In a surprising reversal of his earlier dismissal of four felony charges against District Judge Michael Murphy of Las Cruces, District Judge Leslie Smith reinstated those charges yesterday, setting a trial date of February 5.

In an ongoing saga that looked to have run out of steam a month ago after four of five felony counts against Murphy were dismissed, Smith’s reversal marks a victory of sorts for District Attorney Matt Chandler of Clovis, whose office has accused Murphy of informing a prospective judicial candidate that she needed to pay for a seat on the bench. Allegedly, she also told another judge about a $4,000 donation made in 2006 to to ensure his judgeship appointment.

Smith said yesterday that he reinstated the past four felony charges because he’d been unaware prosecutors had not participated in the immunity hearing overseen by Robinson. “Failing to provide complete information,” Smith warned both attorneys in the case, “can be just as misleading to a court as purposefully giving inaccurate information.”

Murphy has denied any wrongdoing, but taped conversations between himself and another Las Cruces judge, Lisa Schultz, have begun to haunt not just Murphy but other judges and former judges throughout the state whose names have also come up in the case — as either witnesses or those who have knowledge of some of the events and conversations leading up to Murphy’s indictment in May.

For example, in a 43-minute conversation between Murphy and Schultz from November 10 of last year, which had been secretly recorded by Schultz, Murphy expressed several times to Schultz her reasons for a chief judge candidate he wanted elected and why doing so would be in her best interest. Chandler has argued that these remarks signified attempted bribery. Murphy’s attorney Michael Stout has maintained that Murphy was simply lobbying, and therefore there was no wrongdoing or unlawful intent.

That lone remaining charge had been all that had been left of the overall charges against Murphy until yesterday.

“This is pay-to-play pure and simple,” NMWF Executive Director Jeremy Vesbach said in a press release sent out Thursday morning. “You’ve got a major political donor secretly reaping the benefits when public animals were moved to public lands using public resources.”

Sims gave $52,000 to Richardson’s 2006 campaign and $25,000 to Richardson’s 2002 election campaign.(In 2010, Sims gave $10,000 to Susana Martinez—and $8,500 to Diane Denish.)

Mr. Sims was not in his office this morning and a voicemail left at his home has not yet been returned.

Update Nov. 12: Sims denies claims.

Here’s the NMWF report:
Sims report And the lease plan, provided by NMWF: Sims lease plan The legal notice of the lease: Sims legal ad And the State Land Office letter about the extension of the lease:
SLO letter

The State Investment Council, headed up by Bland, and the state’s Education Retirement Board invested a combined total of $90 million with Chicago-based Vanderbilt Capital in 2006. That investment ended up being essentially worthless.

Foy, a former investment officer at the ERB, says he was pressured by board chair Bruce Malott to make the investment in Vanderbilt, and that Vanderbilt’s subsequent donation of $15,500 a couple of months later to Gov. Bill Richardson’s presidential campaign shows that the investments were made in exchange for campaign contributions. Foy’s suit names Richardson’s former chief of staff, Dave Contarino, as the person who was directing Bland and Malott to ensure that the investments happened.

If his lawsuit is successful in civil court, Foy will get a percentage of the proceeds recouped for the state — the result of a whistle-blower law passed by the Legislature just a few years ago.

Accused parties have denied the charges, saying that Foy is a disgruntled former employee who was fired after being found guilty on three charges of sexual harassment. And Malott says Foy’s suit was an attempt to “exploit headlines” coming on the heels of a federal pay-to-play investigation of Richardson’s administration, given a “personal vendetta” Foy has after being fired by Malott.

Now, according to the Associated Press late last week, Bland says that Foy’s lawsuit is a “cynical” attempt to profit from financial distress, and he details his own credentials to make the case that he wasn’t hired for political reasons:

“This lawsuit is a cynical attempt… to make money out of the near collapse of worldwide financial markets and the resultant devastation that event has caused to some of the investments held on behalf of the people of New Mexico,” Bland wrote.

… The response cites Bland’s “unblemished career as a fiduciary,” including 16 years as vice president of trust investment at the Boeing Co., where he oversaw $62 billion in employee trust funds.

Bland, also pleading ignorance of Vanderbilt’s campaign contributions to Richardson, says the Vanderbilt investments were “scrutinized, approved in the normal course and ultimately made because of Vanderbilt Capital’s experience.”

The AP reports that, according to Bland, that experience included $16 billion in assets, 45 institutional clients and a management team with 60 years of combined experience and a strong performance record.

