Senate Majority Floor Leader Peter Wirth (D-Santa Fe) applauds during the State of the Judiciary address on Thursday, Jan. 23, 2025. (Photo by Danielle Prokop / Source NM)
Court-ordered mental health treatment has launched in north-central New Mexico, as court officials work to start similar programs elsewhere in the state and ask lawmakers for more money to do it.
The First Judicial District, which encompasses the counties of Santa Fe, Rio Arriba and Los Alamos, initiated its Assisted Outpatient Treatment program Thursday, New Mexico Supreme Court Chief Justice David Thomson told the House Judiciary Committee.
Thomson was giving lawmakers an update on the court system’s efforts to start-up pilot projects around the state to expand court-ordered mental health treatment.
Thomson said he could not provide a number of people participating in the program in Santa Fe, but he thinks it should be the model.
“I think, in a lot of ways, the First is the design by which we envision this going across the state,” he said.
Programs in the Third and Second Judicial Districts in Las Cruces and Albuquerque, respectively, already exist.
Last summer, lawmakers gave the court system $3 million to support the program in the Third and start ones in Santa Fe, Las Vegas and Alamogordo.
But the money was a one-time appropriation, and was not made part of the court system’s annual budget. Lack of funding makes it difficult to hire contractors to provide the treatment, Thomson said.
The courts have so far spent about $230,000 of that money and obligated another $1.5 million to be spent through June 30, said Karl Reifsteck, director of the Administrative Office of the Courts, the state agency that runs the court system.
That money is going to providers; attorneys for people being ordered into treatment; and for the Institute of Social Research at the University of New Mexico to independently analyze the program, Reifsteck said.
This session, AOC is asking for more than $1.8 million each year for these programs, on top of a request to make that one-time $3 million an annual budget.
The Legislative Finance Committee’s budget included neither of these requests, Thomson said in his State of the Judiciary address this morning.
But this afternoon, Senate Majority Floor Leader Peter Wirth (D-Santa Fe) said he is committed to making the funding for these programs permanent.
“I do want to give you a commitment that we are going to work hard to turn these dollars into recurring dollars so that as you build this out, you can hire folks that can do this on a long-term basis,” Wirth told the chief justice. “I don’t think it’s fair to ask the courts to lift something up like this and then come back every year for a one-time appropriation. It needs to be recurring, and I think we all need to work on that.”
The law allowing court-ordered mental health treatment has been on the books since 2016, “and we just weren’t using it,” Wirth said.
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