Keller proposes $1.47 billion city budget for 2027 - Olivier Uyttebrouck, Albuquerque Journal
Inflation, higher health care costs, cuts in federal funding and increased demand for services add up to a $35 million decrease in city operating funds next year, according to Albuquerque Mayor Tim Keller's proposed budget for fiscal year 2027.
The proposed $1.47 billion budget includes "modest increases" for rank-and-file city workers and "significant raises and additional staffing for public safety," Keller wrote in a letter to the City Council.
And Albuquerque Fire Rescue "will see its highest pay increases in city history," the letter said.
If approved, the 2027 fiscal year budget would mark the first year the city’s budget has declined since fiscal year 2024, when the city approved a $1.37 billion budget, down from $1.42 the previous year.
To achieve the needed budget reductions, departments "eliminated or deactivated" 247 positions and cut external contracts for services that can be provided in-house by city employees.
"Albuquerque continues to see relatively flat population growth and tax revenue when adjusted for inflation," the letter said. "City revenues are also under pressure nationally, with economic uncertainty and low consumer confidence resulting in reduced spending."
The proposed budget includes $16.4 million in compensation increases citywide, subject to negotiations with employee unions, of which police and firefighter raises would claim a total of about $8.2 million.
On the revenue side, city officials anticipate $893.8 million in total revenue in fiscal year 2027, a 2.5% increase over the current year.
“We’re making the necessary cuts without sacrificing services or public safety,” Keller said in a statement. “This budget shows our total focus on protecting public safety, housing, and the core services people rely on every day. It’s about doing more with what we have and making sure it works for our community.”
A city administrator was not made available for an interview Thursday.
Public safety spending
The proposed Albuquerque Police Department budget would increase a modest 2% in the 2027 fiscal year, which begins July 1, to about $278.2 million and comprise nearly 32% of the city's general fund appropriations.
It calls for $3.8 million to support staff raises, subject to police union negotiations.
APD cut eight command staff and 52 civilian positions for a total savings of $5.9 million and doubled the number of funded positions for police service aides from 50 to 100.
"This civilianization strategy allows sworn officers to focus on core law enforcement crime-fighting duties, strengthening overall response capacity," the budget said. APD also plans to transition 43 sworn officers into field operations, it said.
The budget calls for 1,100 sworn officer positions. In November, APD had 901 sworn officers.
For Albuquerque Fire Rescue, the proposed budget includes $4.4 million for a negotiated wage increase for firefighters. Overtime appropriations were increased by $409,000. AFR staffing is expected to remain essentially unchanged at 828 full-time positions.
"Albuquerque Fire Rescue is prioritizing field response by realigning staffing and reducing reliance on overtime," the mayor's letter said.
Albuquerque Community Safety, which the proposed budget identifies as the city's "third branch of public safety," is slated to receive a 10.5% budget increase to $19.8 million in 2027, including $261,000 for raises. The budget increase is intended to increase field response and street outreach.
ACS personnel have backgrounds as social workers, clinicians and counselors and respond to 911 calls reporting people suffering from addiction, homelessness and mental health emergencies. The proposed budget would fund 156 full-time positions, up from 142 currently.
Health, housing and behavioral health
The proposed budget would increase funding by 9.5% to $48.9 million for the city's Health, Housing and Homelessness Department, and fully funds the Gateway System of Care, a cluster of city services for homeless people.
The proposal includes $8 million for affordable housing vouchers. It calls for 98 full-time positions, of which 78 are paid from the city's general fund. Another 20 personnel would be paid by grant funding.
It would also appropriate $400,000 for a new diversion program operated by the City Attorney's Office to address low-level nonviolent offenders.
"Albuquerque Community Safety's expanded outreach capacity will serve as a primary entry point into this system, connecting individuals to shelter, services, and housing pathways," Keller's letter said.
The budget also includes funding for a Gateway West Safe Outdoor Space for homeless people "not yet ready for indoor shelter," the letter said without further explanation. No line-item appropriation is listed for the open space.
The city's Youth and Family Services Department would expand teen programming by $500,000 "while reorganizing early childhood programs to better align with the state's free childcare framework," the letter said.
