Jerome Block
Public Regulation Commissioner Jerome Block Jr. says he doesn’t mind releasing comments made about him by employees who filled out an ethics survey last year.
“I don’t mind sharing comments related to myself with you folks,” he said today.
Block said he was going to raise the issue with his colleagues and the PRC’s general counsel at a meeting later today before making a final decision on whether to publicly release the comments. He said he would get back to NMPolitics.net.
The PRC conducted the employee surveys last October. Commissioners voted 4-1 last week to uphold their prior decision to redact negative comments about employees and commissioners before releasing the surveys to the public. Only Jason Marks voted to reverse that decision and release the comments.
The decision to keep the critical comments from the public has drawn criticism from me and others.
Block has said his concern is that he doesn’t want “to hang our employees out to dry.” The New Mexico Foundation for Open Government has said it would not challenge redaction of comments about specific employees. But the foundation says specific comments about commissioners and general comments about employees and commissioners are public under the state’s Inspection of Public Records Act and should be released.
A prior version of this posting incorrectly stated that the New Mexico Foundation for Open Government has said the public records act would allow redaction of the comments about specific employees, when in fact the organization has said only that it won’t challenge the PRC’s refusal to release such comments.