The lightning-quick second special session of the State Legislature, Nov. 10, to allocate state funds to fund SNAP in the event of longer Federal delays led me down a path of interesting research this week – about the history of public welfare in New Mexico and who uses SNAP in our state.
There is some great coverage of the session from journalist Heath Haussamen, by the way. If you read this column regularly, you need to look up his eponymous website. All the detailed reporting I don’t do because I am a part-time columnist and not a journalist, Heath does, and more.
But back to my brief research. I wanted to see what sort of history New Mexico has with public welfare for our most vulnerable.
It turns out, almost none. Every other state in the nation at the time of the establishment of the first Federal social safety net in the 1930s had at least a system of workhouses or poorhouses or poor farms. New Mexico did not. This was called out as recently as 2019 in Congressional testimony.
If I think about New Mexico a hundred years ago and earlier, and the size of the population, and the isolation of the communities, this sort of tracks. My guess – not backed by any research – is that New Mexico’s poorest were supported by family, neighbors, and the Church.
Since the establishment of the first food stamp program in 1939, which in the 1960s became the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, as we know it today, New Mexico’s problem of endemic poverty, especially in our rural counties, has endured into the present era.
We know the grim statistics. More than 1 in 5 New Mexicans relies on SNAP. 1 out of 4 New Mexico seniors use SNAP. 1 out of 3 households with children use SNAP. And more than 1 out of 2 – 54.6 percent – of single mothers rely on SNAP to feed their families.
I wanted to look at counties affected by SNAP before I looked at the votes from the special session. The funding bill did not pass unanimously. Six Senators and nine Representatives voted against the bill. All were Republican.
According to 2022 U.S. Census data, every county in New Mexico except for Los Alamos County (1.4 percent) has higher SNAP participation rates than the national average of 12.3 percent. 21 counties have SNAP rates higher than the state average of 21.2 percent. Three counties have SNAP participation rates near or more than 40 percent: Torrance (39.3 percent), Sierra (40.5 percent) and Luna (41.4 percent).
For the most part, legislators in the most affected counties voted for House Bill 1, the emergency funding. But the three most vulnerable counties noted above did not receive unified support from their legislative delegations. Representing Luna County, two of three legislators, Sen. Gabe Ramos (R-28) and Rep. Jenifer Jones (R-32) voted yes. In Sierra and Torrance Counties, only one of three legislators representing each county, Rep. Rebecca Dow (R-38) for Sierra County, and Rep. Anita Gonzales (D-70) representing Torrance County, voted yes.
And in deep red Chaves County, while not as heavily dependent on food stamps as those mentioned above, but with 27.4 percent of its residents relying on food aid, only Rep. Jimmy Mason (R-66) out of seven voting legislators representing Chaves County voted yes.
I’m not here to out the “no” votes. Luna, Sierra, and Torrance County voters know who their legislators are. One only has to go to nmlegis.gov and look up HB1 in the Bill Finder for the “2nd Special Session – 2025” tab and see it in black and white (if you read Heath’s article, he’s got the links!). I’d like to highlight a couple of quotes from “yes” votes.
“I voted ‘yes’ because I won’t let children, seniors, or struggling families go hungry,” Rep. Dow posted on Facebook. “But I also can’t ignore why so many New Mexicans depend on SNAP in the first place. For decades, failed policies have trapped our state in poverty — policies that expand bureaucracy instead of opportunity, that measure success by how many people receive benefits instead of how many no longer need them.”
“Yesterday, I voted to secure gap funding for SNAP benefits to insure (sic) that New Mexico families, children and the elderly do not lose access to food during the federal shutdown. Now that the shutdown seems to be ending, full SNAP benefits from the Federal government will return,” posted Rep. Luis Terrazas of Grant County (R-39) on Facebook, adding, “But the real value of this bill is that it created a full audit of New Mexico’s SNAP Administration so lawmakers can get answers and make sure every dollar is being used responsibly.”
This audit, a measure added by Republicans, is important not just for accountability but because Federal legislation passed this summer will reduce Federal SNAP funding for states with error rates over a certain threshold. New Mexico’s error rate is over the threshold.
It’s possible the 15 “no” votes were taking a traditional conservative small government stand. Perhaps they looked at New Mexico’s history, too, and decided it was on family, community and the private charitable organizations here to take care of our neediest residents. But mostly it looks like it was a political opportunity to continue a partisan argument with congressional Democrats.
With the measure guaranteed to pass in the Legislature, given the small numbers of the minority caucus, perhaps this was a calculated vote to stoke support “with the base.” Perhaps it was a performative vote to use for social media posts about who is at fault for the shutdown.
This takes me back to a maxim I developed more than 30 years ago as a very young officer when I had to conduct training for thousands of Sailors and Marines in the wake of the Tailhook scandal about appropriate workplace behavior: “If you’re about to do or say something that you wouldn’t be comfortable with your parent, sibling, spouse, chaplain or best friend knowing about, don’t do it at work.”
I guess that’s how I feel about voting no to emergency funding to make sure seniors, parents and children in my state have food. I can’t think of a reason that is good enough to tell an elderly former ranch hand in Willard, a mother trying to feed her family in Columbus, or a father with a sick wife in Arrey and trying to hang on to the family farm, all of whom might rely on SNAP to make ends meet, that I voted to not provide them food.
I’m glad the shutdown has ended. I’m glad the majority of legislators – including Republicans – quickly voted to take necessary, if potentially painful action in the absence of good sense at the Federal level. There are a lot of numbers in this column that deserve our attention. We must address these dire statistics and ask our elected officials and political candidates what they will do to make sure we are never in a situation like this again.
Merritt Hamilton Allen is a PR executive and former Navy officer. She appeared regularly as a panelist on NM PBS and is a frequent guest on News Radio KKOB. A Republican for 36 years, she became an independent upon reading the 2024 Republican platform. She lives amicably with her Democratic husband north of I-40 where they run one head of dog, and one of cat. She can be reached at news.ind.merritt@gmail.com.
