During Thursday’s Senate debate on whether to open legislative conference committee meetings to the public, Sen. John Grubesic, D-Santa Fe, made mention of the 2002 convictions of five former members of the Las Cruces Public Schools Board of Education.
Apparently, Grubesic worked at the attorney general’s office when it prosecuted the case. He said there were no positive results of the prosecutions, and that proves that the New Mexico Open Meetings Act doesn’t really do much to promote open government. That was one of many arguments he made against opening conference committees.
But Grubesic’s comments were either disingenuous, or he doesn’t know as much as he led lawmakers to believe about the LCPS situation. Let me tell you about it.
At the beginning of 2001, the unions, fed up with the tyranny of former Superintendent Jesse Gonzales, overthrew the school board by campaigning for the successful election of three new members, and pushed Gonzales to take another job.
It was then that, as a reporter at the Las Cruces Sun-News, I received a tip about a secret bonus and other incentives the prior school board had given Gonzales to encourage him to stay in
The result: The public learned for the first time about almost $1 million board members had spent on incentives to keep Gonzales. They had done it all in secret, egregiously violating open meetings law. The two members who had been involved that were still on the school board were recalled; all five members who had been involved were convicted.
It was the first criminal prosecution under the open meetings law since the mid-1970s.
It made no difference, Grubesic said Thursday.
That’s crap. Not only is the school board in
More importantly, it got the community involved in the schools. Some 400 people showed up at a meeting in 2001 at which the board admitted its mistakes and apologized. That was shortly before the community recalled the two remaining members.
Since then, the school board has been under extreme public scrutiny. Public outcry has forced the departures of the two superintendents the board has hired in the last five years.
Its members are still struggling to find a superintendent to move the district past the Gonzales days.
Public scrutiny makes their work difficult. But it has the
If you aren’t in favor of truth, change the subject
The truth is that public scrutiny of conference committees would make the job of lawmakers much more difficult. Their decisions would be questioned. They would be challenged to act in a more ethical manner.
A wise watcher of the Legislature said to me today that there’s no good argument against open government, so if you oppose it, the only thing you can do is change the subject.
That’s what those who opposed opening the secret meetings spent much of their time doing Thursday evening.
I was especially disappointed to see Sen. John Arthur Smith, D-Deming, question at length the integrity of the director of the New Mexico Foundation for Open Government and essentially threaten him with a tax increase.
But let’s start with the complaints about the governor, since that’s where Sen. Timothy Jennings, D-Roswell, began.
He argued that the secrecy of the committees protects the Legislature from the governor, which isn’t really true. Opening the committees would mean the public – including the governor’s office – could attend, but only lawmakers would be allowed to speak, so the governor’s office wouldn’t have any undue influence during hearings.
And, who really believes the governor isn’t already putting extreme pressure on members of conference committees to reconcile differences between House and Senate versions of bills in the way he sees fit?
After making that bogus argument,
Because of the constitutional issues such a move would raise, it was a bizarre, disingenuous proposal that
Bash the press, too
The next to argue against opening conference committees was Smith. He agreed that doing so would only result in lawmakers deliberating elsewhere in secret.
He then went on to quiz Sen. Dede Feldman, D-Albuquerque and the sponsor of the proposal, Senate Bill 288, about the integrity of Bob Johnson, the director of the New Mexico Foundation for Open Government.
Under questioning, Johnson revealed that he is paid by the foundation, that the foundation’s annual budget amounts to just over $40,000, that he is registered as a lobbyist for the foundation and doesn’t lobby for any other groups.
Smith inquired about members of the foundation. Johnson revealed that there are more than 200, but he didn’t have a comprehensive list with him. He revealed the names of several, and most were newspaper editors or publishers.
After a series of questions, Smith pointed out what he already knew: The foundation is largely supported by newspapers. Though Johnson, through Feldman, answered all of Smith’s questions, the senator implied that Johnson wasn’t being truthful and was dodging his questions.
Then he said what could be interpreted as a threat. The only groups supporting open conference committees were media organizations, Smith said, adding that he was equally concerned about the integrity of non-profits like Johnson’s.
“From an accounting standpoint… maybe out ought to be taxing (them)… so we could know exactly what their income levels are,” he said. “We have no idea how large these non-profits are.”
They argued that the public wouldn’t attend conference committees, and the media’s intentional distortion of fact would give the public a negative impression of lawmakers, so they would be better off keeping conference committees secret.
“The press is going to manipulate these committees to serve their needs – nothing more, nothing less,” Grubesic said.
We want access to secret meetings so we can sensationalize the news to sell newspapers? In 2002, the assistant attorney general who prosecuted the LCPS board asked me to be prepared to testify, if I was needed, that statements and facts in my articles on the scandal were accurate. Though he had a strong enough case that he didn’t need my testimony when the trial came around, my articles were factual enough that he used them to build his case.
Even more press-bashing
Sensationalism wasn’t the only complaint about newspapers made by the senators. Sanchez made the outrageous assertion that newspaper editorial boards have as much say in public policy as does the Legislature, so if conference committees should be open to the public, so should newspaper editorial board meetings.
That’s absurd. Newspapers, like citizens and corporations, can lobby the Legislature and make arguments that influence public opinion, but it’s only the Legislature that sets policy.
Add to that the fact that newspapers aren’t funded with tax dollars, and that members of their editorial boards aren’t elected officials, and Sanchez’s argument is revealed as ridiculous.
Sanchez asked who is holding newspapers accountable. Here’s the answer:
Newspaper organizations have a different system of accountability – they need people to buy and read their newspapers. The industry isn’t currently doing a very good job, and it’s paying for it with declining numbers of subscribers and advertising revenue. In addition, it’s losing many reporters, like me, to the Internet.
A $75-million egregious act makes the point
Sanchez also asked a question I found especially ludicrous:
“What’s so interesting about conference committees?” he asked.
At the end of the 2006 session, at some point in the process that wasn’t public, Speaker of the House Ben Lujan slipped a $75-million appropriation into the capital outlay bill to fund water rights settlements.
The funding was proposed during the session and not approved, so when it failed the test of scrutiny, Lujan bypassed the public process and made the business of spending public money his own.
It was an incredibly egregious, conceited act.
Did it happen in a conference committee? One lawmaker who was a member of that secret meeting told me it did not happen there, that he didn’t know about the appropriation until the governor vetoed it. Regardless, the point remains the same: Unless every step of the legislative process is public, the potential for such abuse of power exists.
While the LCPS board was buying secret insurance policies that would go to Gonzales’ wife if he died, for example, teachers at
The public didn’t know about it, so they couldn’t oppose it. There was no scrutiny, no one asking the question of whether an insurance policy for the superintendent was more important than science textbooks.
Some lawmakers also argued during Thursday’s meeting that many legislators feel freer to speak their minds and make ethical decisions if they are behind closed doors.
Sen. Cisco McSorley, D-Albuquerque, had this response:
“We have a history of keeping our votes secret, and when our votes were kept secret, the result of that wasn’t that people had more courage to vote their conscience – they had just the opposite. They had a tendency to vote for things they knew their constituents didn’t want for good reasons, and they were trying to avoid their constituents being informed,” McSorley said.
That’s exactly why the citizens of
McSorley spoke the truth – the simple, honest truth:
“If you can’t stand for principle, then you want your vote secret, it seems to me,” he said. “If you want secrecy, you create a wall between yourself and your constituents.”
Shame on those who are holding that wall up.