Allen Weh
Finance Department’s shift comes after sunshine group expresses concern about redactions
The New Mexico Foundation for Open Government says a state agency violated the Inspection of Public Records Act when it redacted information from public documents before giving them to Republican gubernatorial candidate Allen Weh.
Now it appears the Department of Finance and Administration (DFA) is in the process of correcting that violation.
Sarah Welsh, the sunshine group’s executive director, recently made her own request for some of the public records DFA had provided to Weh with redactions. The agency provided the records to Welsh without redactions, which allowed her to see that DFA had inappropriately blacked out routine information – such as handwritten notations of account numbers or notes such as “OK to pay” – before providing the documents to Weh.
“They provided different information to me and to the Weh campaign, which is not the way it’s supposed to work,” Welsh said.
DFA has said it blacked out some of the information before providing the documents to Weh simply because it wasn’t responsive to Weh’s records request. But there’s no provision in law that allows redactions for that reason.
Because of the redactions, Weh recently filed a lawsuit in his longstanding request to obtain public records from the office of Lt. Gov. Diane Denish, the Democratic Party’s candidate for governor. Some of those records were in DFA’s possession, and Weh’s lawsuit asks a district judge to issue a restraining order prohibiting any altering or redacting of records by DFA or Denish’s office before they are provided to the Weh campaign.
On Wednesday, Welsh expressed concern about the redactions in an article published on this site. Then on Friday, DFA’s records custodian, Nicole Gillespie, sent a letter to the Weh campaign stating that “in the interest of resolving your complaint and minimizing the additional burden on agency staff and office resources your lawsuit has imposed, DFA will make the original, unredacted version (including non-responsive information) of these 270 pages available for inspection. Electronic copies are enclosed.”
That letter was sent by mail and e-mail. In the Friday e-mail to Weh Campaign Manager Whitney Cheshire, Gillespie wrote that the electronic copies would be included on a CD sent with the hard copy of the letter through the mail.
Gillespie has provided no comment for this article except to share the Friday letter to Weh and the e-mail to Cheshire.
‘It should not take a citizen’s lawsuit’
Weh’s request was first filed with Denish’s office in November. Since deeming the massive request “overly burdensome,” Denish’s office has provided some, but not all of the records in its possession. Beyond the issue of the 270 pages with redactions, DFA is still working to provide all records responsive to Weh’s request.
DFA got a late start in responding to Weh’s request because Denish’s office initially failed to forward the request to DFA, which it was required by law to do. Denish’s office corrected that violation and forwarded the request in February.
With at least two violations of the public records act having slowed his attempt to obtain documents related to Denish’s spending during her tenure as lieutenant governor, Weh has nothing nice to say.
“On behalf of New Mexico taxpayers, I would like to read this most recent letter as a commitment on the lieutenant governor’s behalf to stop violating sunshine laws, but whether or not that is the case still remains to be seen,” Weh said in a statement released by his campaign. “Given the history of the lieutenant governor’s refusal to account for her expenditures and the illegal attempts to keep her expenditures secret, it is hard to take any assurances offered by her administration at face value.”
“It should not take a citizen’s lawsuit and a threat of a lawsuit by the New Mexico Foundation for Open Government to obtain public documents concerning the lieutenant governor’s expenditure of taxpayer dollars,” Weh said.
‘They treated two requesters differently’
As for why DFA redacted the information in the first place, Gillespie wrote in her Friday letter to Weh that the records had been previously compiled and provided in response to a separate records request, with the redactions.
“The individual who previously had requested those records was able to obtain all of the responsive public information from each document and did not voice any complaints or concerns about the very limited redactions,” she wrote.
But Welsh said one has to wonder why DFA treated her request differently than a request from a Republican candidate for governor.
“Suffice it to say that they treated two requesters differently, and you can speculate about why that might be,” she said.
The lieutenant governor’s office did not provide comment for this article.
This article has been updated to include information about the Friday e-mail Gillespie sent to Cheshire. Gillespie forwarded that e-mail to me Saturday but I somehow overlooked it in my e-mail and left it out of the original version of this article. My apologies to Gillespie and DFA for that oversight.