3/19/09
The next time you try to exercise your rights by requesting public records from a government agency, you might instead end up hearing from that agency’s lawyers.
Government bodies throughout Northern New Mexico are making a habit of delegating to Albuquerque and Santa Fe lawyers their responsibility to comply with state open records laws.
The state Inspection of Public Records Act requires every public agency to designate one employee, called a records custodian, to “receive and respond to requests to inspect public records.”
Agencies like Rio Arriba County and many school districts are instead paying their lawyers to draft responses to records requests and even to compile and make available the records themselves.
For this, most school districts in Rio Arriba County retain the services of Ramon Vigil, a lawyer with the Cuddy Law Firm in Santa Fe. Vigil said school districts don’t actually appoint him as their custodian of records — he just helps them handle requests. He argued this benefits both the school district and the person requesting the records.
“A lot of time, the person designated as the custodian of records doesn’t know or isn’t sure what records are or aren’t public,” Vigil said. “We review the records for appropriateness and we make sure they observe the (Act).”
But each time an agency delegates a public records request to an outside lawyer, that translates into several hundred taxpayer dollars in a private firm’s pocket.
Last October, for example, the Cuddy Firm spent three hours and 45 minutes reviewing and responding to a request for Española School District employees’ W2 forms, according to an invoice. Two months later, the firm spent almost five hours on a request for former Española Middle School secretary Mabel Rendon.
The total cost to taxpayers, at the Cuddy Firm’s $175-an-hour rate: $1,435.
New Mexico Foundation for Open Government Leonard DeLayo argued involving lawyers often results in better and faster responses to open records requests.
“Bureaucrats tend to take the position that nothing is subject to disclosure, we’ve had better luck when the lawyer’s involved,” DeLayo said. “So I really don’t have a problem with that — but then again, of course, I’m a lawyer.”
In Rio Arriba, however, better and faster is not always the case. For example:
• When the SUN requested in late 2005 to inspect billing statements submitted by lawyer Ted Trujillo to the County, Trujillo himself wrote back to deny the request. Trujillo said attorney-client privilege kept him from releasing the billing statements. The County provided the records after former SUN news editor John Foster pointed out the request was not made to Trujillo, but to the County — which is not protected by attorney-client privilege.
• Earlier that year, the state Attorney General ruled against former County Attorney Adan Trujillo, who had denied a SUN reporter’s request to inspect the e-mail of county commissioners and employees. The lengthy legal process involved translated into a six-month delay in obtaining the documents.
• In January, the Española Military Academy delegated a request for public records to its lawyer, Patricia Matthews. She agreed to release the records — but required that a SUN reporter inspect the records in person, not at the school, but in her Santa Fe office.