The Roundhouse in Santa Fe (Photo by Peter St. Cyr)
The House Judiciary Committee gave a do-pass recommendation earlier today to a bill that would create a publicly accessible database of financial information from government agencies in New Mexico, but not before stripping a provision that would have included employees’ names in the database.
Senate Bill 195, sponsored by Sen. Sander Rue, R-Albuquerque, now heads to the House Appropriations and Finance Committee, and would also need approval on the House floor before heading to the governor for action.
The bill would create a publicly accessible Web site database of detailed and up-to-date financial information including tax revenues, agency budgets and investment reports.
The New Mexico Foundation for Open Government’s Sarah Welsh was at the hearing, and FOG has a posting on its site about the vote on the amendment to keep employee names out of the database. Here’s Welsh’s recount of the discussion:
“Unfortunately, the Committee stripped a Senate floor amendment that included state employee names in the portal. If the new version passes, only titles and salaries would appear. Only Rep. Dennis Kintigh and Rep. James White voted to keep the names in.
“In moving to strip the names, House Majority Leader Rep. Ken Martinez said it seemed to be a little invasive and mean to include them. Rue said he felt the same way initially, but had become convinced that this public information is already available, and taxpayers have a right to access it. Martinez then questioned whether it is manageable to maintain an updated list of some 27,000 state employees; Rue said it’s routine personnel data that is kept updated and simply has to be fed into the portal website.
“Rep. Elias Barela agreed with Martinez. Barela said he’d understand if the portal listed the names of exempt employees (high-level administrators who serve at the pleasure of the governor) but questioned whether the interest in making state expenditures transparent extends to the names of individual classified employees. It could lead to agency in-fighting, Barela said.”
FOG supports including the names. Welsh wrote in the posting that there’s “one concrete example of why this is important – the governor’s ongoing refusal to release the names of the 59 exempt employees who were laid off last month.”
“Rumor has it that some of these employees have simply been transferred to other positions in state government – classified positions,” Welsh wrote. “If the Sunshine Portal contained employee names, it would be relatively easy to track down this information and prevent future abuses.”
The bill has already passed the Senate unanimously, with the provision that would include employee names in the Web site database.