IPRA

MLK Jr Commission, foundation facing public records suit

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A former employee at a state commission filed a lawsuit Monday against the board’s executive director, alleging that he and the organization are illegally withholding financial information. 

Erica Davis Crump, the former associate director of the New Mexico Martin Luther King Jr. Commission, filed the suit against her former boss, Leonard Waites, the commission and an organization called MLK Jr Foundation of NM. Davis Crump’s lawsuit claims that Waites and the commission violated the state’s Inspection of Public Records Act (IPRA) when they did not fulfill a request to disclose information about the foundation. 

Davis Crump’s attorney, Jacob Candelaria, who also serves in the state senate, told NM Political Report that the initial records request he filed on behalf of his client was part of a separate, whistleblower lawsuit against Waites that Candelaria plans to file later this week.  

At issue in the current case is whether the foundation’s aim is “to serve as the fundraising arm of the MLK Commission” as state records show, or if it’s a completely separate entity. Waites did not respond to a request for comment and court records show that he had not been served with the suit as of Tuesday. 

But in a letter to Candelaria regarding the records request, Waites wrote that the foundation is not associated with the commission and that the purpose of the foundation was to raise money to help “fund programs that support the dream of Martin Luther King, Jr.”

“The Foundation is a non-profit corporation, and its officers and directors are private citizens, with no ties to the Commission,” Waites wrote. 

Candelaria included as an exhibit in the suit the foundation’s registration with the New Mexico Secretary of State’s Office that states the foundation is the fundraising arm of the commission. 

“They can say whatever they want now, after the fact, but look at what they actually disclosed to the Secretary of State as being the purpose of the foundation,” Candelaria said on Tuesday. 

In 2018, independent journalist Daniel Libit sued the UNM Foundation, a fundraising group for the University of New Mexico, because the foundation claimed it was exempt from IPRA. A state district judge ruled in favor of Libit on the grounds that the foundation was doing work on behalf of a public body. 

Candelaria said he’s hopeful the judge in this case will agree. 

“The foundation status as a nonprofit corporation, in and of itself, does not mean it’s not subject to IPRA,” Candelaria said. “So their argument is pretty thin, quite frankly.”

In an affidavit from Davis Crump, which was filed as part of the suit, she said she found a note regarding a missing $50,000 from the commission in the desk she “inherited” from the previous associate director.

Environment

EPA, state agencies want public input on drilling wastewater report

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The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the state of New Mexico released a draft report on Friday about the possibility of someday reusing or recycling wastewater from the oil and gas industry. According to the draft white paper compiled by the EPA and three state agencies, “Given that drought is no stranger to New Mexico, decisions about water are growing ever more complicated and meaningful.”

This summer, the EPA and three New Mexico agencies convened a working group to understand and clarify existing regulatory and permitting frameworks and create a road map toward finding other uses for wastewater generated by oil and gas drilling. The draft report lays out various possible reuse scenarios, explains which agencies would be involved in permitting and regulations and parses some of the legal issues. As the authors note, New Mexico became the third-largest oil producing state in the U.S. in 2018 and the industry produces enormous quantities of wastewater.  According to the report:
For every barrel of oil, four or five barrels of produced water may be generated: an estimated 168 to 210 gallons of produced water for every 42 gallons of oil produced.

Daniel Yohalem

Judge: Guv’s office ignoring open records request violated law, but ignoring questions didn’t

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A New Mexico district judge ruled Wednesday that Gov. Susana Martinez’s office violated the state’s public records law, but did not break the law when ignoring or refusing interview requests with a Santa Fe newspaper. The Santa Fe Reporter was first to report on the decision from Santa Fe Pro Tem District Judge Sarah Singleton. Singleton ruled that the governor’s office violated the state Inspection of Public Records Act (IPRA) three times by failing to respond or responding late to public records requests. But, Singleton ruled that the governor and her staff did not violate the U.S. Constitution by refusing to speak to or answer questions from Reporter staffers. She not only said existing case law does not support the paper’s arguments, but that the paper’s questions aimed at the governor’s office “were not comparable to the mundane requests made by other newspaper.”

“The Reporter was requesting special treatment,” Singleton wrote.

Albuquerque Newsdesk

APS faces public records suit from mother of student

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More than a year after Albuquerque Public Schools denied her public records requests related to an incident involving her autistic son, Laura Gutierrez is taking the state’s biggest public school district to court. Her lawsuit, filed last month in Albuquerque’s state district court, alleges APS wrongly withheld public records responsive to requests she made in late 2015. She is asking for the school district to release the records and pay damages for violating the state’s Inspection of Public Records Act (IPRA). Under IPRA, public agencies can be fined up to $100 per day in damages for not fulfilling public records requests if the person who brings the suit can prove damages. “I have decisions I need to make as a parent, and without these records I can’t move forward,” Gutierrez said in an interview.

