I am writing today to announce the closure of the New Mexico Independent. After three and a half years of operation in New Mexico, the board of the American Independent News Network, has decided to shift publication of its news…
While environmental activists played their part yesterday during demonstrations at the capitol building, going so far as to dress up as solar panels and to sing the tune of “You Are My Sunshine,” their counterparts, the anti-cap-and-trade contingency who has…
Roughly one quarter of University of New Mexico students are unimpressed with the state’s flagship public school, according to a survey that questioned college students about their higher education experiences.
A local organization that works for more openness in government is claiming victory after a state agency decided Tuesday to publicly release documents that had been sought by the media for months.
“Today’s action is a win for transparency,” Sarah Welsh, executive director of Foundation for Open Government (FOG), said Tuesday evening in a statement, referring to the State Investment Council’s decision to release four documents.
FOG, like the Independent and other media outlets, had requested copies of some of the documents for months, only to be denied until Tuesday.
The documents made public by the State Investment Council included two federal grand jury subpoenas, issued by the U.S. Attorney’s Office in New Mexico, that are related to a federal criminal investigation.
The other two documents the SIC released Tuesday were from the Securities and Exchange Commission — a subpoena demanding a wide-ranging list of records as well as that agency’s rules of testimony that were sent to former State Investment Officer Gary Bland prior to testimony he gave this fall to that federal body.
At the center of the showdown between the media and SIC was the status of such records. The media insisted for months that the documents were public and should have been released under the state’s open records law.
Subpoenas often can offer a glimpse into what prosecutors are looking for by the records they request, which can be anything from financial records to e-mails from and to specific individuals.
“It’s important to note that our state open-records laws are more robust than federal FOIA (Freedom of Information Act) law,” Welsh said. “So when these documents arrived at a state agency, we believe that they became state records for the purposes of the New Mexico Inspection of Public Records Act. And that law mandates disclosure.”
The SIC rebutted the media’s argument, saying that a request from federal prosecutors to not make them public trumped the state’s open records law. The belief, the agency said, was that releasing the subpoenas publicly would hamper an ongoing federal investigation, an argument repeatedly used by New Mexico state agencies over the past 15 months.
The New Mexico Finance Authority, at the center of a federal pay-to-play probe that ostensibly ended this summer with no criminal charges, employed a similar argument to deny media requests for federal subpoenas it had received.
“When the Justice Department sends you a letter saying you are requested to not disclose the existence of the subpoena. I am going to pay attention to that,” the authority’s chairman, Stephen Flance, told state lawmakers in June. “They also said premature disclosure could affect the outcome of the investigation.”
The U.S. attorney asked the NMFA to not to release the document, citing a federal statute that applies to banks.
The NMFA, like the SIC, sided with the feds in the balancing act that pits the prosecutors’ request against the state’s inspection of public records act.
While the SIC and other New Mexico state agencies have sided with federal prosecutors’ request not to release subpoenas publicly, state agencies in other states have not always chosen that path. In Connecticut, the governor’s office in 2004 made subpoenas available to the press despite a request from the U.S. Attorney’s Office that the subpoenas not be made public.
Ultimately the governor of that state, Republican John Rowland, pleaded guilty to corruption and spent roughly 10 months in federal prison.
Some New Mexico state agencies have released subpoenas they’ve gotten, either because the federal inquiries had ended – as the NMFA did in September — or because the agency simply changed its mind, as the Educational Retirement Board did in June.
In making the documents public Tuesday the SIC shifted gears after months of denying media requests. Reasons for the shift in policy were outlined in a one-page letter from the state’s interim investment officer Bob Jacksha, which accompanied the released documents.
Jacksha wrote:
“The Investment Office initially denied those requests under New Mexico Inspection of Public Records Act … in order to refrain from interfering in any federal investigation.
“However, in the staff’s ongoing legal review, with the input of council Members, and under my own direction as Investment Officer, the Investment Office will today publicly release the subpoenas to all who have asked for them previously.”
