The Governor’s Office calls the Department of Transportation’s now defunct efforts to redevelop two offices in Santa Fe “a fatally flawed process” in a long-awaited review reported on today by the Albuquerque Journal.
The plans, which the governor halted in the midst of the scandal last fall, “suffered from poor planning and poor decisions,” the report stated, according to the Journal. The report said the DOT lacked the expertise for planning public-private projects, “skirted purchasing rules and made questionable use of state aircraft,” the Journal reported.
None of this is news. The Journal has done an excellent job of reporting on this topic and already reported most of what was in the governor’s report. You can find links to many of the newspaper’s articles in my archives on the DOT headquarters project by clicking here.
The short of it: Projects to redevelop the state and district headquarters buildings in Santa Fe were mired in scandal and tied to people who are currently indicted in the Bernalillo County Metro Court scandal and others who are very close to the governor. No charges have been filed in the DOT case, and it’s not clear how seriously the U.S. Attorney’s Office has looked into the DOT situation during its investigation of the metro court situation.
As I’ve written before, it’s nice that the governor cancelled the projects and ordered a thorough review that has led to the new, scathing report, but a truly independent, thorough investigation is needed. We can only hope that