COMMENTARY: As a teen I photographed the moon through a telescope with my dad. I almost minored in astronomy in college. As someone who hopes to watch Virgin Galactic’s SpaceShipTwo fly into space with my kids, and who desperately wants my kids to have the option to find quality jobs in our community, I want Spaceport America to succeed.
The spaceport is a state government agency that’s funded with our money. Our ability to scrutinize the project is essential to its need to earn public trust and continued funding. So transparency is critical to the spaceport’s success.
That’s why I sued the N.M. Spaceport Authority, the state agency that runs the spaceport, in August 2018. I had sought financial records the year before as part of a journalistic investigation into whether the spaceport was having a positive impact on our economy. The agency put up walls around public information by, among other things, redacting portions of four lease agreements with tenants and blocking some people, including me, from accessing its Twitter feed.
In short, as one article in that investigative series concluded, transparency problems plagued Spaceport America.
My lawsuit has led to some significant victories:
• The spaceport recently released fully unredacted copies of the leases. We finally have a clear picture of the sort of agreements the spaceport is making with tenants other than Virgin Galactic (whose full lease agreement has always been public). You can browse the unredacted leases by clicking here.
• We essentially got confirmation that the spaceport scrubbed the list of accounts it had blocked from seeing or responding to its tweets after I made a stink about the agency blocking me. When I discovered I had been blocked, I asked who else was on the list. The agency denied my request for the list. I warned them to preserve it as it existed at the time of my request, but they did not. By the time the spaceport provided the list more than a year later, there were no blocked accounts, mine included. While the list they were required to release is lost, I hope the negative publicity pressures the agency to act better in the future and serves as a warning to other government agencies.
• The spaceport’s chief financial officer, Zach De Gregorio, said during a deposition that he factored no documents into an analysis that claimed the spaceport was having a positive economic impact in New Mexico. The spaceport contended all along that there were no documents responsive to my request. I was skeptical, but under questioning by my attorney, C.J. McElhinney of Las Cruces, De Gregorio said under oath that there was nothing to provide. He said he took no notes while interviewing business owners and didn’t look at any documents to gather data. He characterized the analysis as his “best guess” of the impact based on his “professional judgment,” saying, “I think there’s value in that.” I’m glad we got that clarified for the public to consider when weighing the validity of the spaceport’s economic claims.
With that in mind, I’m writing to tell you I’ve settled my lawsuit against Spaceport America. The state agreed to pay $60,000 in exchange for me dropping the lawsuit.
Settlement talks got serious just before we were scheduled to go to trial in September. I believe we would have proved the violations we alleged in court, and there’s a good chance the state would have been ordered to pay a much higher amount in damages and attorney fees.
In the end, I considered what I summed up above. The primary documents I was seeking were the lease agreements, and they finally released them in August of this year — almost 2.5 years after I requested them, but at least we now have them. Going to trial wasn’t going to win the release of documents that factored into the economic analysis if there were none. And the list of blocked Twitter accounts is lost forever, so trial wouldn’t lead to its disclosure either.
The only legal recourse for the delay in releasing unredacted leases and hiding the list of blocked Twitter accounts was to make the spaceport pay, and we accomplished that. Going to trial could have forced them to pay more, but this was never about money for me. It was about getting public information to you.
Of course, as part of the settlement the spaceport didn’t admit any wrongdoing. But I’m hopeful the negative publicity the spaceport earned will deter future shenanigans.
However, there’s a hiccup in what this means for spaceport transparency going forward. In 2018, the state Legislature and former Gov. Susana Martinez gave the spaceport a new law allowing additional secrecy. How much secrecy could end up being decided by the courts, because there are differing interpretations of the law. It may give the spaceport leeway to redact information from lease agreements again.
While I believe it’s clear that the spaceport acted illegally by redacting information from lease agreements when I requested them in 2017, it’s not clear that such redactions would be illegal today. My case had no chance of influencing that reality.
I still find it incredible that even though the spaceport was playing fast and loose with the law — the attorney general found four violations of open government laws in the agency’s dealings with me — the state’s policymakers rewarded the spaceport with more secrecy. But it happened.
So in the end I decided my one-person news organization had taken this fight as far as it could.
I’m grateful to my attorney for his help with my lawsuit, and to the office of Attorney General Hector Balderas for pushing the spaceport to release some information it had withheld. I’m glad we won the release of the unredacted lease agreements and grateful I was able to publish an investigative series about the spaceport that is still relevant. If you missed it, you can read it by clicking here.
Today there’s a lot more spaceport-related activity in Southern New Mexico. Virgin Galactic has moved lots of employees from California to Las Cruces. The company’s vehicles overflow the parking lot at its offices. We’re expecting testing on SpaceShipTwo at Spaceport America to begin soon. I’m excited to take my daughters to see history made when commercial spaceflights begin.
I remain steadfast in my belief that transparency and public scrutiny are critical to the spaceport’s success. It’s your turn to pick up that torch and carry it. File a public records request under the new law for all leases the spaceport has with clients. See if the agency redacts any information. I’ll be curious to know.
Good luck!