2017 Legislative Session

Effort to make college research secret stalls over fears it goes too far

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Angelo Artuso warns that a move by lawmakers to shield some university research from the public eye could lead to harrowing consequences. At a Wednesday morning House committee hearing, Artuso invoked some of history’s darkest state-sanctioned university research projects. For decades, researchers at Tuskegee University studied the effects of syphilis by pretending to offer infected Black men free health care. And several colleges and universities from the early 1950s until 1973 were involved in Project MKUltra, a CIA program that used drugs like LSD unknowingly on human subjects to experiment with mind control. Programs like those, involving government-funded atrocities at institutions of higher learning,  Artuso maintained, would remain hidden at New Mexico public higher education institutions under a bill sponsored by state Reps.

2017 Legislative Session

State Sen. wants parents to have access to investigations into school police

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Laura Gutierrez has been trying to get public records from Albuquerque Public Schools for more than a year. In 2014 a school law enforcement officer allegedly used force against her autistic son. APS opened an investigation and soon cleared the officer of any wrongdoing. Gutierrez wants to see all the documents from this investigation. In the fall and winter of 2015, Gutierrez filed four public records requests with APS for the district’s internal investigation of the officer, an employee of the school district.

Environment

The ‘politics’ of wrangling data on the Gila

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A one-sentence provision in state law is emboldening at least one agency to keep public information from seeing the light of day. All officials have to do is accuse someone of having a political agenda. For more than a year, retired Interstate Stream Commission director Norman Gaume has wanted to know how much water farmers and others currently draw from the Gila River. That’s where the state plans to build a controversial new project that would divert more water from the river. Specifically, he wondered if water users are using the maximum amount of water they’re already allotted from the river.

Albuquerque Police Department

Affidavit: ABQ police have illegally deleted, altered videos of shootings

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Albuquerque Police Department officials have altered and, in some cases, deleted videos that showed several controversial incidents, including at least two police shootings, the department’s former records supervisor has alleged in a sworn affidavit. Three officers’ body camera videos that captured events surrounding the fatal shooting of 19-year-old suspected car thief Mary Hawkes in April 2014 were either altered or partially deleted, according to former APD employee Reynaldo Chavez’s nine-page affidavit. Also alleged is that surveillance camera video from a salon showing APD officers shooting Jeremy Robertson, a law enforcement informant and suspected probation violator, in June 2014 bore “the tell-tale signs that it has been altered and images that had been captured are now deleted. One of the deleted images captured the officers shooting Jeremy Robertson.”

This piece originally appeared at NM In Depth and is reprinted at NM Political Report with permission. Chavez also said that ‘SD cards’ from cameras were easy to make disappear, and that he witnessed Assistant Chief Robert Huntsman say ‘we can make this disappear’ when discussing a particular police camera with an SD card in it, according the affidavit.

Albuquerque Newsdesk

AG says APS violated open records law. Now they’re still denying a mother the documents

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For more than a year, Laura Gutierrez has been at standstill in a dispute with the state’s largest public school district. Gutierrez is seeking records from an internal investigation of an Albuquerque Public Schools police officer that came after she alleged the officer tased her son during the fall of 2014. While APS handed over a memo stating that the investigation cleared the officer of any wrongdoing, it also withheld releasing supporting documents like a field investigator’s supplemental report, witness statements and a forensic interview conducted with Gutierrez’s son, Michael Bruening. “I should be able to know what my son said in the interview,” Gutierrez, who formerly went by the name Laura Bruening, told NM Political Report. Gregory Williams, an Albuquerque attorney and president of the pro-transparency New Mexico Foundation for Open Government, agrees.

University of New Mexico Health Sciences Center

Regent involved in UNM Hospital shake up deleted emails

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Last month University of New Mexico Regent Rob Doughty shepherded to success a little-scrutinized plan to restructure the leadership and governance of the university’s Health Sciences Center. As one of the plan’s architects, Doughty also kept the plan secret — from the public, medical staff at UNM Hospital and at least two of Doughty’s fellow regents in the weeks before a March 14 vote that set the restructuring in stone. Now, the black hole of information surrounding how the plan came to be is growing murkier. New Mexico In Depth has learned that Doughty deleted emails he sent and received in the weeks leading up to the last-minute, controversial vote that changed oversight of UNM’s Health Sciences Center, which has an annual budget of $1.9 billion. The change did away with a board composed of community members and regents and replaced it with a panel of three regents, who are political appointees of Gov. Susana Martinez.