Bland was hired by Richardson in 2003 after retiring from Boeing in 2001. In a press release announcing the hiring of Bland, Richardson said he had “… ambitious plans for the State Investment Office, and I wanted a leader who will take the office in a new direction… I got exactly what I wanted in Gary Bland.”

Under our laws, there’s not necessarily anything wrong with that. The system is set up to allow political appointments to taxpayer-funded jobs. And, unless there’s a quid pro quo, there’s not necessarily anything illegal about a politician using his clout to help a contributor.

But such admissions from Richardson provide insight into how a man whose administration is currently dogged by pay-to-play allegations — and a man who is arguably the most powerful politician in the state’s history — plays the political game.

Richardson is currently facing two separate pay-to-play controversies. The first involves a federal grand jury investigating allegations that a California company received a state investment contract that paid almost $1.5 million in exchange for $110,000 in contributions to two Richardson political action committees and his 2006 gubernatorial re-election campaign.

In the second case, a lawsuit alleges that the state lost $90 million in investment deals made in exchange for a little more than $15,000 in contributions to Richardson’s 2008 presidential campaign.

Richardson’s office declined a request for an interview for this article, but former House Minority Whip, and NMI contributor, Dan Foley said in an interview that it’s unfair to try to tie or compare the pay-to-play allegations to Richardson’s decision to give a state job to the son of a man who helped him on a campaign.

“I think saying that a guy helped me on my campaign so I helped his son get a job — that’s politics. That’s different than saying that you give $250,000 and you get a big contract,” Foley said.

“Politics is a relationship business. You try to surround yourself with people you trust. You try to surround yourself with people you believe in, and who better than the people who were there in the beginning?”

But one New Mexico political operative, who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the subject, said Richardson’s earlier admissions raise suspicion.

“If he’s willing to admit to giving a taxpayer-funded job as a political ‘thank you,’ and if he’s willing to admit to thinking about how he can help people who give to his campaign, what is he doing that he’s not admitting?” the operative asked.

A climate ripe for pay-to-play politics

It was in a 2007 interview with CNBC that Richardson acknowledged that giving money to a politician does give the donor “a little bit of an edge. …

“I don’t give any extra access to somebody that contributes,” Richardson said. “But I’ll remember that person, and I’ll say, ‘Jeez, that guy helped me. Maybe I can help them.’”

And it was in his 2005 autobiography, “Between Worlds: The Making of an American Life,” that Richardson recounted giving a state job to the son of Donaldo “Tiny” Martinez, an influential Hispanic activist in northern New Mexico whose support of Richardson’s 1980 run for the 1st Congressional District seat gave his campaign a big boost. Richardson ended up losing to an incumbent Republican by about 1,000 votes that year, but two years later, he won the newly created 3rd District seat.

“More than two decades later, Martinez’s son applied for a state job,” Richardson wrote in his book. “I talked to him and he told me his credentials. He was as qualified as the other candidates. I told him he was getting the job because he was his father’s son and because his father did a fine thing for me many years ago.”

Many politicos who declined to speak on the record for this article pointed to stories like that — and the volume of news articles throughout Richardson’s tenure about campaign contributors getting state contracts or appointments to boards and commissions — as evidence that Richardson has for years engaged in pay-to-play politics.

It’s Richardson’s behind-the-scenes political maneuverings, the anonymous political operative said, that keep many from speaking for the record about the allegations.

“Everybody knows that Bill Richardson is good to his friends,” the operative said. “And on the flip side, everybody knows that he can be very vindictive if you cross him. Examine his line-item vetoes for Democrat legislators versus Republicans, and it becomes obvious. So the reason no one is willing to go on the record about many of these allegations … is he’s still a very powerful person and is willing to use that power to hurt people if they speak ill of him.”

Jose Z. Garcia, a New Mexico State University (NMSU) government professor and active Democrat, wrote in a recent column published on this reporter’s blog that the combination of Richardson’s “bullying style” and the fact that he “elevated fundraising to an art form,” raising unprecedented amounts of money in New Mexico, created a climate ripe for pay-to-play politics.

“There were fundraisers in-state, out-of-state, big ones, little ones, fat ones, skinny ones. And people doing business or wanting to do business with the state were at least as encouraged to contribute as anyone else, and probably more,” wrote Garcia, a Richardson appointee to the New Mexico Border Authority until his term expired in 2006.

“Fundraisers received appointments to powerful positions on boards and commissions and in other ways appeared to receive a great deal of face time with Big Bill.”

