New Mexico counties cite rising costs from Civil Rights Act, aim to push for changes

Nearly five years after a controversial state civil rights law took effect, local government leaders say their initial fears about the potential costs of the legislation have been borne out.

The New Mexico Civil Rights Act, enacted in July 2021, created a right to sue state and local government entities under the New Mexico Constitution for civil rights violations. It also removed a doctrine known as qualified immunity, which shielded public officials, including law enforcement officers, from liability.

New Mexico was only the second state to pass such a law, following Colorado in 2020. Under New Mexico’s law, only a public body can be sued — not an individual employee.

Designed to provide an avenue for New Mexicans to hold government entities accountable for civil rights violations, the law faced early concern that higher payout caps — now $2.4 million — would drive up liability insurance costs for local governments and state agencies.

New Mexico Counties, an organization that runs the self-insurance pool the majority of counties pay into, says that’s what has happened since the Civil Rights Act took effect — in some cases doubling premiums. The group plans to push for changes to the law next year. Advocates for the law, meanwhile, argue there is no data showing it directly led to insurance cost hikes. They also say counties should be doing more to prevent civil rights lawsuits instead of seeking to roll back the law.

Laura Ives, a civil rights attorney who advocated for the law, said the state should be “enhancing” civil rights protections rather than paring them down, particularly, she said, because certain protections at the federal level are being diminished under the Trump administration.

“I want to be clear. We’re talking about instances where law enforcement has purposefully killed somebody unjustifiably or raped somebody, and the thing to do is to prevent law enforcement officers from doing that in the first instance, and direct efforts at training them, holding them accountable, having good policies,” Ives said. “Not misleading the public as to what has supposedly been paid out under this act, because they don’t have any evidence of that.”

‘The escalating cost’

While the overall number of civil rights claims against counties has stayed roughly the same since the law was enacted, settlement amounts have increased dramatically, said Grace Philips, risk management director at New Mexico Counties. Many of the civil rights claims against counties are related to law enforcement, she said.

Counties’ contributions to the insurance pool covering law enforcement claims more than doubled between 2020 and 2026, rising from $16.6 million to $34.4 million, she said.

Philips provided data showing the cost of law enforcement claims against counties participating in the New Mexico County Insurance Authority pool increased from $10.9 million in 2020 to $20.7 million in 2021 and $32.6 million in 2022.

Lawsuits involving cases in more recent years are still being developed, but Philips said the trend has continued.

There isn’t data on how many claims under the Civil Rights Act have been settled since the law went into effect, or for how much money. Philips said a list of claims is confidential.

Records requested from counties under the New Mexico Inspection of Public Records Act were not immediately provided.

“People who are hurt deserve fair compensation, and we recognize that,” Philips said. “The challenge, I think, for the policymakers in the Legislature is how to balance that very important need with the equally important expectation that government serves all citizens, and that, in my case, the counties who are on the ground providing the essential safety services are sufficiently solvent to continue to do that.”

Prior to the Civil Rights Act, plaintiffs could sue under a federal civil rights law called Section 1983, which provides uncapped damages but offers qualified immunity as a defense.

For cases involving government negligence, New Mexicans could — and still can — sue under the state Tort Claims Act, which is capped, depending on the type of claim, at up to $750,000.

Claims under the Civil Rights Act are capped at $2.4 million and will go up to $2.5 million in July; the cap is adjusted annually for inflation. Attorney’s fees can be covered, too. The maximum the county self-insurance pool can cover is $2 million, Philips said, meaning a county would have to come up with the difference for a settlement above $2 million, although that hasn’t happened before.

The costs could eat into local governments’ budgets, she said: “The concern is that the escalating cap and the escalating cost of getting even the coverage that they have is going to prevent counties from providing essential services.”

She added, “We don’t think the sponsors intended to compromise essential public services, but the reality is, the escalation in cost is unsustainable.”

Sandoval County Manager Wayne Johnson said the diversion of public funds to insurance costs could ultimately make it harder for his county to provide basic services and adequate staffing.

“The number of cases have not gone up, but the awards have significantly skyrocketed because they’re suing under a much more lucrative law,” Johnson said.

