{"id":16194,"date":"2010-04-19T11:20:34","date_gmt":"2010-04-19T17:20:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.nmpolitics.net\/index\/?p=16194"},"modified":"2010-04-20T08:41:37","modified_gmt":"2010-04-20T14:41:37","slug":"agency-says-it-will-give-weh-unredacted-records","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/nmpolitics.net\/index\/2010\/04\/agency-says-it-will-give-weh-unredacted-records\/","title":{"rendered":"Agency says it will give Weh unredacted records"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>

Allen Weh<\/p><\/div>\n

Finance Department\u2019s shift comes after sunshine group expresses concern about redactions<\/h4>\n

The New Mexico Foundation for Open Government<\/a> says a state agency violated the Inspection of Public Records Act<\/a> when it redacted information from public documents before giving them to Republican gubernatorial candidate Allen Weh<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Now it appears the Department of Finance and Administration<\/a> (DFA) is in the process of correcting that violation.<\/p>\n

Sarah Welsh, the sunshine group\u2019s 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 \u2013 such as handwritten notations of account numbers or notes such as \u201cOK to pay\u201d \u2013 before providing the documents to Weh.<\/p>\n

\u201cThey provided different information to me and to the Weh campaign, which is not the way it\u2019s supposed to work,\u201d Welsh said.<\/p>\n

DFA has said it blacked out some of the information before providing the documents to Weh simply because it wasn\u2019t responsive to Weh\u2019s records request. But there\u2019s no provision in law that allows redactions for that reason.<\/p>\n

Because of the redactions, Weh recently filed a lawsuit in his longstanding request to obtain public records from the office of Lt. Gov.\u00a0Diane Denish<\/a>, the Democratic Party\u2019s candidate for governor. Some of those records were in DFA\u2019s possession, and Weh\u2019s lawsuit asks a district judge to issue a restraining order prohibiting any altering or redacting of records by DFA or Denish\u2019s office before they are provided to the Weh campaign.<\/p>\n

On Wednesday, Welsh expressed concern about the redactions in an article published on this site<\/a>. Then on Friday, DFA\u2019s records custodian, Nicole Gillespie, sent a letter to the Weh campaign stating that \u201cin 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.\u201d<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

Gillespie has provided no comment for this article except to share the Friday letter to Weh and the e-mail to Cheshire.<\/p>\n

\u2018It should not take a citizen\u2019s lawsuit\u2019<\/h3>\n

<\/p>\n

Weh\u2019s request was first filed with Denish\u2019s office in November. Since deeming the massive request \u201coverly burdensome,\u201d Denish\u2019s 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\u2019s request.<\/p>\n

DFA got a late start in responding to Weh\u2019s request because Denish\u2019s office initially failed to forward the request to DFA, which it was required by law to do. Denish\u2019s office corrected that violation and forwarded the request\u00a0in February<\/a>.<\/p>\n

With at least two violations of the public records act having slowed his attempt to obtain documents related to Denish\u2019s spending during her tenure as lieutenant governor, Weh has nothing nice to say.<\/p>\n

\u201cOn behalf of New Mexico taxpayers, I would like to read this most recent letter as a commitment on the lieutenant governor\u2019s behalf to stop violating sunshine laws, but whether or not that is the case still remains to be seen,\u201d Weh said in a statement released by his campaign. \u201cGiven the history of the lieutenant governor\u2019s 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.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cIt should not take a\u00a0citizen\u2019s lawsuit and a threat of a lawsuit by the New Mexico Foundation for Open Government to obtain public documents concerning the lieutenant governor\u2019s expenditure of taxpayer dollars,\u201d Weh said.<\/p>\n

\u2018They treated two requesters differently\u2019<\/h3>\n

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.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe 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,\u201d she wrote.<\/p>\n

But Welsh said one has to wonder why DFA treated her request differently than a request from a Republican candidate for governor.<\/p>\n

\u201cSuffice it to say that they treated two requesters differently, and you can speculate about why that might be,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n

The lieutenant governor\u2019s office did not provide comment for this article.<\/p>\n

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.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

UPDATED: A sunshine group 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 is in the process of correcting that violation.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11,1],"tags":[108,111,107],"class_list":["post-16194","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news-and-analysis","category-uncategorized","tag-2010-election","tag-open-government","tag-roundhouse"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/nmpolitics.net\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16194","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=16194"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/nmpolitics.net\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16194\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/nmpolitics.net\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=16194"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nmpolitics.net\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=16194"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nmpolitics.net\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=16194"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}