The examples are many

In addition to the allegations at the center of the federal probe and the lawsuit, the examples of campaign contributors winning state contracts are many:

• The bank Northern Trust has handled billions of dollars in state assets since being hired in 2003. Meanwhile, the company and its executives have given more than $45,000 to Richardson’s campaigns and PACs.

• A Los Angeles-based public relations firm won a $140,000 annual state contract in 2006, and in 2007 its employees contributed almost $10,000 to Richardson’s presidential campaign.

• Paul Blanchard, the president of the Downs at Albuquerque, served as finance chairman on Richardson’s 2006 re-election campaign, and he and his wife have donated $300,000 to Richardson’s gubernatorial campaigns, according to The New York Times. Meanwhile, Blanchard does a lot of business with the state, including the approval in May by the State Racing Commission, whose board members are appointed by Richardson, of what the Times called “a controversial request from Mr. Blanchard to move the racetrack off the fairgrounds to the city of Moriarty and expand its casino operation.”

• A California developer gave $75,000 to Richardson’s 2006 re-election campaign and donated use of his personal jet to the governor. Meanwhile, Richardson helped secure approval of state funding totaling $4 million for an interchange on Interstate 25 in Belen that is going to vastly improve access to the developer’s 6,000-acre development.

• ValueOptions won a lucrative state contract in 2005 to manage mental-health and substance-abuse services for the state. People tied to the company donated at least $25,000 to Richardson campaigns, and the chairman of the company held a fundraiser for Richardson’s presidential campaign. However, ValueOptions lost the state contract last month to another company. People tied to the new holder of that contract also gave big to Richardson campaigns.

• Santa Fe art dealer and developer Gerald Peters contributed well over $100,000 to the governor’s campaigns, let Richardson use his jet for political trips and held a fundraiser for his presidential campaign. Richardson made Peters a vice chair of his task force on higher education in 2004. In 2006, Peters was awarded a contract to rebuild the state Department of Transportation headquarters in Santa Fe in exchange for the right to use the remainder of the DOT property to develop commercial and residential buildings for his own profit. The project was terminated amid controversy surrounding how Peters won the contract and the project’s ties to defendants in the Bernalillo County Metropolitan Courthouse scandal.

‘Let this investigation run its course’

Richardson has repeatedly said that there’s no connection between donations and contracts, despite what he told CNBC about his tendency to consider helping campaign contributors.

“There’s no connection between donations and what happens in state government,” Richardson said at a 2007 news conference related to the DOT controversy. “That’s always been an established principle.”

Foley acknowledged that some of Richardson’s actions may be questionable, but said it’s not clear that Richardson or any member of his staff has done anything illegal.

In addition to being an influential former legislator, Foley is an insurance agent who gets a 10 percent commission on all policies sold under Allstate’s contract to provide supplemental insurance to state employees. He said he has never experienced Richardson as threatening or bullying and said the governor has “never asked me for a penny.”

Foley said he’s confident that the federal probe will determine whether there was any impropriety.

“You give us a check and you get the contract — If that was said, it’ll come out and they should get in trouble. That’s wrong,” Foley said. “[But] I think the people of New Mexico should sit back and let this investigation run its course.”

Flickr/Richard Soderberg

ALBUQUERQUE — “Pay-to-Play.”

It’s a catch-all phrase, much in the news these days, to describe the kind of corruption in which payment of some sort is made to a power-broker to make something happen.

Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich’s tape-recorded musings about how contributions to his campaign might be rewarded with an appointment to the U.S. Senate was a classic example from a city known for political graft.

Federal investigators are probing whether a similar deal was afoot here in New Mexico when a California company, CDR Financial Products, Inc., was awarded a state contract from the New Mexico Finance Authority in 2004 after two large contributions — totaling $100,000 — were made to Gov. Bill Richardson’s political action committees in 2003 and 2004. Last week, the investigation derailed Richardson’s nomination to be commerce secretary in the Obama administration.

Whatever the consequences for Richardson personally, his withdrawal from the commerce secretary post raises serious questions about how business is done in New Mexico. It’s not the first time that the shadow of corruption has hung over the state, but this story has the potential to be the most damaging because it could involve not just him, but people who worked for Richardson as well.

For years, I’ve heard people whisper about pay-to-play as a way of doing business with Richardson’s administration. Most of these people, though, have some kind of relationship with the state government and won’t kill the prospects of getting state contracts by complaining out loud about the political arm-twisters seeking large campaign contributions.

