State will feel loss of retiring financial wizard
To understand the institutional heft of David Abbey, you have to hear the Uh-oh Story. Several years back, New Mexico was broke — as in “Buddy, can you spare a dime?” busted. And state leaders were frantic, shaking couch cushions and shattering piggy banks for spare change to fund a budget that, without a miracle, would be as vacant as a pocketful of lint.
As state Sen. Peter Wirth conversed with Abbey about the impending financial catastrophe, he asked the sage of the state budget a simple question: What do we do?
“And I said, ‘I don’t know what to do,’ ” Abbey recalled last week. “And he said, ‘Uh-oh. Abbey doesn’t know what to do.’ ”
The truth is, Abbey, the longtime director of the powerful Legislative Finance Committee, really was stumped. It doesn’t happen often. And his inability to concoct a solution, a frightening prospect for legislators who depend on his acumen, ate at him, ruining his days and invading his sleep.
“When David Abbey doesn’t know what to do, [it’s a] whole different universe,” Wirth said Friday.
Fortunately, the a-ha! moment finally arrived. Abbey, tossing in bed once more, figured it out. The details are probably best served by a newsletter from the Kennedy School of Government, but here’s the bottom line: Abbey devised what he called “technical adjustment,” allowing the state to record an $80 million revenue gain, bridging what looked to be a certain shortfall.
New Mexico, cooked for sure, had its bacon saved.
“That’s sort of been my life in a lot of ways,” Abbey said of the moment — and the pressure that came with helping craft the state’s volatile budget for decades. “I did it because I enjoyed it and I helped people . ... It was challenging, too.”
That might help explain why the tectonic rumble you felt beneath the Roundhouse this spring came on the day Abbey officially announced his retirement — a move that takes effect Wednesday.
Governors come and go, legislators pontificate and go poof, but Abbey always seemed to be around: steady, driven, able. He headed the LFC since 1997 and had served in government for four decades — a master of what to say and when; elegantly (and sometimes secretively) pirouetting around the minefield of egos and colliding interests and nosy reporters that comes with politics, money and deadlines.
On the floor, he was the gentle voice
in the ear of a legislator as they spoke on financial matters: Cyrano with a spreadsheet.
I told Abbey there are a lot of people at the Capitol who thought he was on the medals stand as one of the three most influential people in New Mexico.
“Well, I want to be very modest about it,” he replied. “… I’m very clear. I’m not elected. Members are elected. On the other hand, because of expertise and knowledge, perhaps I had a lot of influence. And I used it carefully and I believe to the good.”
Fair enough. “To the good” always seemed to be a destination. The grandson of a man who’d been mayor of Cleveland and the son of a man who’d served in the federal government and worked in international affairs, Abbey grew up in Maryland, in the shadow of the nation’s capital. He was delivering copies of The Washington Post at age 14, but also taking time to read the words he tossed on people’s doorsteps.
(Note to today’s TikTokaddicted teens: what a concept.)
“This was in the ’60s, of course, when Johnson was president,” he said of a bruising and inspiring era that seems distant and near at the same time. “I had a — it’s like, well, I want to help. I thought, you know, I want to make a better world.”
He noted the issues of that era were food, hunger, education, health care. They still are.
In New Mexico, they’re acute. And it troubles Abbey that after all these years, the problems are as prevalent as ever, despite a rise in the budget from $870 million in 40 years ago to nearly $10 billion today.
“I think all the time about why are we last and we are still last,” he said. “I mean, we were last when I started my career and we substantially are [now], and a lot of that was because we were a poor state. And now we’re not really a poor state. Now ... we have more money than many ever imagined [that] we would have with this oil and gas, fracking and the permanent funds building up. But either way, we need to think hard about it.”
Abbey clearly has. And so he continued, talking about how it should now be clear a lack of money is less a constraint. He used the word picture of a presentation he used to give, in which New Mexico takes 100 buckets to 100 different fires.
“We try to solve all the problems rather than focus on [this],” he said. “We should take a hundred buckets to three fires.”
I suspect that’s not the last we’ll hear from David Abbey. He said he still wants to be of service in some way, and he’s rightfully proud of the people he’s hired and mentored in state government. He’s seen himself as a teacher, guiding legislators, media, maybe even critics, to understand how the numbers work and how they could be employed in a more useful way.
Those lessons may come in handy as Abbey takes his leave and the Legislature hunts for … well, another David Abbey. It’s about the numbers, of course. But it’s about a whole lot more, including the search for the right solutions.
Or as Abbey might say, a search for the good.
Phill Casaus is editor of The New Mexican.