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 person filing an ethics complaint and then going public would face much harsher penalties than a public official found to have violated the public trust under a State Ethics Commission proposal the Senate Finance Committee passed Tuesday.
According to the legislation, a person filing a complaint and then speaking about it could have to pay a $26,000 fine and spend a year in jail. On the other hand, a censure or public reprimand would be the worst a public official would get from the ethics commission if found to have violated the public trust.
That seeming inconsistency has long-time good government groups speaking out against the proposal following years of lobbying state lawmakers for a commission that could investigate and punish ethical lapses by public officials.
The “extreme penalties” would discourage people from filing complaints with the proposed commission, the groups said in a joint statement issued Tuesday.
“It’s odd that the penalties for a complainant speaking publicly about a complaint would be astronomically harsher than any penalty the commission could dish out to a public official accused of misconduct,” Steven Robert Allen, executive director of Common Cause New Mexico.
Common Cause was one the groups listed in the joint statement Tuesday criticizing the Senate bill and similar legislation moving through the House.
The confidentiality provision that silences complainants seems to fly in the face of the “presumption that government must be open by default, with any secrecy provisions carved out as narrowly as possible,” added Sarah Welsh, executive director of the New Mexico Foundation for Open Government. “This bill takes the opposite approach. It starts from the presumption that all Commission documents, meetings and hearings related to ethics complaints must be secret, forever. It then carves out a narrow exception for one final report to be made public. I still haven’t heard a good explanation for why an ethics body needs such extraordinary secrecy privileges, and I don’t think the public will trust its pronouncements without more transparency.”
Terri Cole, president and CEO of the Greater Albuquerque Chamber of Commerce, another organization speaking out against the legislation, told The Independent on Tuesday that both the House and Senate bills are moving quickly. In previous years, similar bills languished in the Legislature.
Cole recounted events late Monday night in the House Judiciary Committee to make her point.
The House committee was hearing the state ethics commission bill when the chairman, Rep. Al Park, D-Albuquerque, introduced a substitute to the piece of legislation up for discussion. Usually during hearings supporters and opponents are allowed to testify.
But Park skipped over public testimony and took lawmakers’ questions.
“And they’re were only four of us in the room,” Cole said of the 11:15 p.m. hearing.
Lawmakers asked some questions, but “not the usually House Judiciary vetting,” Cole said, referring to the sometimes-tedious, line-by-line analysis House Judiciary members put a bill through.
Then members voted on the substitute bill, sending it to the House floor.
“It flew out,” Cole said. “It’s got to be part of a higher plan.”
