New Mexico's future lawmakers will come from more minority communities across the state and will get to work at the Roundhouse with a transporter, one local political observer predicts.

At the same time, more of New Mexico's lawmakers will be people who are newer residents to the state, and longtime politicians with a deep history of state government might become a thing of the past, another wall leaner suggests.

Those are just some of the ideas that observers came up with when asked about how the state's already storied and colorful government will look in a century.

As New Mexico prepares to celebrate its first 100 years of statehood, The New Mexican asked notable residents to predict what could happen in the next century on several key topics.

Steve Allen, the director of the good-government group Common Cause New Mexico, predicted more minorities will run for and win elected offices. He also said citizens will have greater contact with lawmakers through social media and other new technologies.

Big, privately funded campaigns might be a thing of the past, said Allen, whose group works on issues including campaign finance reform.

"I don't think you'll see large private donors giving so much," he said last month. Instead, Allen envisions more of the publicly financed political system that has only gained popularity in recent years.

He also predicted "a movement to amend the [U.S.] Constitution to make it possible to regulate the money in politics problem and make it possible to overhaul the system that even from our current temporary perception seems crazy to the vast majority of people."

Allen also hoped the cost of campaigns would drop off significantly as the need for expensive advertising wanes.

"I think there will be creative media systems that allow people get out their message without needing a big money machine," he said.

The people working to get their messages out to voters also will be dramatically different, said James Taylor, a former state lawmaker who served for a decade.

"We're going to lose that Nuevo Mexicano, the New Mexican type of representative that has a long history and is proud of their family here and their activism in state government," he said.

"We now have so many newer members who have maybe lived in the area they represent for five or six years. I don't think we'll have as many legislators invested in the fabric of New Mexico as much as those looking at the topics and issue of the day."

Taylor, who served nearly a decade in the house and one term in the Senate before losing in 2008, also bemoaned the potential loss of institutional knowledge as younger and newer to New Mexico candidates run for office.

"I'm worried that you're not going to have the Lucky Varelas who have years of institutional memory, not just in the Legislature, but also in state government and in finances, someone who remembers when the budget was just one billion," he said.

The state's budget — now more than $5 billion — is going to become even more important, as the federal government rolls back the generous helping of cash it for years has given to the state for everything from Medicaid to military research, Taylor said.

"The challenge for the Legislature is to remember that, OK, we're dependent on the labs and federal money for social programs, but we are going to have to learn to have an independent way to fend for ourselves."

Contact Kate Nash at 986-3036 or knash@sfnewmexican.com.