Head of state aging department leaving for another position
Alice Liu McCoy will become executive director of the state Developmental Disabilities Planning Council
Alice Liu McCoy is leaving her $150,000-a-year position as head of the New Mexico Aging and Long-Term Services Department to become executive director of the state Developmental Disabilities Planning Council.
A salary has not yet been set for her job with the little-known state council, whose website says its mission is to “promote advocacy, capacity building, and systemic change to improve the quality of life for individuals with developmental disabilities and their families.”
A spokesman for Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham said in an email Friday, “This opportunity came up and, given Alice’s incredible expertise and experience, we feel really good about her taking that position and moving over there.”
Governor’s spokesman Tripp Stelnicki said state policy on developmental disabilities has “been given the short shrift in recent years” and that membership on the council hasn’t been at full capacity for years.
The council voted earlier this week to hire Liu McCoy, choosing her over one other contender.
Stelnicki said Liu McCoy’s departure from the Cabinet is unrelated to Lujan Grisham’s abrupt dismissal earlier this week of Public Education Secretary Karen Trujillo from her 7-month-old administration.
“This move, as a means of distinguishing it from the departure earlier this week, is unequivocally an addition, not a subtraction,” he said. “And given we knew there was the potential Alice would be in contention for this position, we’ve been kicking the tires on candidates and hope to have someone in place in the near future.”
After Trujillo was fired Monday, Lujan Grisham said she took that action because “my expectations were not met in a number of areas.”
Before Liu McCoy was tapped for Aging and Long-Term Services secretary, she was a lawyer for Disability Rights New Mexico. She also was a member of the board of the New Mexico Guardianship Association and was on a state Supreme Court committee assigned to come up with guardianship and conservatorship rules.