ISSUES

After countless conversations with residents of Senate District 20, Martin Hickey will fight for the issues that matter to you. As your State Senator, Martin's priorities are:

Economy: Time to pivot

All successful businesses and economic strategies analyze challenges and find opportunities. COVID, while devastating, is no different. In order to succeed in our economic ‘reset’, we must strategize what will maximize recovery and position New Mexico for economic success in our new reality. Dr. Hickey believes we can turn our economic “reset” into an opportunity for an economic pivot, not just going back to business as usual.

To succeed, we have to align New Mexico with the economic trends of tomorrow.

Three national/world economic trends we will see as a result of COVID:

Greenshoring/Nearshoring - America discovered our supply chains are far too long, creating great national security and economic risk with most of our manufacturing based in China. Businesses and government must strategically manage this problem by:

  • Nearshoring: We will see more manufacturing move to Mexico and in the US. New Mexico is perfectly positioned for this move. We are neighbors of Mexico and are port-ready as Mexico is our largest export partner already.

  • Greenshoring: Many businesses are increasing their sustainability efforts for profitability. We have ideal conditions for renewable energy and can be a leader in attracting sustainable businesses.

Growing and Pivoting Small Businesses. Unfortunately COVID is our new reality, and we need to support our small businesses and ensure they receive the grants and loan funding they need to stay open and adapt. New Mexico is home to nearly 3000 start-ups many who say they cannot find New Mexicans with the technical skills they need. 

We can continue to help our New Mexico’s businesses by:

    • streamlining the capitalization process by partnering with our credit unions and local banks, 

    • asking our state investment council to invest a small portion of their land grant fund portfolio toward low-interest New Mexico based business loans. 

We currently see many gaps in skills in our labor market. Retail and other unskilled labor jobs are being eliminated due to online shopping and other trends. We can fix our skill gaps with education:

    • “Get it done” scholarships - Offer time-limited scholarships and to finish undergraduate degrees during nights/weekends.

    • Increase accelerated training program partnerships -Increase spots in accelerated 18-month programs that teach highly in-demand technical skills.

    • Increase dual high school/trade programs. Allow more high school students to finish a trade program with their high school diploma

Connectivity and Broadband. - COVID merely accelerated a trend that has long been developing. Unskilled labor sectors are shrinking due to automation and trade, and new technical skills are in increasing demand. Post-COVID several companies have stated that will be permanently virtual. Unless New Mexico aggressively pursues broadband, our workforce will be left out of new virtual opportunities. 

  • We can take advantage of this trend by guaranteeing broadband access to every household by 2030.

    • Broadband will allow many healthcare and government services appointments to go virtual. Primary care is spread thin in New Mexico in rural areas and rural residents can gain access to tele-health and other case-management-based services.

    • Broadband will also allow us to free up impacted housing markets along the I-25 corridor because a virtual worker can work from anywhere.

    • Broadband will enable us to attract new skilled workers who want to take advantage of the low cost of living.

    • Broadband will cut down on pollution in our own backyard. New Mexicans are traveling long distances to commute to work in our widespread state.

Education: Conception to graduation model

High quality and universal early childhood education. The science is there. Programs like universal prenatal care and full-day Pre-K have shown that participants benefit from higher graduation rates, lower rates of special education, and higher earnings in life. Early Childhood Education is also associated with lower addiction and incarceration rates. Every family deserves the opportunity to have their child in high-quality early childhood education programs. It’s one of the best investments in our families, helps attract companies to relocate here, reduces multiple adverse childhood events which often lead to prison or early death, and saves taxpayers millions of dollars. We need to increase scholarships for early childhood educators and ensure they are paid a living wage to keep them in New Mexico.

Protecting Teacher Pay and Educational Investments. COVID-19 has led to an economic downturn with some hard choices ahead. However, we know retaining high-quality teachers means persevering their recent hard-won pay raises. Education will continue to be our best economic engine to both attract out of state business and build a generation of entrepreneurs; We cannot cut teacher pay and educational investments to the bone, setting us back decades. 

Streamlining Education pathways: Nearly 24% of New Mexicans started but did not finish an undergraduate degree. We need to eliminate barriers to college degree or trade skills attainment. We can ensure we increase the skills of our workforce by putting basic courses online, creating scholarships for those who need to finish their education, and increasing slots in specialized and successful 18-month tech programs with guaranteed jobs upon completion. There are many structural barriers to education and we can ensure pathways to a skilled career are clearer with investment and forward-thinking policies.

Healthcare: Increase access and affordability

Improve affordability and access in healthcare. COVID has made clear that health must be prioritized to protect not only our families but our economic prosperity. To improve overall health and decrease costly chronic illness outcomes, we must increase the number of primary care physicians and ensure there is access to affordable preventive and maintenance medications and services. 

  • We can focus on prevention and lowering costs for everyone by eliminating co-pays for behavioral health visits and common chronic illness medications.

  • We can increase primary care physicians with tuition reimbursement for medical students who stay in New Mexico and grant extra stipends for rural areas.

  • We can improve drug affordability by fixing the medicare part D “donut hole”.

Reproductive Health Access.  Dr. Hickey believes that while we may approach our moral and ethical decision making in healthcare differently, we can all agree that the government has no business intervening between a patient, their family, and their doctor particularly for highly personal decisions like reproductive healthcare. 

Public Safety: Accountability and investment

Healthy communities are safe communities - Martin believes that community safety and successful criminal justice reform comes from accountability and investment. Crime is a symptom of larger structural problems and barriers like a broken behavioral health system and inadequate education. 

  •  A robust and accessible behavioral health system is critical to early behavioral interventions to prevent New Mexicans from going down the wrong track. 

  • A fully-funded early childhood education system will reduce truancy, drop-outs, and later crime rates. 

  • Improving intake and risk assessment will better enable the courts to help low-risk offenders stop the cycle and keep dangerous offenders off the streets.

Common sense policy for gun safety. Day after day the headlines are filled with gun injuries and death, the result of dangerous firearms in the hands of the wrong people. As a Physician, Dr. Hickey believes there are common-sense common-ground gun safety measures that will keep New Mexicans safe from gun violence.

Accountability and investment in community policing. Martin Hickey is focused on keeping our community safe, and is not in favor of defunding the police. Martin supports making sure every police officer in the field uses a body camera for both the public’s and officer protection. He also supports a ban on life-threatening chokeholds, and that officers who use excessive force are held accountable. Finally, he supports scholarships for police to attain a college degree and better training.

Environment: Sustainability for our future

A healthy environment for generations of New Mexicans. New Mexico can and should lead the nation in clean energy like wind and solar power as we have the ideal sun and wind conditions. Investing in green energy will stabilize our boom-and-bust oil and gas cycle that hurts New Mexicans families economically. Climate disruption is increasing drought conditions, endangering our way of life. By decreasing our reliance on oil and gas, we can also protect our land and water for future generations. Green energy will be key to attracting forward thinking businesses to New Mexico.

Martin will fight for good health--for you, the community, the environment, and our state.