{"id":148076,"date":"2016-05-03T12:13:04","date_gmt":"2016-05-03T18:13:04","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/nmpolitics.net\/index\/?p=148076"},"modified":"2016-05-03T21:23:37","modified_gmt":"2016-05-04T03:23:37","slug":"you-cant-use-government-resources-to-campaign-ever","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/nmpolitics.net\/index\/2016\/05\/you-cant-use-government-resources-to-campaign-ever\/","title":{"rendered":"You can\u2019t use government resources to campaign. Ever."},"content":{"rendered":"

COMMENTARY:<\/strong> During a radio interview<\/a> about her efforts to gather the signatures needed to run for secretary of state, Rep. Nora Espinoza, R-Roswell, directed listeners to her official legislative webpage<\/a> to contact her and help.<\/p>\n

\"Heath

Heath Haussamen<\/p><\/div>\n

\u201cThey can look on my legislative website and it\u2019s on there, so that they can email me, and I can mail them a petition,\u201d Espinoza said in February in response to a question from the radio host.<\/p>\n

Democrats hit hard. The state Democratic Party filed an ethics complaint<\/a> accusing Espinoza of inappropriately using public resources to campaign.<\/p>\n

\u201cOfficial government resources cannot and must not be used for campaigning. Period,\u201d Debra Haaland, the chair of the state Democratic Party, said at the time<\/a>. \u201cIt violates the law and it violates the public\u2019s trust.\u201d<\/p>\n

Haaland is correct. Espinoza should not have directed people to the Legislature\u2019s official website to contact her about her petition to run for secretary of state.<\/p>\n

Some members of Haaland\u2019s own party also need to take her words to heart. Like Michael Padilla, an Albuquerque Democrat who is the party\u2019s majority whip in the state Senate.<\/p>\n

On Monday, Padilla\u2019s re-election campaign sent out an email inviting people to his fourth annual job fair. It claimed that, to date, Padilla\u2019s job fairs have \u201chelped over 1,600 people find new jobs.\u201d And the email, which states that it\u2019s paid for by Padilla\u2019s campaign, does the very thing Haaland correctly pointed out as inappropriate when Espinoza did it.<\/p>\n

\u201cClick\u00a0here<\/a> for my legislative web site,\u201d Padilla\u2019s campaign-funded email states. The \u201chere\u201d links to the Legislature\u2019s official website.<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve written on this issue many times. A former governor and lieutenant governor<\/a>, former president pro tem of the state Senate<\/a>, former secretary of state<\/a>, former union president in Albuquerque<\/a>, and a former Santa Fe County sheriff<\/a> are among those who\u2019ve used government resources for political purposes.<\/p>\n

The amount of public money that gets misused in these cases is usually small or, in some cases, immeasurable (a line in an email that leads to a click to a public website). In other words, in a state plagued by government waste and corruption, there are more serious offenses than these.<\/p>\n

But the mindset that it\u2019s OK to mix campaign and official government resources leads to bigger problems. These offenses are serious because, left unchecked, they contribute to a culture that allows larger abuses of the public trust.<\/p>\n

So let\u2019s hope Espinoza has learned her lesson. Let\u2019s hope Padilla does too. And that their examples help educate other government officials and shift our state\u2019s culture to one that shows greater respect for the public trust.<\/p>\n

Because New Mexico, which too often ranks at the bottom of all the important lists, isn\u2019t going to improve until we collectively take the public trust more seriously.<\/p>\n

We\u2019ve made progress in this area in recent years. I believe most of our government officials avoid using public resources to campaign.<\/p>\n

But clearly we need to continue efforts to educate officials on the importance of keeping their government and campaign activities separate. We all need to play a role in holding our government officials accountable by voting, paying attention to what they\u2019re doing and speaking out in our communities.<\/p>\n

And, as I\u2019ve written before<\/a>, we need to create a state ethics commission to set ethical standards in government, educate officials on those standards, and help police violations.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Clearly, as recent examples involving a Republican and a Democrat show, we need to continue efforts to educate officials on the importance of keeping their government and campaign activities separate.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":55852,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1192,10],"tags":[109,107],"class_list":["post-148076","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-commentary","category-haussamen-columns","tag-ethics-reform","tag-roundhouse"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/nmpolitics.net\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/148076","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/nmpolitics.net\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/nmpolitics.net\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nmpolitics.net\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nmpolitics.net\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=148076"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/nmpolitics.net\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/148076\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nmpolitics.net\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/55852"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/nmpolitics.net\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=148076"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nmpolitics.net\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=148076"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nmpolitics.net\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=148076"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}