Why were they abandoned in the agency’s former office for almost two years? What information do they contain?
When the Las Cruces-based Region VII Housing Authority shut down in August 2006, board members said the agency’s records would be sent to Region III in Albuquerque.
So why did the government records remain essentially abandoned in a privately owned office building in Las Cruces until almost two years later, when they were finally picked up by Brian Colón, a private attorney working on the State Investment Council’s (SIC) lawsuit that’s attempting to recover money lost when Region III defaulted in 2006 on $5 million in bonds it owed the state?
Good question.
Region III continued to operate after its bond default led to several other housing authorities around the state shutting down in 2006, but only for the purpose of sorting through the mess the housing authorities had created. Gov. Bill Richardson appointed Lawrence Rael, who runs the Mid-Region Council of Governments, to head up that effort.
Rael has not returned a call seeking comment on why his office never picked up the Region VII records.
Edgar Lopez, who owns the Las Cruces office Region VII leased, said a company hired to liquidate Region VII’s assets came at some point to take phones and other equipment, but left behind the paper records and a computer server that contained Region VII e-mails and other documents.
At that point, Lopez said, he made known “to everybody including the attorney general’s office” that documents in a file cabinet and on a computer server had been “abandoned” and were still in his possession, and that they could be obtained with a subpoena.
The AG later took the computer server but left the paper records, Lopez said. Then in May 2008, Colón came for the documents. The SIC’s spokesman, Charles Wollmann, said Colón’s law firm has made the documents available to the AG’s office for its criminal investigation.
Officials mum on content of records
So what do the records say? It’s not clear. Colón’s subpoena sought “documents and items” in Lopez’s possession related to Region III, Region VII, another company tied to the housing authorities and several companies owned by former Region III Director Vincent “Smiley” Gallegos, the man at the center of the scandal.
But no one with knowledge of what was actually contained in the Region VII files who was interviewed for this article, including Colón, would talk about the content of the documents. And it’s not clear how a member of the public who wants to view what are public records would go about doing that.
Officially, the records should be in the possession of Rael and Region III, but they are not. Wollmann said a records request should not be directed to the SIC, which is not the custodian of the records.
And Colón’s law firm, though it is in possession of the records, isn’t a governmental agency to which a public records request can be directed. It’s simply doing work on behalf of the SIC.