The state paid millions for a parcel of land it apparently didn’t need. Then Richardson got a $50K campaign contribution from a member of the family from which the state purchased the land. Hmm…
Use your public position to spend taxpayer money to benefit the family of a private contractor, get $50,000 of that taxpayer money back as a campaign contribution.
Is that how a land deal went down between Gov. Bill Richardson and Santa Fe contractor Sonny Otero? The Richardson administration says it’s not, but there’s certainly an appearance of possible pay to play created by the deal, which is highlighted today by Albuquerque Journal reporter Thomas Cole.
The details, as reported by Cole: More than three years ago, the Richardson administration bought 14 acres of vacant land on the city’s south side for $6.9 million. It’s still empty today. Most — 12 acres — was bought from a company owned by the family of Otero for $5.9 million, which was $3.2 million more than the family paid for it 28 months earlier. Otero gave Richardson’s 2006 re-election campaign $50,000 two months after the sale of the land to the state was finalized.
Uh huh.
When Cole first reported on the deal three years ago, the state said it “planned to use the land as a site for a campus of government buildings,” today’s article states.
That never happened. Cole quotes a state official as saying there are “preliminary talks about possibly building a DPS crime lab on the site and an MVD office. So to say it’s sitting vacant without plans is not correct.”
Preliminary talks, especially in this economic climate, do not equal plans.
Anyway, Cole goes on to explain that the purchase of the property “never made a lot of sense” because, at the same time, the state Department of Transportation was “trying to unload” 42 acres of mostly vacant land in the same area. And while that 42 acres might have been large enough for a “so-called mega-complex of government agencies” that the state is looking to build, the 14-acre parcel the state bought in 2006 “appears to be too small for consideration,” Cole quoted a state official as saying.
And the state is now leasing nearby office space from a private developer.
Cole says there’s no escaping this conclusion about the land purchased from the Otero family: “The state never needed the property, doesn’t need it today and may never need it.”
‘Taxpayers are justified in their distrust’
NMSU government professor and blogger Jose Garcia, writing about Cole’s article, calls the situation “The Mother’s Milk of Politics: Richardson Style.”
“Yes, money is the mother’s milk of politics, but when access to that milk comes to depend much too heavily on one’s contributions to political campaigns, taxpayers are justified in their distrust of the motives behind the actions of state government officials across the board, and justified in their feeling taxpayer money is being wasted in ways that undermine our confidence in the integrity of state government,” Garcia writes.
I’d take things a step further than Garcia or Cole: If they haven’t done it already, it’s time the feds add this situation to the list of deals they are investigating as part of their probe into allegations of pay to play in the Richardson administration.
I don’t know if there was a quid pro quo in this situation, and I’m certainly not trying to imply that there was. But this deal creates a nasty appearance, especially in the context of all the other scandals swirling around Richardson. That appearance raises a question I hope the feds will try to answer.