The New Mexico Foundation for Open Government recently completed an investigation where they allege that the City of Las Cruces held secret meetings where police policy decisions were made. KRWG multimedia reporter Noah Raess spoke with NMFOG executive director Christine Barber to learn more.
Noah Raess:
I guess my first question is, can you tell me a little bit about NMFOG and what you guys do?
Christine Barber:
Sure. We are a nonprofit. We protect the laws that protect democracy. So, if someone needs help with open meetings or they're having problems with public records, they call our helpline and we help them get the access that they need and then when we discover or, for me, when I’m told on the helpline that there might be a government agency or any town or state agency or any school board that might be breaking transparency laws, then I investigate that to see exactly what's happening. And then if we do find that transparency laws are being broken, we file lawsuits on behalf of the public to make them stop.
Noah Raess:
You guys kind of made headlines in Las Cruces a couple weeks ago, one of the investigations found a meeting that you say broke transparency laws. I was wondering if you kind of briefly go over that and provide any new updates, if there are any.
Christine Barber:
So we had the one call our helpline and said I believe that there is a secret committee that is talking about law enforcement and no one knows about it and no one knows what's happening. And so you get a call like that and first you think, oh, that sounds really far fetched but it's my job to believe and then investigate and that's exactly what I did. So after looking through, gosh, I think almost 500 emails and then doing transcripts and minutes and meeting agendas of more than 250 or closer to 300 meetings, I was able to confirm. Yeah, they were right. Between 2020 and 2023, there was a secret committee meeting in Las Cruces about law enforcement. It was so secret that those city councilors that were not on the committee had no idea when they met. They had no idea what they talked about. And so this committee, any committee created by a public body has to actually interact with the public body that created it. So it has to either inform them about hey, these are our recommendations, or they do the bidding of the public body. This committee did neither. There's absolutely no evidence they ever informed the city council of what it was doing at all. It never gave any recommendations, never a single thing to them about anything. Yet it met for three years. So that is when we decided that we should gather up all of our findings and a letter and send it off to the city council and say this is a violation of the Open Meetings Act, which was literally created for this exact reason. So there would be no secret committees, because secret committees are the antithesis of democracy. And it is an incredibly serious violation. So, the majority of city councilors in a previous meeting earlier this month, the majority did state that they wanted to repeal the select committee ordinance, which is the ordinance that allowed the secret committee to be formed in the first place. The majority said they do want it to be repealed. So, we are believing them on that. We do believe they're trying to do the right thing, but we will keep an eye on it. And, we will see if that is something they do.
Noah Raess:
What do you think people should be on the lookout for if they attend meetings consistently? What should they be on the lookout for to kind of spot issues like this?
Christine Barber:
So, if people want to do their own kind of investigations into their governments, which I 100% support, they should start by looking at the things they would consider the most boring things ever, which is the agendas, the meeting agendas and the minutes. In our experience, when a government agency, again, or a school board or county commission or city council, when they don't follow basic open meetings law, meaning that they're not meeting when they're exactly when they're supposed to, they're not announcing the meetings when they're supposed to. It might not be that there's anything nefarious, but that's often how bad actions start is by not paying attention to those rules. And so if you start seeing that, you start seeing a pattern of it, check it and see what's going on. If you want to see a committee, listen to what your city council or school board are talking about. If you don't have time to watch the entire meeting, you could always do an AI transcript of the meeting since a lot of them are now online, and you can check the transcript to see, you know, if anybody mentioned certain key words like secret or, Open Meetings Act or transparency laws, or if there's just recurring themes from meeting to meetings.
Noah Raess:
If people believe that they found a meeting or there's a meeting going on that kind of breaks some of those transparency laws, what should they do?
Christine Barber:
If they find a meeting that breaks transparency laws, they should call us.That is what we do. They're welcome to call our helpline. That's why our helpline has existed for 40 years. And that number is (505) 764-3750. They're also able to file a complaint with the attorney general's office. However, those complaints usually take about three months before you hear anything back. So it's not a quick process. But they are the enforcement people on that kind of thing.
