With elections approaching, I speculate on an on-going situation interweaving political campaigns and legal action. It involves two candidates for local office and the Las Cruces Law Office. District 1 Councilor and Mayor Pro Tem Kasandra Gandara is running for mayor, District 2 Councilor Tessa Abeyta is running for re-election, and City Attorney Linda Samples is resisting an Inspection of Public Records Act (IPRA) request.
The situation is a complicated one. Politically, Gandara’s and Abeyta’s membership on a secret city government committee contradicts their professed commitment to transparency and accountability. Although a majority of City Council approved the creation and charter of the Select Committee on Public Safety on 6 January 2020, several councilors seemed unaware of it or its activities at a 22 May 2023 Council meeting. Their ignorance over three years later might seem odd except that the Select Committee, though charged to provide information and make recommendations to Council, has apparently never done so. Understandably, the non-member councilors might have forgotten all about it. Meanwhile, Gandara and Abeyta have been operating in secret not only from their fellow councilors, but also from Las Cruces citizens.
Legally, Samples is resisting an IPRA request for information about the Select Committee which, if disclosed, might indicate violations of the Open Meetings Act (OMA). My legal action in Third District Court aims to overcome her resistance and effect the city’s compliance with IPRA. The city’s violation seems clearcut. IPRA requires the city to disclose certain information even about redacted or withheld documents, like who communicated with whom and what was their subject. The city refuses to disclose this information. The question is why.
My speculative answer is that, if the disclosure of this information about redacted or withheld documents were to lead to the disclosure of their contents, that information would likely be unfavorable to Gandara and Abeyta. It would show them violating the separate, city-charter-defined roles and responsibilities of Council and its one employee, the City Manager, by directly involving themselves in the management of government operations. It would show them diminishing and usurping the City Manager’s authority by their covert involvement in city operations without transparency or accountability for their actions. And it would show them disregarding—that is, violating—OMA.
The political and the legal overlap. Samples has denied the allegations and seems indifferent to needlessly running up the city’s legal costs. It is easy to infer one reason for her perverse and expensive response: she is doing Gandara and Abeyta a favor. If she had complied promptly with IPRA, I might have obtained information damaging to their campaigns. Bad enough if the court’s decision finds that the city has violated IPRA. Worse if the unredacted or released documents reveal operational decisions in secret meetings in which Gandara and Abeyta violated OMA—facts suggesting criminal liability. Samples’s denial of the allegations to delay these disclosures seems a good-ole-girl effort to help these candidates at taxpayer expense. If elected, they will be safe from voter disapproval for four years, after which time, time will have swept their dirty deeds under the carpet. (Nothing need be said about the Mayor’s dishonorable leadership.)
The record of the Law Office with respect to IPRA is not, in my experience, a savory one. When I made an IPRA request about my complaint about false police allegations, Senior Assistant City Attorney Roberto A. Cabello redacted and withheld a number of documents. To me and later to a New Mexico Assistant Attorney General (AAG), he cited the exemption for matters of opinion related to employer/employee relationships to justify his redactions and withholdings. Without seeing the documents in question, the AAG did not accept Cabello’s justification. Yet only when I threatened legal action did the city release the pertinent documents unredacted. The previously redacted portions had nothing to do with that relationship. Cabello lied to me and to the AAG, with the approval of the then, since fired, City Attorney Jennifer Vega. Not a laudable record.
So I am inclined to suspect that the Law Office is improperly exempting the many redactions in the Select Committee’s notes, some short, some long, and its two withheld documents from disclosure and release by a bogus claim of attorney-client privilege. They likely show that the committee of selected councilors and ranking city officials—Mayor, two Councilors, City Manager, City Attorney, Police Chief, Fire Chief, City Clerk, and others—has been making decisions of policy and practice, thereby shutting out City Council in matters of policy and directing the City Manager as well as the Police and Fire Chiefs in matters of practice.
Such covert operations are the antithesis of transparency and accountability in city government. If so, there needs to be a price for sneakiness and subversion of democratic processes. It would begin with the defeat of Gandara and Abeyta at the ballot box and continue with the firing of Samples for involving the Law Office in election politics.
To conclude, I speculate on the basis of information available to me and inferences about information denied me in particular circumstances. I close with this promise. I shall correct or confirm my speculations as the facts play out, in and out of court as they become available, probably after the election. In the meanwhile, voters should question Gandara and Abeyta about their secret committee work and their commitment to transparency and accountability. Look for my follow-up as I learn more about secrecy in the Las Cruces government.
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