“This is a disciplined budget built around accountability,” Chief Financial Officer Carla Martinez said in a statement. “We took a hard look at any inefficiency and worked with departments to reduce costs, bring work in-house, and improve performance while making sure we continue delivering essential services for our residents.”
Governor still weighing New Mexico's participation in federal education tax credit program - Dan Boyd, Albuquerque Journal
Despite voicing initial opposition to a federal school choice program, Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham has not made a final decision about whether New Mexico will participate.
Amid pressure from Republican lawmakers to opt in, Lujan Grisham is seeking more information from President Donald Trump’s administration before making up her mind, a spokesman said this week.
“The governor is actively considering whether to opt in but is awaiting more information from the Department of Treasury about the flexibility of the funding,” Lujan Grisham spokesman Michael Coleman told the Journal.
He also said a decision was expected to be made soon, but did not provide a firm deadline.
The White House has urged governors to opt in to the federal education freedom credit program, which allows taxpayers to obtain a dollar-to-dollar tax credit of up to $1,700 for donating to scholarship-granting organizations that help students attend private schools.
Scholarships issued under the tax credit program, which will officially be launched next year, can also be used for some expenses for public school students, including tutoring and after-school programs. The program was created as part of the federal budget bill passed by the GOP-controlled Congress last summer.
While mostly Republican-led states have announced plans to opt in so far, Colorado Gov. Jared Polis, a Democrat, announced in January that New Mexico’s northern neighbor would also participate.
Some New Mexico Republicans have urged Lujan Grisham to follow suit, and state Rep. Rebecca Dow, R-Truth or Consequences, said in a letter to the governor this week that students around New Mexico would benefit from the tax credit program.
“This opportunity presents a rare moment for our state to deliver meaningful, student-centered support to families, particularly those who need it most, without placing additional strain on our state budget,” Dow wrote in her letter.
For states that opt in to the federal program, students will be eligible to receive scholarships as long as their family’s annual income does not exceed 300% of their area’s median income. For Albuquerque, that cutoff would have been about $204,000 in annual income in 2024, according to U.S. Census Bureau data.
However, teachers unions have largely criticized the program, arguing it amounts to a voucher program that could translate to fewer resources for public schools.
Whitney Holland, the president of the American Federation of Teachers union in New Mexico, said this week she was planning to reach out to the Lujan Grisham administration with information from the national union.
“From our point of view, it’s a disastrous program,” said Holland, who said the federal program could specifically disenfranchise students in rural New Mexico communities that lack school choice options.
In addition, some critics have noted the federal tax credit program could also indirectly lead to less federal spending on public schools, since less revenue from taxpayers will be available. Congressional estimates have projected that at least $500 million in tax credits are likely to be issued next year.
Education spending in New Mexico has surged in recent years, and the state is set to spend about $4.8 billion on K-12 public schools in the coming year — about 43% of the state’s total $11.1 billion budget.
However, New Mexico has continued to rank near the bottom of most national education rankings, despite improvements in the state’s reading proficiency rate.
Meanwhile, only about 6.5% of the state’s roughly 340,000 students attended a private school as of 2022, according to data from the Learning Policy Institute, a California-based research and advocacy group. That figure was lower than the national rate of 8.7% of K-12 students attending private schools.
NM Attorney General leads multi-state coalition in US Supreme Court pesticide, weedkiller case – Joshua Bowling, Source New Mexico
New Mexico Attorney General Raúl Torrez on Wednesday led a multi-state coalition asking U.S. Supreme Court justices to preserve several states’ abilities to seek restitution from pesticide manufacturers.
The New Mexico Department of Justice and attorneys general for 16 other states and Washington, D.C., filed a brief of support in the Missouri case Monsanto Co. v. Durnell. The case focuses on a dispute over whether the Federal Insecticide, Fungicide, and Rodenticide Act protects manufacturers like Monsanto from local lawsuits that accuse its products of causing cancer.
Torrez and the other AGs argue that members of Congress did not intend to do away with various state law protections when they signed the federal legislation nearly 80 years ago.
A Missouri gardener named John Durnell filed the suit against Monsanto in 2019 after receiving a non-Hodgkins lymphoma diagnosis. He alleged that Monsanto did not adequately disclose cancer risks associated with using the weed killer Roundup.
