New Mexico Launches New “Sunshine Portal” – Too Bad the New Mexico Bar Doesn’t Care About Transparency
The Reporter’s Committee for Freedom of the Press reports that New Mexico is launching a new “Sunshine Portal” to make it faster, easier and more convenient for New Mexicans to access government records. Promising to be “your window into government spending, budgets, revenues, employees, contracts and more,” the Sunshine Portal is a nice step forward for states making their records more accessible. After all, the internet makes this easy – why not put the vast majority of stuff online? It’s better for members of the public, less bureaucratic, and requires less state resources as there should be far fewer public records requests to respond to.
The irony is that while the rest of New Mexico moves forward with this admirable transparency, the State Bar of New Mexico remains a bastion of opacity. Want to find out when an attorney was licensed? Whether they’ve been sanctioned? Fat chance you’ll find this information on the State Bar of New Mexico website. And good luck even getting it in response to an open records request.
Why? Because the judiciary, unlike every other state agency in New Mexico, considers itself exempt from that state’s Inspection of Public Records Act (IPRA). And while the New Mexico Supreme Court has created court rules that extend IPRA-like provisions to court records, the Bar (an agency of the New Mexico Supreme Court) considers its records to be outside these rules.
So the New Mexico Bar – whose members write these rules – are the only element of state government free of public transparency. As a result, the public has access to far more information about the licensing and disciplinary history of sign language interpreters, massage therapists and barbers (to name but a few) than for lawyers. While the bar could easily address this, it has chosen not to – and also won’t provide the data to others (like Avvo) who would post this information for the public.
Were I a member of the New Mexico Bar, I would be profoundly embarrassed to fall further behind the rest of state government in public openness – particularly given the “professional excellence and service to the public” the State Bar of New Mexico claims to be dedicated to.
June 4th, 2011 at 10:15 am
Yes, it is an embarrassment, as is AGs absurd insistence that salary history of state employees is secret.
Have you actually tried to use the so-called sunshine portal? It was marginally useful when it first came out. Now they have degraded the service so as to be completely useless. As an experiment I tried to look up salary information using a very general search term: “Sandoval” Nothing. Then I tried the names of known state employees. Nothing. Is there any easy way to type in the name of a state contractor and find out how much money it has been paid?