Reasons for optimism in coming year

The new year is a time for hope. We want to believe in a better year ahead, so we celebrate the possibilities.

Here in New Mexico, there are a number of reasons to be optimistic about 2019, especially if you’re a Democrat, the party that now controls all three branches of state government. But politics won’t be the only big news in the year ahead; the economy will also make some headlines.

In the upcoming legislative session, the last eight years of divided government will come to an end, which means a plethora of changes are about to occur. Let me touch upon two: the legalization of marijuana and education reforms.

Past efforts to legalize recreational marijuana have fallen flat because we’ve had a governor, Susana Martinez, who promised to veto any such bill that crossed her desk. That left proponents with an option of taking the question directly to the voters (polls have shown a majority of New Mexicans favor legalization) but such efforts failed because Democrats weren’t united around the issue.

But now we have a governor who says she’s “open” to legalization, so support for legalization will be stronger. I suspect that when lawmakers wrap themselves around the revenue opportunity — between $34 million and $57 million a year in tax revenues, according to one estimate — and consider the costs to other ambitions, including education reform, they’ll be hard-pressed not to pass it.

Meanwhile, the Public Education Department has long been criticized for the way it has assessed and evaluated students, teachers and school districts, and the Democrats intend to fix all that in an effort to pull New Mexico out of the cellar in national school standards.

It’s uncertain whether they’ll succeed or not — we’ve been a long time at the bottom in education, under both Republican and Democratic governors — but this much is certain: teachers, who are a big base of support for Democrats, will have a greater say in the reforms to come. Here’s hoping that pays off in better schools.

Economic development in southern New Mexico will also be big news in 2019. The Facebook data center at Los Lunas is expected to open in the new year, pumping billions into the state’s economy.

And Spaceport America just southeast of Truth Or Consequences will make headlines if Virgin Galactic finally gets its space tourism business off the ground. A successful test flight to the edge of space just took place and Virgin’s Richard Branson is now suggesting that 2019 will be the year his enterprise takes flight.

Meanwhile, about an hour south of New Mexico’s spaceport, there’s Las Cruces and the St. Teresa Port of Entry, where business is booming — and will continue to do so, if politics doesn’t get in the way.

The politics is evident — President Trump and Congress are kicking around the nation’s troublesome immigration policies like a political football, as if real lives aren’t hanging in the balance. Expect a lot more news coming from the U.S.-Mexico border.

Statewide, expect more money coming in — through the oil and gas industry, which is thriving at the moment, the legalization of pot, which I predict will be passed in 2019 and to become law in 2020, and a growing tech industry spanning Albuquerque to Cruces.

Tom McDonald is editor of the New Mexico Community News Exchange. Contact him at:

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