Allen Weh
Republican gubernatorial candidate has sued to try to stop agencies from redacting documents
The New Mexico Foundation for Open Government shares Republican gubernatorial candidate Allen Weh’s concern that a state agency is going overboard in redacting public records before providing copies to Weh.
Weh recently filed a lawsuit related to 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 the possession of the state Department of Finance and Administration (DFA), 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.
Sarah Welsh, executive director of the Foundation for Open Government (FOG), says the redactions that have been made by DFA “certainly raise questions for us.”
The finance department has redacted information from a number of documents before providing them to Weh. According to a March 8 letter to Weh from Nicole Gillespie, DFA’s records custodian, “DFA is only redacting information that is either not a ‘public record’ under the Inspection of Public Records Act… or information that was not requested by Mr. Weh.”
The latter is not a valid reason to redact information from public records before providing them for inspection, Welsh said.
“There’s no reason to redact that information,” she said.
FOG has made its own request for some of the records DFA provided to Weh with redactions to see how DFA responds. Welsh said it appears, based on the sort of hand-written notations that are often contained on government financial records, that many of the redactions could be of handwritten notes that simply state things like “OK to pay” on invoices.
“We’re just curious about what they redacted and why they think that’s exempt,” Welsh said of FOG’s request for the records.
DFA says it has ‘worked diligently’ to provide docs
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.
Since then, Gillespie wrote in an e-mail to NMPolitics.net, “DFA has worked diligently to make hundreds of documents available for inspection in compliance with IPRA guidelines, and will continue working until the request has been fully satisfied.”
But the Weh campaign lost patience with a process that had taken more than four months by the time Weh filed his lawsuit on March 23. Among the spending revealed so far by the documents Denish and DFA have provided to Weh is that the lieutenant governor spent some federal stimulus money on political news releases. Denish’s campaign has since reimbursed her office for those costs.
Given that type of spending, Weh Campaign Manager Whitney Cheshire said, “we believe it is very likely that the notes they are hiding and destroying are the honest comments of non-partisan state workers who are outraged at the proposed expenditures by the Denish office. Why else would they redact them?”
“We believe there is nothing in state law that allows the lieutenant governor to hide this public information, or the redaction of information in these documents, and therefore believe the lieutenant governor and the Department of Finance and Administration are in violation of the law,” said Cheshire (who is also a former columnist for NMPolitics.net).
Asked if Denish’s office has also redacted information from documents it’s provided to the Weh campaign, Cheshire said, “There are no visible black-out marks on the documents given to us by Denish’s office, but there is no way of knowing if Wite-Out redactions occurred.”
‘How difficult is it to locate receipts?’
The Weh campaign has shown no evidence to back up its claim that Denish’s office or DFA may have altered the original public records – rather than making redactions on copies provided to the Weh campaign. But Welsh said that would be “a huge issue” if they do have evidence.
As for the records Denish’s office hasn’t yet provided to Weh, Denish’s Record Custodian Carmela Casados sent a letter to Weh on Feb. 23 – more than 90 days after Weh’s Nov. 11 request – asking for clarification on what Weh meant when he requested “all contracts entered into between the Lt. Governor’s office and any vendor of any nature that provided her office either a service or product between January 2003 and present” plus other documents including supporting invoices, purchases orders and correspondence.
The letter asked whether Weh wanted all such records, including contracts and vendor agreements related to “paper clips, staplers and Xerox machine leases” or wanted to narrow its request.
Weh never responded. Cheshire said the Feb. 23 letter “was an effort to fuzz up their several violations of the public records law.”
“The Denish people were very late to identify the need for additional time,” she said. “How difficult is it to locate receipts? The law requires much more timely responses, and the letter is an attempt to dig out of that hole and pretend they didn’t understand the request.”
Diane Denish
Denish calls lawsuit ‘frivolous’
Weh filed his lawsuit on March 23, the same day that Denish unveiled a plan to cut state government spending. Her campaign referenced that in response to Weh’s lawsuit.
“It’s ironic that on a day when Diane Denish announced a plan to save taxpayers $450 million, Alan Weh announced a frivolous lawsuit and political stunt that will likely cost the taxpayers thousands of dollars,” Denish campaign spokesman Chris Cervini said.
That was followed the next day by an e-mail from Denish Campaign Chair Ted Martinez to supporters calling Weh’s lawsuit “one of the most shameful political stunts in recent memory.”
The case, which was filed in district court in Albuquerque, has not yet been scheduled for a hearing because several judges have recused themselves or been excused from hearing it.