Here come the Saturday hearings

Saturday hearings are going to start up this week in the legislature.

The House Appropriations and Finance Committee and the House Health, Government and Indian Affairs committees have announced they will be meeting this Saturday.

House Health, Government and Indian Affairs Committee chairman James Roger Madalena, D-Jemez Pueblo, announced that his committee would be meeting on Saturday afternoon so as to not conflict with the House Appropriations and Finance Committee, which will meet on Saturday morning.

Madalena joked that he would need more than the next 30 days to hear the legislation that is on the committee’s plate.

Speaker of the House Ken Martinez, D-Grants, joked that the committee would be hearing legislation, “in March, April and May.”

The legislative session ends at noon on March 16.

As the session winds down, weekend hearings become increasingly more common. This means that legislators from far-flung parts of the state (such as Farmington, Silver City or Hobbs) will not be able to go home. The weekend sessions also usually come at the same time as longer hours for committee hearings during the week.

Already, some committees have been having hearings into the early evening. Soon there might be committee hearings that have the need for dinner breaks.