This story was originally published by Source New Mexico.
Joshua Bowling
Source New Mexico
The state committee tasked with rebuilding New Mexico’s behavioral health infrastructure on Friday, Aug. 14, approved more than $40 million in plans to restore services across several rural areas.
The 2025 Behavioral Health Reform and Investment Act charged a committee made up of behavioral health experts and state leaders to review proposals from 13 regions across the state — modeled after the state’s 13 judicial districts — to rebuild behavioral health services after former Republican Gov. Susana Martinez’s fraud accusations led to an exodus of providers.
As of Friday, Aug. 14, the committee overseeing the effort had signed off on seven such plans. Nick Boukas, the executive committee chair and director of the state Health Care Authority’s Behavioral Health Services Division, told Source NM after the meeting that he hopes to sign off on the remaining six by the end of the year.
Lawmakers and rural officials overseeing individual regional plans have frequently expressed frustration at interim legislative committee hearings this year over the plan’s slow rollout, “nebulous” goals and varying local politics.
The five plans approved covered the regions surrounding Roswell, Socorro, Farmington, Silver City and Clovis and identified funding priorities such as school-based behavioral health resources, crisis services and workforce development.
Regional plans can identify up to five such priority areas that local governments will address through the funding. Committee member Alanna Dancis, the state Health Care Authority’s acting Medicaid director, told her fellow committee members that she was concerned that many regional plans seemed to be “missing half the population.”
“I didn’t want to in any way slow down the approvals of the plans, but I did not really see pregnancy or family housing mentioned very much,” she said. That is “something I’m really looking at and continue to be very concerned that it doesn’t seem to be a priority of the regions.”
A dispute over funding for Pueblos, tribes, nations
After the committee approved the five plans, committee member Violette Cloud introduced several proposals aimed at changing how the committee awards money to Pueblos, tribes and nations.
She said the funding formula the committee had long relied on had flaws in its underlying data and argued that the current structure could unfairly award some Pueblos, tribes or nations more money than others.
Boukas, the committee chair, told Cloud he appreciated her concern but believed that voting on it Friday, Aug. 14, would be premature. He said he thought any need for course-correcting likely rests with the Legislature and added that it would be more appropriate after formal tribal consultation.
“I just feel like every time that we’re meeting and we’re trying to change, I think it’s very difficult for the accountable entities to try to keep up with what has changed,” Boukas said.
While the committee didn’t take a vote on several of Cloud’s proposals, it did approve her motion to set aside 9.5 percent of the committee’s budget exclusively for Pueblos, tribes and nations.
Under the prior funding formula, leaders from New Mexico’s Pueblos, tribes and nations did not always have clarity of whether they were applying for their own pot of money or whether they were included by default in their corresponding region’s plan, Cloud said.
After the meeting, Boukas told Source NM that the approved change was aimed at “making sure that the tribal partners know how much they have to spend.”
