The case the Judicial Standards Commission has built – or has been unable to build – against Bernalillo County Metropolitan Court Judge Theresa Gomez may be an indication of what’s to come in the larger scandal involving the state’s housing authorities.
Earlier this month, the commission asked the state Supreme Court to reprimand Gomez and require her to pay $17,000 in back rent to the state. That’s because Gomez lived rent-free, for 20 months, in a home owned by the Albuquerque-based Region III Housing Authority, an organization whose goal was to provide housing for low-income people.
At the time, Gomez was making $93,000 per year. She also dismissed traffic citations and cancelled an arrest warrant for Vincent “Smiley” Gallegos, the man who ran Region III at the time.
Gomez’s conduct was egregious. The judge has admitted that her actions violated the ethical requirements of her job and has agreed to the reprimand and to pay the back rent.
But the Supreme Court wants to know why the recommended discipline isn’t worse. It wants justification that a reprimand is harsh enough.
The answer is revealed in the Supreme Court case file: The documents that might justify harsher sanctions simply don’t exist.
“The primary mitigating circumstance that affected this case from the outset is an absence of substantial documentary evidence,” Commission Director Jim Noel wrote in his response to the Supreme Court. “There is no evidence demonstrating any additional or more serious impropriety.”
Gomez claims she didn’t deal with Gallegos directly, according to the court records, but dealt with a real estate agent who found the home owned by Region III. The agent, Gomez claims, asked her to complete an application to qualify for the low-income program, and got her set up on a lease-purchase deal for the home. Gomez claims she didn’t know about Region III’s problems until she read about them in the newspaper.
The documents that would back up her claims or prove them false, and any that would answer other questions, like why she wasn’t required to pay rent, don’t exist.
“The records evidencing that Judge Gomez satisfied all conditions to participate in the lease-purchase program are missing,” Gomez’s attorney Robert J. Desiderio wrote in a filing with the high court.
Lawrence Rael, who was brought in after Gonzales’ resignation last year to stabilize Region III, said in a sworn affidavit provided to the high court that he believes any documents related to Gomez’s deal with the housing authority “were destroyed or were taken from the housing authority, along with records of other transactions, prior to my appointment. I have no evidence or information about who may have destroyed or taken these records.”
The larger scandal
The destruction of public records is a fourth-degree felony punishable by up to 18 months in prison for each violation, but the state would first have to be able to prove that someone destroyed the records.
The Region III authority defaulted last year on $5 million in bonds it owed the state. Those bonds were to be spent on affordable housing projects, but almost $900,000 went to Gallegos as salary, benefits and a questionable loan, and some $700,000 was loaned to the
The lack of documents certainly makes more difficult the tasks of determining what caused the state’s affordable housing system to crumble last year and whether any activity was criminal. Because of that, the Gomez case may be a sign of what’s to come. As indicated by Rael’s statement, a large quantity of housing authority documents that should exist no longer do.
Many fear the problems go far beyond the bond money. The state auditor is currently conducting a review to try to determine the extent of the problems, and the attorney general is conducting an ongoing investigation that could lead to criminal charges. The difficulties created by missing records might explain why their investigations are taking so much time.
If crimes were committed, the missing records could make it harder to bring the perpetrators to justice.