Monsanto’s parent company, Bayer, has long countered that the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency does not list Roundup’s active ingredient as a known carcinogen and that it stands to reason that federal policies would take precedence over any state’s requirement to disclose cancer risks.
The AGs in Wednesday’s filing disagree.
“At stake in this case is whether state law will continue enabling people to hold pesticide manufacturers accountable in many cases,” Torrez said in a statement. “We are leading this coalition to ensure that federal law is not misused to shield corporations from accountability and to defend the ability of states to safeguard public health through private claims brought in state courts.”
A Missouri court ruled in Durnell’s favor and awarded him $1.25 million. Torrez and the other state AGs on Wednesday asked the Supreme Court to uphold that decision.
However, the U.S. Court of Appeals in a separate Pennsylvania case against Monsanto ruled that federal law overrode the state’s labeling requirements.
In petitioning the U.S. Supreme Court, Monsanto has argued that these two cases represent a “deepening split” that sorely needs clarity.
The company’s lawyers have also argued that varying labeling requirements across states would create a “crazy-quilt” of standards, Torrez wrote in the Supreme Court filing. He alleged that the characterization is “exaggerated,” though, and that obligations to warn of potential harms associated with a consumer product are “more or less the same across states.”
“Inconvenience to Monsanto is no reason to pre-empt state law where federal law allows considerable latitude,” Torrez wrote.
In an emailed statement to Source NM, a Monsanto spokesperson wrote that the federal law was meant to provide a “uniform, nationwide framework” and maintained that companies shouldn’t face penalties under state laws “for complying with federally approved and scientifically-based labeling determinations.”
“Allowing such claims to proceed invites a patchwork of state standards that conflict with the uniformity objective Congress prescribed in law and creates uncertainties that impede the development of new agricultural innovations,” the spokesperson wrote. “The security and affordability of the nation’s food supply depend on farmers’ and manufacturers’ ability to rely on the science-based judgments of federal regulators. Clarification from the Court is essential to restore uniformity, certainty, and the rule of law.”
Oral arguments are scheduled for April 27.
Torrance County votes to extend ICE contract, potentially for last time – Patrick Lohmann, Source New Mexico
The Torrance County Commission approved its latest — and potentially last — month-long extension Thursday of a contract enabling U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement to hold immigrants at the local jail.
The commission’s unanimous vote comes ahead of the May 20 effective date of House Bill 9, the Immigrant Safety Act, which prohibits public entities from contracting with ICE to detain immigrants. The New Mexico Legislature passed the bill in the 2026 legislative session.
Under the contract commissioners extended Thursday until April 30, ICE pays Torrance County more than $2 million for costs associated with housing detainees, funding the county then passes on to CoreCivic under what’s known as an “intergovernmental services agreement.”
But even after the agreement expires, county officials expect that operations at the jail, including detention of roughly 370 ICE detainees, will continue uninterrupted.
That’s because ICE has announced its intention to contract directly with private company CoreCivic, which owns the Torrance County Detention Facility.
ICE officials prefer to include government entities in detention contracts, because the federal agency generally faces fewer barriers, including procurement and competition requirements, than it would face in contracting directly with private companies.
Torrance County Manager Jordan Barela said Thursday county officials expect the federal agency and CoreCivic will ink a contract before the effective date of HB9.
“CoreCivic is in the process of negotiating a direct contract with ICE, which, if approved, would remove Torrance County as a partner to the contractual agreement for these services,” he told commissioners. “It is our understanding that those contract negotiations are ongoing and they would be in place within the next 30 days.”
Torrance County is one of three New Mexico counties with ICE detention contracts. Cibola County’s commission voted last week to begin the county’s withdrawal from its contract due to HB9. However, Cibola commissioners, in a letter to ICE and CoreCivic, raised the possibility of litigation that could arise soon that could halt the county’s exit from the contract.
That’s because Otero County, which owns the Otero County Processing Center facility, has extended its contract past the HB9 effective date in apparent defiance of the state law, an act that Cibola officials could result in litigation that affects Cibola’s contract.
The New Mexico Department of Justice has twice determined that the Otero County contract extension is illegal under two state laws, and Attorney General Raúl Torrez on Wednesday asked the Supreme Court to order the county to stop its enforcement of the extended ICE contract.