At the August 20-21 meeting of the Legislative Finance Committee, economists from the Executive and Legislative branches noted that New Mexico’s consistent and large revenue growth over the past decade is slowing down, but legislators will still have a considerable sum of new money available to allocate when they meet in January to adopt a budget for the coming fiscal year.
New revenue estimates released Wednesday project that lawmakers will have nearly $660 million in “new” money available next year. This amount represents the difference between projected revenue and spending levels in the current state budget.
We are hopeful that this bodes well for the efforts currently underway by the New Mexico Alcohol Alliance and others to temper the extent to which the liquor excise tax might be increased. It also provides support for efforts to stop allocating a portion of the liquor excise tax to the state general fund.
We will continue to advocate an approach that directs the entire amount of liquor excise tax collections to programs and matches the funds collected with federal Medicaid funding. These two actions would greatly increase available funding for substance abuse programs. With such a significant increase in resources, the state should not have the need to enact an excessively large increase in the excise tax, such as we saw proposed during the last session.
Two of the interim legislative committees will be discussing the tax in an upcoming meeting, but we don’t have an agenda for that meeting yet. We will update this page when new information becomes available.