Public Safety & Crime: 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.
Tougher sentences for criminals and ending Catch-and-Release programs.
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.
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.
Economy: Time to pivot
All successful businesses and economic strategies analyze challenges and find opportunities. 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.
Growing and Pivoting Small Businesses. 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
Streamlining Trade Skills pathways: We need to eliminate barriers to finishing 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. We have a physician crisis in New Mexico and it is clear that health must be prioritized to protect our families and 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.
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. 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.