Will the upcoming 30 day legislative session make a difference in the state's bottom of the barrel rankings in child well-being, poverty, high school graduation rates and the crime and drug epidemics? It appears not.

Governor Lujan Grisham has decided to make peace with Senate Finance Committee Chairman John Arthur Smith which means the session will have a conservative tilt that will not directly attack the social conditions crisis that afflicts us. Instead, we will get incremental steps, baby steps, if you will.

Seeking peace with Smith instead of taking a more aggressive stance means that proposals such as the constitutional amendment to tap a small portion of the over $18 billion Land Grant Permanent Fund for early childhood education are dead for this session. In its place is a much more meager measure that would appropriate about $300 million from the oil and gas surplus for an "endowment" to be funded from the interest of that fund. The difference? The LGPF proposal would provide upwards of $150 million annually early childhood education while the endowment would provide perhaps $25 million.

Also, there is no serious discussion in Santa Fe about implementing widespread drug treatment and detox programs to make a bigger dent in the addiction rate that is largely responsible for the crime wave. And talk of trying harder to curtail the drug imports from Mexico along the interstates with beefed up state police force is nearly nonexistent.

Lujan Grisham and Smith will continue to fill some of the deep hole left by the fiscal austerity of GOP Governor Susana Martinez. While that may help halt the state's decline, it is not likely to lift the state up. For that to happen this Governor and the senate conservatives would have to agree to take some risk with the enormous state surplus and invest heavily in human capital programs that are dearly expensive but would get at the culture of decay that afflicts so many households.

MLG has self-reported herself as a "fiscal conservative." By doing so she has consigned herself to getting conservative results. That may be enough for some, but a year from now when the latest stats on the social conditions of the state arrive and show little change after two years of the administration, frustration will deepen.

That is as why the June state Senate primary elections are so important. An even slight ruffling of the feathers of the conservative Dem incumbents could give this Governor a push away from the status quo and toward the more aggressive stance that she has rejected.

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(c)NM POLITICS WITH JOE MONAHAN 2020