Racing Through the Roundhouse with Gwyneth Doland

Anyone familiar with the New Mexico Legislature knows the session’s last couple of weeks are always a mad dash to the final gavel. And anyone wandering the halls of the Roundhouse during that time has likely seen our politics correspondent, Gwyneth Doland, and her shock of dark hair relentlessly pursuing lawmakers for interviews about the bills they’re soon to vote on.

It’s something I’ve come to appreciate in my few years at NMPBS: working alongside Gwyneth in Santa Fe for either four or eight weeks every year, watching her wrangle both party communications coordinators and individual legislators, all while fine tuning multiple lines of inquiry to be ready for whomever becomes available. The sentiment appears to be much the same for our viewers, many of whom have tracked us down over the years inside the Capitol to tell us so. If you’re one of them, this episode is for you.

Over a period of less than four hours, Gwyneth gathered some of the most informative, contextual and relatable interviews with our legislative leaders that you’ll see over the next calendar year.

First up: She sat down in the House Speaker’s office with Democrat Javier Martínez for a nearly 20-minute conversation about the majority party’s priorities coming into session and what they’ve been able to pass so far. They talked Trump, what the president’s funding cuts mean for a state reliant on federal dollars and what New Mexico lawmakers are doing about it.

Then Gwyneth scampered over to the House Minority office to interview the GOP’s top lawmaker in the House. She asks Socorro County’s Gail Armstrong about some of the same things and, as you might expect, got some very different answers.

And to top it off, Gwyneth caught up with two members of the powerful Senate Finance Committee with two very different perspectives. Democratic Chair George Muñoz has served in the Legislature since 2009 and has led the committee for the last four years. Republican Steve Lanier is just about six weeks into his first session inside the Roundhouse.

All four interviews stand out as deeper conversations than what you’ll find in most of the statewide legislative coverage out there — and the reason is Gwyneth.

I hope you enjoy this week’s show.

-Lou DiVizo, Senior Producer