes here? I note this week that Secretary John Dendall of Tourism and Economic Development has been upgraded not only by the Democrats, whom he attacked in the person of Max Call, but

also members of his own party. In fact, it seems the governor's even upset about this. What about the Dendall Call affair? Will that have an effect on the appropriations process? I really don't think so. The pattern has been followed by the House Appropriations and Finance Committee for the last few years, which is chaired by Call, and which is the primary drafter of the budget bill, has been to get angry, to talk big, and give the agency the money they want. And I think behind the scenes and all that, we had probably some people in the governor's office who were very irated Dendall. There was talk that he might, his head might roll and so on, but they got no replacement for him. And if they did fire him just before the session, that would be to play into the hands of Max Call. Max would have been very happy to see that happen, I think. But, you know, when the super bowl is about to start, you can't be changing your line

up too much. And that's the situation. Even if your team is not all that talented. Yes. But we're on the eve here of Gary Carruther's last great shot at governing, as it were. He's got a legislature in town, he's got a chance to put some priorities into effect. Will anything happen before the Carruther's administration expires, or will we have four years of vacancy here in the state house? I'm waiting for you to answer. I was going to leave this one here. I noticed it too. Well, I think that, like you said earlier, the no tax position will be shown to not have been true, that one of the significant changes over the last few years is that we have seen our gasoline taxes go up, we have seen our personal income taxes go up, and we will probably see our property taxes go up in addition to a number of fee increases. So that is one impact, Carruther's will have, on the future of the state.

It's possible that if the Democrats come through with funding, that we will see some educational reform. Now, we probably should have seen it four years ago when the 186 Senate Bill 106 was passed. We were ready to. And it's so it's really going to depend on whether or not the money follows the proposals. Let me ask Calvin a question. I want to make some odds. What are the odds on they're not getting the job done, and we need a special session. Maybe a day or two, maybe a week, maybe a whole special session. What do you think? I think they'll get done on time. Yeah, I do too. I think they'll go through all the mishmash and carry on and so on. But at the last minute, they'll glue it all together, including the taxes. But the burden here, the burden of all of this, you're saying, seems to be that we're not going to see any great accomplishment out of the Carothers Administration. Something that we can put in the history books to record this governor, this governorship

as being anything extraordinary. It's a little late for them to achieve that. It's a little late indeed. Let me, in just the brief time we have left, bring up two or three stories, which this week saw the light of day and didn't get as much play, I think, as they should have. And they're illustrative of some of the problems in the Mexico Journalism. About a month ago, I was traveling around the state and saw many of the small, weaklies and semi-weeklies in this state addressing the issue of the plight of small gasoline station owners who were struggling against new regulations governing underground gasoline tanks. That story was all over rural New Mexico in early December, discovered as it were this week by the Albuquerque Journal as if it had not existed before. I think an example of the fact that the big paper is not the only journalism in this state by any means. Two other stories of interest, and I'd like your reaction on this very quickly.

One out of Santa Fe, a story of racial incidents in Los Alamos at a high school basketball game in which racial slurs were hurled at Hispanic kids from Albuquerque. The second PNM, overcharging its right payers, $40 million in tax escrow funds. Two stories that indicate issues that are there beneath the surface that we don't see enough of. The PNM one has been there for months and months and months and months and has been known. It hasn't got much attention. It will get irate letters by the bail and every paper and the stuff. But it needs, because those three initials just at this time in history draw people to denounce big news. It needs an indication. But the story is a little more complex than we have seen in full explanation we've seen before. Thank you Fred McCaffrey and Helen Goswan. If you wish to express your views about our program, please write us.

At Weeksend K-N-M-E-T-V, 1130 University Boulevard, Northeast, Albuquerque, New Mexico, 8702. Be with us next week as we continue to ride the tide of legislative activity in Santa Fe. We'll keep you informed of developments there. Until then, I'm Neil Boggs at Weeksend.