‘Investments in training’

Advocates doubt the law is driving the rise in insurance costs.

When a task force examined legislation proposing the law in 2020, its members said in a report public entities hadn’t provided a clear projection of insurance costs and called the predictions “speculative doomsday scenarios that never will come to pass.” Advocates still say that’s the case.

“This conversation about only looking at insurance premiums is ignoring the whole reason that the Civil Rights Act was passed in the first place,” attorney Brian Egolf said, “which is we wanted to give everyday New Mexicans the ability to vindicate their rights under the New Mexico Bill of Rights, and to do it in state court closer to home.”

Egolf, a former state House speaker who co-sponsored the bill in 2021 and represents plaintiffs in civil rights lawsuits, noted the law “has been used across the board. It’s not just police cases; it’s been used to vindicate the rights of individuals to speak freely.”

He added, “The bigger overarching principle here is that counties and municipalities in the state would do much better if they would make appropriate investments in training, appropriate investments in oversight of their employees.”

Curry County Manager Lance Pyle, who is on the board of the counties’ insurance pool, said his county is doing “everything we can” to reduce civil rights lawsuits.

“The reality is that we have to ask ourselves whether we can afford to continue to invest in sometimes costly loss prevention services while simultaneously asking our members to pay more,” he said.

State agencies also have said their increasing insurance rates are a result of the Civil Rights Act, though the law’s proponents say there, too, the data on payouts and causation isn’t yet available.

‘Fiscal responsibility’

Some see revisiting the Civil Rights Act as a hot-button issue for upcoming legislative sessions.

State Sen. George Muñoz, D-Gallup, earlier this year proposed legislation that would have amended the Civil Rights Act to reduce the cap on damages, introduce qualified immunity when the public body had a good faith belief the conduct didn’t violate the law, and clarify state claims arising from the same event can only be recovered under one state law.

The county organization supported the legislation.

Local governments have said claims arising from the same event are often brought under both the Civil Rights Act and Tort Claims Act, exposing them to greater liability.

Muñoz said his bill “had some issues last year,” but he’ll consider proposing legislation to amend the Civil Rights Act in the coming session.

“It really takes a couple years to get big stuff through,” he said.

The issue is “part of fiscal responsibility for the state,” he said. “We have to figure out what things are working.”

Philips said bringing claims under both the Tort Claims Act and the Civil Rights Act increases the amount counties can be required to pay out in a civil case. Several recent cases include claims under both laws:

* A complaint

* filed against the state earlier this month by the family of a Taos boy who died by suicide at the Rio Grande Gorge Bridge; the family alleges the state failed to address known safety hazards.

* A complaint

* filed against the city of Santa Fe in March by members of a family caught up in a 2024 police chase and fatal shooting.

* A complaint

* filed in February against the city of Deming and state Department of Public Safety over allegations a former police officer assaulted a girl.

‘Remarkable stability’

A law review article published earlier this year by leading scholars nationally, studying the impact of qualified immunity changes in Colorado and New Mexico against two states with no similar laws, found “remarkable stability” in law enforcement payouts and insurance premiums in Colorado and New Mexico.

The authors surveyed law enforcement agencies in the state regarding data between 2017 and 2023, and had a 55% response rate for information from New Mexico agencies on insurance premiums and judgments paid.

Philips disputed the study, calling the county-provided data more comprehensive, including more of the counties over a longer period of time.

Alex Reinert, a law professor at Yeshiva University’s Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law, who co-authored the article, wrote in an email any study of the effects of the law should compare New Mexico to other states.

Both Reinert and co-author Joanna Schwartz, a law professor at the University of California, Los Angeles School of Law, said more rigorous data is needed than the county-level data provided to The New Mexican to prove counties’ concerns.

The challenge, Reinert said, is “discerning whether changes in exposure to litigation risk and cost are driven by changes to the underlying legal regime or other changes that might also affect litigation risk and cost. Just looking at one state in isolation probably is not enough to help evaluate the impact of legislation like the NMCRA.”

He added, “One should not lose sight of another perspective — which is that if the data suggest that the NMCRA is making it easier for people to vindicate their constitutional rights, law enforcement agencies should be responding by trying to minimize rights violations.”

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