But University of New Mexico political science professor Lonna Atkeson told the Independent the perception that pay-to-play is rampant in New Mexico results from the way our government itself is set up, at all levels — local, state and federal.

“There’s a lot of pressure that stems from the design of our government itself for people to give. Even if the politician doesn’t demand it, maybe people think its expected that they’ll contribute. What they receive may not be what they want. So are they actually buying access or something else? It can create the appearance of corruption even when it doesn’t exist.”

Steve Allen, executive director of the good-government group Common Cause New Mexico, said, “The way it works is very subtle and, frankly, not illegal.”

“A politician notices who gives — and the contributors gain access,” he explained. “Politicians are more likely to return phone calls to their big contributors. Then, through the development of relationships with the politician and his staff, the contributor might be the beneficiary of favors.”

“Most politicians aren’t on the take,” he continued, “but when you have a state that has no contribution limits whatsoever, and you have companies able to fork out tens and in some cases hundreds of thousands of dollars, it invites conflict of interest that is not good for the politicians themselves, much less the public.”

Change we can believe in?

Flickr/Eyeliam

There are two ways to correct these systemic problems, Allen said: contribution limits and public financing mechanisms — which together would go a long way toward taking the money out of politics.

Currently, New Mexico is one of only five states that place no limits on contributions to political candidates or political action committees, so denying that favors are being traded for large contributions is made a lot easier than it otherwise would be.

The other four states without campaign contribution limits are Illinois, Oregon, Utah and Virginia.

Public financing laws, however, have made some headway in the past five years. Atkeson thinks this shows that many in New Mexico recognize the need to create safeguards against pay-to-play schemes.

In 2003, the Public Regulations Commission was placed under a publicly financed elections system. The state’s appellate judgeships were given public financing in 2007. Allen said the reasons for both of these changes were very clear cut — it was unseemly to have elected officials accept campaign contributions from those who also had direct business with them, or were regulated by them.

Additionally, Albuquerque has public financing for municipal elections, and Santa Fe will have such a system in place soon — the voters approved it last March.

Allen said while he doesn’t know who will be sponsoring it yet, a public financing bill will most likely be introduced during the 2009 legislative session for the big money races of New Mexico’s executive branch: the governor, lieutenant governor, secretary of state, attorney general and state land commissioner.

In addition, Rep. Joseph Cervantes, D-Las Cruces, told the Independent that New Mexico doesn’t have enough “clear statutory direction” regarding elected officials and the awarding of state contracts.

“The line between what is acceptable and unacceptable is blurred to some people,” he said in an interview. “One of my objectives through legislation is to demarcate that line as clearly as possible.”

In 2007, Cervantes passed a bill that amended the Governmental Conduct Act to place more stringent restrictions on state employees when it came to the awarding of state contracts. That bill was signed into law by Richardson. He also gained approval of a “whistleblower” bill to protect and potentially reward people who come forward to expose corruption.

This year Cervantes will re-introduce bills to open conference committees to the public, and to create an ethics commission. He is also introducing a package of bills in collaboration with New Mexico Attorney General Gary King geared toward giving the public greater access to information about how government operates and to make government more transparent.

When it comes to the federal investigation underway, Richardson has strongly denied any wrongdoing by his administration, and said he fully expects the investigators to conclude the same in the end.

CDR Financial Inc. President David Rubin also vigorously denied that the contributions to Richardson were designed to gain the state contract. In a statement on the firm’s Web site, he said:

For the record, CDR has never practiced pay-for-play, on any playing field where we do business. With respect to the work we did for the New Mexico Finance Authority, we underwent a rigorous vetting process that involved multiple steps to ensure that CDR was, in fact, qualified for the job of assisting the state in managing its interest rate swap transactions…

It is true that I have made contributions to political causes and candidates in New Mexico — including contributions directly to Bill Richardson’s gubernatorial campaign and to organizations supporting voter registration drives and other aspects of the electoral process. That support was given with full compliance of state and federal laws…

Anyone who knows me knows that I have been an unabashed supporter of Democratic causes and public figures, especially those like Gov. Richardson, who support a liberal, inclusive agenda.

And an editorial in the Seattle Times sums up the “anger and frustration” of Richardson supporters, as well as the puzzlement that such a skilled politician could be “anywhere near a cheesy scandal that forced him to withdraw his name to be President-elect Obama’s commerce secretary.”

Well, in the end, maybe its simply due to the fact that he’s the governor of a state that is in serious need of ethics reform.