UNM Wants Your Trust—and $125.5 Million from Taxpayers on BOND 3. We Have Some Issues.

UNM cannot claim a statewide footprint when it wants credit and retreat to a campus-sized footprint when it faces criticism.

When the university counts jobs, degrees, and payroll, its boosters celebrate its contribution to New Mexico. When residents bring up deep poverty, chronic doctor shortages, or campus radicalism, the excuses begin: those problems are complicated, other people share the blame, and Bond 3 is only about buildings.

VOTE NO for BOND 3. It's about results and trust.

The measure authorizes $352.2 million in new public borrowing across New Mexico, with UNM taking $125.5 million—anchored by $116 million for its Albuquerque medical school. Property taxpayers will repay every dollar of that principal and interest over the next 11 years. Bond buyers are lenders, not donors, and before voters co-sign another massive loan, UNM should answer for its record.

Grade UNM on the State It Serves

UNM’s regents-approved mission promises to foster “an educated, healthy, and economically vigorous New Mexico.” Its School of Medicine pledges to advance the health of all New Mexicans and evaluate the access, quality, and distribution of healthcare professionals across the state.

Measure those promises against how New Mexicans actually live.

In January 2026, the Legislative Finance Committee reported that New Mexico still suffers from “critical, chronic” healthcare worker shortages, with 32 of 33 counties designated as shortage areas for primary care, behavioral health, or dental care. The state remains at least 5,000 healthcare workers short, and 94% of surveyed New Mexico physicians say those shortages hurt their daily work.

Meanwhile, the taxpayers being asked to back this debt are already stretched thin. Across New Mexico, 17.8% of residents live below the poverty line, 19.2% of households rely on SNAP food assistance, and 57.3% of children are on Medicaid.

UNM did not single-handedly create those numbers, and it does not write tax or malpractice laws. But “not ours alone” does not mean “not ours.” As one of the state’s largest taxpayer-funded employers and institutions, UNM’s name is on New Mexico’s outcomes—good and bad.

Taxing Poor Rural Counties for an Albuquerque Building

UNM’s 2024 physician-location report identifies 2,113 UNM-trained doctors practicing in New Mexico. That is real work, and a fair evaluation acknowledges it.

Yet that same report exposes who actually benefits—and who gets left behind. Out of 3,241 practicing physicians listed in Bernalillo County, 1,535 were UNM-trained. In rural counties battered by generational poverty, UNM’s footprint practically vanishes.

Look at the numbers side by side:

• In McKinley County, 33.2% of residents live in poverty, 37.7% of households rely on SNAP, and 77.7% of children are on Medicaid.
• In Luna County, poverty sits at 28.6%, SNAP use at 30.1%, and child Medicaid at 83.2%.
• In Cibola County—where poverty is 28.4% and 78.8% of children are on Medicaid—UNM’s report counted just five UNM-trained doctors in the entire county.
• In Hidalgo County—where child poverty hits 34.1%—there were zero UNM-trained physicians. Three of New Mexico’s 33 counties had none at all.

Even among doctors who earn a UNM medical degree, only 20.6% stay to practice in New Mexico if they complete their residency out of state, compared with 52.5% of those who do both medical school and residency at UNM.

Yet under Bond 3, homeowners, farmers, and families paying rent in McKinley, Cibola, Luna, and Hidalgo counties will stay on the hook through property-tax debt to build a $116 million facility in Albuquerque—when the likelihood that their families ever see a local doctor from that monthly obligation is remote.

UNM’s Selective “Inclusion”

Voters also have every right to ask who is actually included under UNM’s banner of “inclusion”—and who is shut out.

In January 2026, UNM’s Faculty Senate passed a resolution formally rejecting the Trump administration’s “Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education,” a reform package calling for merit-based admissions, protection of conservative viewpoints, tuition freezes for American students, and strict discipline for campus disruptions. Faculty leaders declared the compact “antithetical” to UNM’s core commitment to “inclusion.”

Look at how that “inclusion” works in practice:

• When conservative speakers visited UNM, “inclusion” disappeared. Tomi Lahren’s September 2022 speech had to be cut short when disruptive protesters forced her escort from the room. Charlie Kirk’s November 2022 appearance drew unruly protests requiring State Police in riot gear and ending with three demonstrators detained and cited. And when conservative students hosted Riley Gaines in October 2023, UNM slapped them with a $5,384.75 security bill until a federal judge stepped in and blocked the university’s unconstitutional fee policy.
• During COVID-19, UNM locked down campus spaces with police patrols and enforced a vaccine and booster mandate on students and employees until March 2023—locking non-compliant New Mexicans out of school and work while keeping mandates even longer for Health Sciences programs.
• Even after scrubbing the phrase “affirmative action” from its rulebook in 2025, UNM kept its DEI apparatus running and landed under a March 2025 U.S. Department of Education Title VI investigation for alleged “race-exclusionary practices” in graduate partnerships accused of shutting out white and Asian American students based on race.
• Meanwhile, UNM’s Financial Aid Office actively directs undocumented non-citizens to a dedicated UNM Application for State Aid—part of the state tuition and subsidy framework that the U.S. Department of Justice sued New Mexico over in August 2026 for disadvantaging out-of-state American citizens.

Indulging Anti-Western Radicalism and Antisemitism

While conservative speakers face security bills and police barricades, UNM hosts an active chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), which continues to stage campus rallies.

Its national parent organization is not a mere humanitarian group: National SJP calls the United States “occupied Turtle Island,” explicitly campaigns against capitalism and Western “imperialism,” and circulated an October 7 toolkit calling Hamas’s massacre of Israelis a “historic win for the Palestinian resistance.”

Where that climate leads was on full display on October 7, 2026, when campus protesters reportedly trampled Israeli flags at a UNM student’s memorial display, shouted “Death to Israel,” and stole and burned clothing. UNM confirmed receiving a complaint and opened an investigation—but taxpayers are still waiting to see whether anyone faces real consequences.

Make Them Earn the Loan

Politicians love to bundle higher-education bonds so that small community colleges and rural branch campuses get $750,000 or $3 million crumbs, forcing rural voters to swallow the whole package just to help their local school. Don’t fall for the packaging. Two-thirds of Bond 3 goes to the state’s three largest universities, and UNM alone takes $125.5 million. It is one combined vote.

Voters do not owe any institution automatic approval just because the ballot says “education.” Until UNM proves it can put doctors in poor rural counties, treat conservative and Christian New Mexicans as equals rather than targets, end race-exclusive programming, and enforce basic order against antisemitic harassment, taxpayers have every reason to vote no on Bond 3.