Viante's Final 2019 Legislative Update

This video update was done on Friday, March 15, 2019 at 11am.

Video Update from Viante’s Executive Director
Rhiannon Samuel, Viante’s Executive Director comes to you with an update from across New Mexico’s Roundhouse from the office of “Innovate Educate. ” We want to give a little shout-out to them for giving Viante a workspace during the session!

What’s Happening Between Now and When the Session Ends

The session ends March 16, 2019 at 12pm and there will be a lot happening between now and then. Legislators will be fine tuning bills in order to get them to the Governor’s desk. On the other hand, other legislators will be working to kill other bills in order to keep them from reaching the Governor. So even though there’s only a little over 24 hours left in the session, New Mexico’s Legislature is by no means slowing down.

There’s been a ton of work being done this session. There were about 1300 bills introduced in total, approximately 450 of which touch on Viante’ metrics. For those who want to know which metrics Viante uses to select our common ground issues, click on the links below.

Viante’s Education Metrics
Viante’s Crime Metrics
Viante’s Quality of Life Metrics

Working Across the Political Aisle

There were many legislators this session who reached across the political aisle to get support for nonpartisan or bipartisan legislation that will help move New Mexico forward. This was huge. For example, because there is a large Democratic majority in the House and Senate, it was necessary for Republicans to get Democratic support in order to move certain legislation forward.

As expected, divisions between parties still existed in other areas. What’s new, however, is that different fights emerged between rural and urban legislators. In some cases, certain legislators disagreed with their own party based on their constituency’s desires.

Viante’s Work is Just Beginning

Now that the session is coming to a close, Viante will be working on selecting our final 15 bills that we’ll use to grade our legislators. Viante has a subcommittee that will diligently work to comb through the 450 bills that touch on our metrics. They will narrow down the list and unanimously decide which bills hurt or help New Mexico in a nonpartisan way.

From there, the bills will be presented to Viante’s entire Board of Directors, where they will then unanimously decide on 15 bills they believe will have the biggest impact on New Mexico. We’ll use this selection of bill to grade our legislators and to make our one-of-a-kind scorecard. You can expect to see legislator scores mid-year.

Prior to that, Viante will release legislator attendance data on how often they were showing up for floor votes. We released attendance scores mid-way through the session and by and large, our legislators are showing up and doing their job. We’re interested to see what the data will show after the session ends. We’ll be releasing that information soon.

From here on out, you can expect less frequent emails, but we’ll still be following up with you if there’s any breaking news or big announcements. Please follow us on social media to stay-up-to-date and please share your thoughts with us – your voice matters! Thank you for following us on this journey.

Stay tuned for more…