The Roundhouse in Santa Fe (Photo by Heath Haussamen)
The House has easily approved the creation of a publicly accessible, online database of financial information from government agencies in New Mexico that would include the names of exempt employees but not classified employees.
Senate Bill 195, sponsored by Sander Rue, R-Albuquerque, was amended by the House to include the names of all exempt employees – sometimes referred to as “political appointees – in the database, but not the names of some 27,000 classified employees. The change means the bill has to go back to the Senate for concurrence before it can head to the governor for action.
The bill passed the House on a vote of 65-1.
Whether to include employee names in the database has been the sticking point. Rue’s legislation didn’t start out including employee names in the so-called “Sunshine Portal,” but the Senate added a provision including the names in the proposed database in before unanimously approving the bill.
But the House Judiciary Committee OK’d the legislation only after taking employee names back out of it. That was proposed by Majority Leader Ken Martinez, D-Grants.
Then it was Martinez who, on the House floor late Wednesday, proposed adding back in the names of exempt employees but not classified employees.
“This is trying to strike the balance,” he said.
Republican Reps. Dennis Kintigh and Dennis Roch said they preferred having all employee names included in the database.
“It doesn’t quite go as far as some of us would like,” Roch said of the Martinez amendment.
But no one else spoke in favor of including all names in the database during House debate, and Kintigh decided against proposing an amendment that would have included them all.
So, as passed by the House, the bill would create an online database of all sorts of government financial information, including the salaries and titles of all state employees – and the names of exempt employees. The Senate must now decide whether to accept that version of the bill or reject it and force negotiations by a conference committee.
Rep. Nate Cote, D-Las Cruces, who carried the bill on the House floor for Rue, was pleased with the House action.
“We now have a transparency bill on the way to the Governor’s Office thanks to Senator Rue’s sponsorship and willingness to work with his colleagues and members of the House,” Cote wrote in an e-mail.
Update, 1:20 a.m.
The Senate has concurred with the House version of the bill, so it now heads to the governor for action.