The state Crime Victims Reparation Commission is asking the legislature for $4.47 million for the upcoming fiscal year to help victims of violent crime.
Frank Zubia, director of CVRC, spoke during an interim Legislative Finance Committee hearing on Tuesday and said $1 million of the request is to offset the loss of federal funding that is no longer available.
Because of a cap set by the U.S. Congress on how much Victims of Crime Act funding could be available to state and local sexual assault services in addition to the years of lost funding due to a change in the U.S. Department of Justice’s prosecutorial strategies of white-collar crime, state sexual assault services are experiencing a reduction in federal dollars.
Fines and fees from federal white collar crime convictions have provided the funding for VOCA since the 1980s but the DOJ has been seeking agreements wherein the company agrees to pay fines but avoids prosecution.
Congress passed and the Biden Administration signed a ‘VOCA fix’ law in 2021 that would allocate those nonprosecutorial fines to the VOCA fund but the fund has been in decline since 2011, according to the National Criminal Justice Association.
Rachel Cox, director of technical assistance for direct services for the New Mexico Coalition of Sexual Assault Programs, also attended the hearing. She said that $2 million of the roughly $4 million would go to NMCSAP, and that $1 million of those funds will go to support the state’s rural sexual assault services.
Cox said that 32 percent of NMCSAP’s new clients are under the age of 18. Zubia said CVRC has seen an increase in applications for the compensation program and that the biggest payout is for funeral and burial services.
“Our compensation program was created to assist with medical expenses and mental health but funeral continues to be the top. Medical is second,” he said.