The next step in modernizing the state Legislature, according to a nonpartisan think tank, includes a slew of ethics reforms for lawmakers, lobbyists and advocates whose transparency requirements aren’t on par with those in other states.
Think New Mexico released a new report Sunday outlining 10 proposals it believes would help restore public trust in state government — something that has dwindled in recent years, dropping from 31% in 2020 to a record-low 19% in 2025, according to the 2025 Garrity Perception Survey.
The proposals, which Think New Mexico plans to advocate for during the 2027 legislative session beginning in January, follow some high-profile scandals including former House Majority Leader Sheryl Williams Stapleton’s conviction of dozens of federal charges related to a kickback scheme and, just last week, former state lawmaker Sandra Jeff’s arrest in connection with an alleged scheme to embezzle funds from a pueblo housing organization.
They also follow a flurry of recent ethics complaints against current lawmakers.
Democratic state Rep. Andrea Romero has faced several complaints for taking a part-time job at the First Judicial District Attorney’s Office, where she previously directed $100,000 in state money. Democratic state Sen. George Muñoz was hit with a complaint earlier this month for supposedly lobbying the state to help his son’s pavement-marking company. And Democratic state Rep. Joseph Hernandez was the subject of an August complaint requesting an investigation of his campaign expenditures after he was accused of running around naked and banging on guest room doors at a Chicago hotel in July, a scandal which led him to suspend his reelection campaign.
Several of Think New Mexico’s recommendations align with those made by the State Ethics Commission, the independent agency that enforces public accountability laws and determines the outcome of ethics complaints.
“New Mexico has relatively lax legislative ethics laws,” Think New Mexico Executive Director Fred Nathan said in a statement. “As the state takes steps to modernize and professionalize the legislative branch, with increased staffing and the constitutional amendment on this November’s ballot to pay New Mexico’s legislators a salary, it is time to bring our state’s ethics laws in line with the majority of other states.”
The state Legislature’s status as the last unsalaried Legislature in the nation, Think New Mexico asserts, has been the primary justification for these lax ethics laws; “in many cases, the higher legislative salaries, the higher the ethical expectations,” according to the report.
On Nov. 3, New Mexico voters will weigh in on the proposed Constitutional Amendment 4, which if it passed would allow state legislators to receive compensation equal to the state’s median household income — currently about $67,800, according to census estimates.
Similar amendments previously appeared before New Mexicans in 1961, 1965, 1969, 1974, 1978, 1990 and 1992, Think New Mexico’s report notes. They failed every time.
A poll about Think New Mexico’s recommendations, which was commissioned by the organization and run by former University of New Mexico Department of Political Science Chair Gabriel Sanchez, found 64% of New Mexico voters support paying legislators a salary — but only if those legislators also have to comply with ethics reforms.
Reforms for lawmakers
In the report, Think New Mexico first suggests requiring state legislators to recuse themselves from voting on legislation when they have a direct financial conflict of interest. Currently, the determination of recusal is governed by House and Senate rules — which state a lawmaker must request to be excused from a vote, and that request must be approved by a majority.
The think tank also suggests requiring the disclosure of conflicts of interest during the legislative process, which is also not presently required in legislative rules. Forty-three other states require such: In neighboring Colorado, the state constitution requires members of the General Assembly who have “personal or private” interests in pending legislation to disclose that fact and recuse themselves.
This would also provide increased transparency when lawmakers are voting on legislation that is also being lobbied for by an immediate family member, according to the report. Several legislators in New Mexico have lobbyist spouses.
In its 2025 annual report, the Ethics Commission recommended amending the Lobbyist Regulation Act to require legislators “disclose that the legislator’s family member is lobbying on a bill on which the legislator must vote” before voting.
Think New Mexico also agrees with an Ethics Commission recommendation to require greater financial disclosure from statewide elected officials, state agency leaders and legislators around their specific sources of income and assets. Rigorous in some ways, the state’s Financial Disclosure Act asks for “general category descriptions” for income and assets, leading to listings such as “government” and “investment income” in financial disclosure statements.
“This makes it impossible for the public to detect if there might be a conflict of interest, such as significant ownership of stock in renewable energy, mining, or technology corporations, which might be seeking permits, funding, or legislation from state government,” the report reads.
The report also proposes a two-year cooling-off period before an outgoing legislator can become a paid lobbyist. It is legal in the state for a lawmaker to resign mid-legislative session and get paid by a special interest to lobby their former colleagues the next day, according to the report.
Sen. Harold Pope, D-Albuquerque, has unsuccessfully put forth bills that would have established this cooling off period three times. A similar bipartisan proposal passed the House floor overwhelmingly in 2017, but stalled in a Senate committee.
Reforms for lobbyists
Registered lobbyists in New Mexico outnumber legislators by a ratio of about six to one, according to the report. And there are information gaps in the financial reports these lobbyists are required to file three times per year.
Think New Mexico recommends amending the Lobbyist Regulation Act to require lobbyists to list which lawmakers are benefitting from each expenditure, which of a lobbyist’s clients is paying for an expenditure and which bills or issues are being lobbied with an expenditure. None of this is currently required.
The organization also supports adding a provision to the Lobbyist Regulation Act requiring lobbyists to disclose how much they are paid by each client.
Bills targeting lobbyist transparency — including a measure to require lobbyists to report which bills they are focused on and what positions they are taking on those bills — have long popped up in the Roundhouse, but are rarely successful.
“I had an easier time banning the storage of high-level nuclear waste in New Mexico than increasing transparency of lobbyists,” Sen. Jeff Steinborn, D-Las Cruces, told The New Mexican in 2024.
Reforms for advocacy groups
The laws governing advocacy groups — which frequently fund political advertisements — need modernization, too, the report says. Several political action committees in New Mexico have made headlines for their lackluster financial disclosure reports, which often link huge fractions of their contributions to singular little-known nonprofits rather than specific people.
Last month, the Ethics Commission reached a settlement agreement with Virginia-registered Elevate New Mexico — a secretive organization behind a vast advertising campaign supporting the controversial data center Project Jupiter. Documents filed as part of that agreement revealed Elevate New Mexico received nearly $3.7 million in contributions from the project’s developers, Yucca Growth Infrastructure LLC and spent nearly $419,500 on advertising.
And ahead of New Mexico’s June primary election, an elusive PAC dubbed Accountable New Mexico paid for ads attacking now-Democratic gubernatorial candidate Deb Haaland. The PAC listed a top nonprofit donor in public reports with which it shared a Washington address.
A “true source” disclosure law would “shed light on not only direct sources of funding, as is required by current New Mexico law, but also all intermediary sources and original sources of funding for political advertisements,” the report argues.
The Campaign Reporting Act features a loophole exempting out-of-state political committees registered with the Federal Election Commission from filing state reports. Think New Mexico recommends holding out-of-state groups paying for campaign-related political advertisements to the same standard as in-state groups.
The report also suggests explicitly making it illegal to mislead state lawmakers and other government officials by misrepresenting constituent voices — a proposal rooted in reporting earlier this year that at least 42 comments made to the New Mexico Environment Department in support of Project Jupiter data center were fake, though allegedly taken from the names and emails of New Mexico constituents and submitted without their knowledge.
Lily Alexander is a state accountability reporter for The New Mexican and Searchlight New Mexico, focusing on equity and transparency. Her position is part of the New Mexican Public Service Journalism Fund, and her stories are available to all readers without a paywall.
