Gov. Martinez again vetoes money meant for Gallup Detox Center

For the third time in four years, New Mexico Gov. Susana Martinez has vetoed money meant specifically to help keep the doors of the Gallup Detox Center – McKinley County’s only detox and shelter program – open and helping the area’s people with alcoholism and substance abuse issues.

Read KOB.com’s special report on the Gallup Detox Center and the cyclical money problem it faces.

Monday, Gov. Martinez announced she had signed the $6.2 billion budget passed by the state legislature. She line-item vetoed many portions of the budget, but one of those vetoes was $200,000 put specifically into the budget for the Gallup Detox Center, also known as the Na’Nizhoozhi Center, Inc. (NCI).

That money would have come from a local DWI grant fund that the Department of Finance and Administration would have worked with the county to supplement with other local funds – essentially again piece-mealing funding together for the center that is all-important to the area.

After another person was found dead from exposure last week, it brings the count to 25 people over the past two winters who have died from alcohol-related exposure out in the cold in Gallup.

Sens. Martin Heinrich and Tom Udall were last month able to get Indian Health Services to help gather funding to keep the center open through the end of March, but its future is up in the air beyond that.

Rep. Patricia Lundstrom, D-Gallup, helped add the $200,000 to this year’s budget – just as she did in 2013 for the FY2014 budget, when the governor also line-item vetoed the money.

Lundstrom tried another fix during the 2015 legislative session, introducing a bill that would have established behavioral health investment zones for impoverished areas of the state with high alcoholism rates and other “indicators” that show a need for focused services and treatment. It was based off the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation model that had been in place for years that looked at evidence and researched-based solutions.

The bill passed both the House and Senate overwhelmingly. But that bill, too, was vetoed by Gov. Martinez.

In Monday’s veto message to the latest denial of funds, Martinez wrote the money was a “special earmark that was slipped into the budget…that would circumvent the Local DWI Council’s competitive process for funding substance abuse programs throughout the state.”

“This particular region of the state will continue to receive a substantial amount of behavioral health and substance abuse treatment funding on my watch,” she continued.

The governor did not specify whether RFPs have been written to fund the center – which has been juggled between several funding sources over the past year – or how much funding was actually headed to McKinley County for such programs.

She and her office have not responded to requests for comment on the veto.

McKinley County’s alcohol-attributable death rate in 2013 was 113 per 100,000 people – twice the New Mexico average of 53 per 100,000 and four times the national rate of 28 per 100,000 people.

“As I have each year, I vetoed several earmarks – which are special appropriations or special carve-outs of other appropriations – that circumvent competitive funding processes or seek to direct statewide money to one particular locale over all others,” Martinez wrote later in her budget signing and veto message.

Friday, Congressman Ben Ray Lujan, D-NM, will join Lundstrom and other state and local leaders for a roundtable discussion on the matter and the future of the detox center. The meeting will happen at 3 p.m. at the El Morro Theatre in Gallup.