Plans to build a new School of Medicine at the University of New Mexico have taken an important step forward with the project now securing $350 million in state backing.
That funding was the single largest item on a list of capital outlay projects totaling $1.5 billion approved last week by Governor Michelle Lujan Grisham.
In approving the projects, the Governor remarked that she was doing so as a “commitment to New Mexico’s long-term success and a promise to keep moving our state upward.”
The next largest item approved by Lujan Grisham is seeing $75 million going to the New Mexico Behavioral Health Institute in Las Vegas. That $75 million will go to the construction of a new forensic unit at the inpatient psychiatric hospital.
Some $20 million in funding was approved for upgrade work in state parks across New Mexico, while $17.6 million is going to the John T. Harrington Forestry Research Center on the Mora campus of New Mexico State University.
Additional funded projects: the construction of a new science, technology, engineering and mathematics building in Albuquerque, which has been approved for $10 million; and the long-planned North Domingo Baca Aquatic Center, also in Albuquerque, slated to receive $4 million in funding.
One capital outlay is of particularly significant historical importance: $10 million to create a museum in the community of Tse Bonito honoring the Navajo Code Talkers. The facility will celebrate and explore the work of the Native American soldiers in World War II who used their indigenous language to transmit secret Allied messages in the Pacific theater.
March 16, 2026
By Garry Boulard
Photo courtesy of the National Archives
