Your tax dollars at work

New capital-spending dashboard gets NM on the road to accountability

For years, the Journal Editorial Board has asked for accountability and transparency in New Mexico’s sprawling, labyrinthine, all-but-impossible-to-analyze capital outlay system.

And while the dashboard recently unveiled by Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham’s administration doesn’t get us all the way there, it’s a promising start.

For those unfamiliar with capital outlay, it is New Mexico’s unique and highly politicized system of doling out funds for projects including government facilities and equipment, bridges and roads. State capital dollars go into three buckets — the governor, Senate and House — for divvying up based on anything and everything but prioritized need. Those dollars in turn are used to purchase bonds to finance the projects, so taxpayers essentially take out a mortgage for every capital outlay expenditure.

There has been no way for the public to tell if a project is wanted or needed by a community, if it’s a smart use of public dollars that will deliver in the short and long term, if it is completely funded or being done in phases, and unless a sponsor discloses it, who asked for and who got funding.

Not sexy stuff, for sure, but hundreds of millions of your tax dollars financing gym mats, grass seed, zoo animals, senior center silverware and myriad other items that won’t last the life of the bonds paying for them is the epitome of irresponsible government.

This system has been criticized by many as lacking — lacking a big-picture view of state needs and return on investment, lacking long-term planning, lacking project oversight, lacking transparency on who wants a project and why.

Lujan Grisham and her team’s online tool — accessible at nmdfa.state.nm.us under “DFA Dashboards” — is a first step in that it provides information on the projects, funding amounts and status of funding.

Of course there’s room for improvement — it’s a brand new online tool that needs to be used, and you can’t fix what you don’t know is broken, after all. But it holds enormous promise both for making government transparent and accountable, and for reducing the number of discombobulated taxpayers and records requests.

As to the dashboard’s strengths: It’s full of data. Its “Capital Project Listing” page is probably its most userfriendly section. Tracking projects by county, year, fiscal agent or project type — or some combination of those factors — is achievable with a little time and concentration. The tool shows how much funding has actually been spent on a project to date in contrast to its total appropriated dollar amount — a good measure of how quickly recipients of capital outlay dollars are getting their projects off the ground.

And it comes at a good time, when New Mexico is poised to spend a massive amount of new oil and gas revenue.

As to the dashboard’s weaknesses: Its mountains of data are not easily accessed by members of the public who don’t have a background in data analysis, government budgeting or bureaucratic jargon. New Mexicans who want to know what state money has been given to that library down the street will have to be able to read a spreadsheet and have at least some insider knowledge of what the project might be called or who the local fiscal agent is. Otherwise, welcome to a yawning pit of impenetrable facts and figures.

For example, sometimes the same project is listed by different names. Assigning a project a number that can be tracked throughout the process would be helpful.

As designers refine and update the tool, they should keep public accessibility top of mind — less jargon, more education. Legislators may know that “GF” stands for “general fund,” but your average citizen? Probably not.

What the dashboard does not do is attach projects to the elected officials who sought the funding — a key element for full transparency and a perennial stumbling block for those who would reform the state’s uniquely flawed and fundamentally secretive capital outlay system. That’s not the fault of dashboard designers, but a problem lawmakers ultimately need to solve. Having senators, representatives and the governor divvy up the capital kitty might seem like a good way to make sure elected officials are in touch with their constituents and ensure New Mexico’s poorer districts aren’t overlooked. But in fact it’s a system that at best spends a whole lot money on a whole lot of minor projects that don’t move the needle, and at worst is ripe for abuse.

Santa Fe-based think tank Think New Mexico has pushed for a system that scrutinizes projects, ranks them according to need and attaches sponsoring legislators’ names. But just this year, the state Senate spiked a bill that would have required lawmakers to disclose how they spend their capital money. Yes they are citizen lawmakers, but they are elected and entrusted to make the tough choices and need to stand behind their decisions.

As New Mexico’s coffers continue to overflow as a result of the Permian boom, spending transparency and accountability are paramount. We can make the most of this or squander it.

The governor has led the way for the former by prioritizing this dashboard. Here’s to her administration staying on task and refining the tool. State lawmakers should follow her lead, and finally do their part for their bosses, the taxpayers. Knowledge is power, and New Mexicans deserve to know exactly how, where and why their money is being spent.