Five people are running in primaries for governor of New Mexico – two Democrats and five Republicans, as well as one independent. The primary is June 2nd and for the first time, independent voters can participate in the primaries. Bernalillo County District Attorney Sam Bregman is running against former Interior Secretary and U.S. Rep. Deb Haaland. He spoke with New Mexico PBS host Nash Jones recently on New Mexico in Focus.
NMPBS: As the Bernalillo County District Attorney, you've positioned yourself as the law and order candidate, the tough on crime candidate in this race in many ways. What would you say to Democratic voters who don't believe that more police officers, more people locked up, makes their community safer?
SAM_BREGMAN: It's extremely important that we recognize the fact that when we do have more of a sense of community policing, more police officers on the street, that does work. But the single biggest thing we need to do to fix crime in this state is fix our behavior health, mental health, and addiction recovery systems. There's a lot of good people working in this, but it's not coordinated to the extent that it needs to be. We can do better, for example, right now I've been in a courtroom in the morning where the judge wants to sentence someone to treatment, and they say we can't send you to treatment because there's no available beds, but that afternoon I've been in a rehab center myself where there's 14 available beds.
NMPBS: As governor, what does that allow you to do in terms of amping up that coordination, in terms of making sure that those pieces are connected?
BREGMAN: Let's get something that will establish real results. For example, a real-time dashboard on the Department of Health, which actually tells everybody where all the available treatment beds are in this state for people suffering from mental health, suffering from addiction. If a social worker walks up to someone in a homeless encampment right now, they ought to be able to pull up a real-time dashboard on their iPad and say, "You know what, you've hit rock bottom, we've got a bed for you two blocks away, get in this van, we'll get you over there.” Every nonprofit who's working in the behavior health space needs to be calling in every morning, telling the Department of Health how many beds they have available. If they get state funds, that's a simple requirement that I think should be done that way everybody knows, because there is no coordination right now.
NMPBS: Now you're running against Deb Haaland, a former Interior Department secretary with a record of protecting New Mexico's public lands from development. As governor, how would you balance preserving New Mexico's natural resources with tapping them as economic drivers, and why should a voter who considers protecting public lands their number one issue vote for you instead of the former Interior Department secretary?
BREGMAN: I came out here a long time ago to the University of New Mexico, that's how I got here. The reason I'm still here today is because the wonderful place this is, all of its natural beauty, all of its public lands. I love our public lands. I love our natural resources. We have great opportunity to be able to protect our natural resources, our air, land, and water, and water is going to be a big issue. And I wish we had all the time in the world to discuss that, because it's extremely important. But at the same time we also have economic development and energy needs, we're the second largest producer of oil and gas. At the same time, we know we're going to have to switch to renewables, and we need a leader who's going to be able to balance the environmental concerns with making sure that economic growth isn't so stifled that our kids and our grandkids can't grow up and have opportunity here. We have to balance those interests, and we can balance those interests, we can do both.
NMPBS: When I spoke to Haaland, she basically said there's there's places to drill and there's places not to drill, and she mentioned Chaco Canyon, for instance. Where do you stand on protecting sacred lands, protected lands?
BREGMAN: I think we should protect sacred lands. I don't know about the arbitrary 10-mile radius, the biggest concern I have with all of that. The Navajo Nation is a sovereign nation. The people on the Navajo Nation deserve to be consulted about those kind of decisions. They were not consulted about that decision. They were not consulted as a nation, as the sovereignty that they are, and the individuals that that affected were not even spoken to from the Department of Interior. That's a big concern for me. We need to respect the sovereignty of all of our tribal nations in this state.