The Latest: House, Senate reach compromise on $7B budget

SANTA FE, N.M. (AP) — The Latest on activity at the New Mexico Legislature (all times local):
5:40 p.m.
New Mexico Senate and House lawmakers have brokered an agreement on disputed provisions of a $7 billion spending plan for the coming fiscal year.
A conference committee of three legislators from each chamber on Friday reached a compromise on a list of disputed budget provisions.
They include disagreements about the distribution public of school staff salary increases and $750,000 in new appropriations for legislative leaders to hire staff to communicate with political constituents.
The agreement affirms that all public school staff will receive a 6 percent salary increase, though school boards will have final say over pay for superintendents.
The rewritten budget suggests that the University of New Mexico reinstate disbanded sports teams for soccer, skiing and volleyball without making it a requirement.
Final votes of the House and Senate will send the budget plan to the governor.
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1:10 p.m.
New Mexico Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham is urging members of the Legislature's powerful Senate Finance Committee to increase funding for early childhood education as a new agency is created to oversee preschool and infant services.
Lujan Grisham appeared before the committee Friday with her granddaughter in her lap to urge greater withdrawals from a multi-billion dollar state education trust to fund preschool. She said without greater funding, the state is making a "Sophie's choice" to educate some children and not others.
Democratic Finance Committee Chairman John Arthur Smith warned that other states such as Alaska and North Dakota have failed to safeguard trusts derived from fossil fuels.
She says her push to provide universal access to preschool will require annual spending of $285 million.  It is unusual in New Mexico for a governor to lobby a committee directly.
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3 a.m.
Legislators are hammering out agreements to increase annual spending on public school education by a half-billion dollars after consummating New Mexico's version of a "Green New Deal" that aims for carbon-free electricity production within a generation.
The consequences of sweeping Democratic midterm election victories in New Mexico were coming into focus in the final full day of the state's annual legislative session on Friday.
Two successive annual budget surpluses in excess of $1 billion are allowing the Legislature to plot a major economic stimulus package and respond to a judge's order to boost resources to public education.
As Democrats push through the state's first minimum wage increase in a decade, their own ideological divides have sidelined efforts to legalize recreational marijuana and remove a dormant criminal ban on abortion.