Budgeteering has always been a fine New Mexico spectator sport; one played for the sake of luring crowds out of the bleachers and onto the field of play — where, sometimes, they can be as effective as the executive and legislative athletes themselves.

The game is tough enough during good fiscal times, when the contest is for governmental surpluses: Crafty administrators take their cases to the public, most often through the press, portraying whatever they want money spent on as a new plateau in public service, something everybody else has, and we just must have — or look like a bunch of brutos. Next thing local or state legislators know, concerned citizens are saying hang the expense — just get us this program, that building ...

In bad times, of course, the ball rolls the other way: Whatever you do, don't cut the budget for this or that essential service, however sloppily it's being delivered — and it'd be a crime to cut back on cultural offerings ...

The past week has provided a spectacle of the sport, played by past masters of good-times gamesmanship who've adjusted their pitching to our state's rediscovered poverty — and to Gov. Bill Richardson's refusal, during the recent special session on balancing the budget, to consider raising taxes or cutting salaries.

Our legislators did the only thing they could under the circumstances: They passed spending cuts to put the state in the black until they convene again in mid-January.

The legislated figure, $253 million, is still a lot of money for state agencies and programs to lose — so Richardson mounted his bully pulpit on behalf of the bereft-to-be.

The governor called in key players to tell him — and the people of our state — what would happen if or when year-in, year-out spending comes under the knife.

For starters, said Corrections Secretary Joe Williams, we would have to close down two prisons — probably one down in Hagerman holding 270 men, and the women's prison at Grants, home away from home for nearly
600 convicts.

Hundreds of bad actors suddenly set loose? That oughta give folks in the foothills the heebie-jeebies.

By comparison, the cuts being considered by Secretary Joanna Prukop of the Energy, Minerals and Natural Resources Department sound benign — but they're not:

The highly professional Prukop went, service by service, through her domain, figuring out which job vacancies she could least afford to hold open. Many were in law-enforcement at our state parks — a chilling prospect, which might include closed parks.

Besides considering furloughs for scores of employees, she's taking a hard look at 11 job vacancies in the environmentally crucial oil-conservation office. That could mean a two-thirds reduction in field inspections; intervals during which lots of groundwater lies at risk.

Felizmente, Prukop has listed other budget-cutting possibilities that are at least a little less dire.

It's the same scene around state government — which, for all the criticism it gets, performs vast amounts of service.

Richardson makes a good case for cutting pork barrel spending, and putting that money toward state operations. But even if those one-time amounts were shifted, where does the money come from next time around? Or does the governor figure that's for his successor to worry about?

Late this week, our desperate politicians were casting hopeful eyes on whatever's left of $58 million in federal spending money the governor can spend with legislative approval. The two branches of state government have already committed $20 million of that money to whittling the budget shortfall — leaving $38 million or less to throw into the $253 million hole.

Between now and the governor's Nov. 12 deadline for signing or vetoing the special-session budget bill, expect more horrific scenarios from departments with the greatest potential for frightening the taxpaying public.

But New Mexicans should see them not only as worst-case scenarios, but also as the public-relations leverage they are. If the governor's entire Cabinet takes as careful an approach as Secretary Prukop has, he and legislative leaders might make less-harmful choices to get them into the upcoming budget session — at which time revenue increases will have to be a big part of the debate.