EDITORIAL: IPRA bill should be scrapped

Thanks to the Inspection of Public Records Act, local governments and agencies are tasked with responding to requests for inspection of public records within statutory deadlines. This allows any citizen to view the work of government. Yet the burden has increased for records custodians. This is partly because of businesses that mine public records for databases for sales purposes and because of social media content producers who base their product on police and courtroom footage. Those video requests can take hours, if not days, to edit and produce.

A proposed solution before the state Legislature, House Bill 283, appears to be well-intended. However, it misses the mark by creating new administrative procedures and ultimately shifting power away from citizens.

HB283, sponsored by Rep. Christine Chandler, D-Los Alamos, and Sen. Linda Trujillo, D-Santa Fe, would establish the concept of “commercial” and “non-commercial” requests. This would require those making the request to state the intended use of the information and authorize custodians to charge as much as $30 per hour for access to documents that are public property.

There are carve-outs for journalists and attorneys — meaning these professionals would not be considered commercial. For businesses that do fall under the commercial category, the $30-an-hour fee would come into effect only after the first hour.

The bill purportedly seeks to allow custodians to prioritize records requests from everyday citizens, journalists and attorneys in their regular course of business, as well as agencies and proprietors, such as builders, architects and genealogists, who have a constant need for public records.

Proponents argue this is a compromise solution, protecting the interests of newsrooms, well-intentioned businesses and the general public, while offering public records custodians a tool to dissuade those asking either for large amounts of public records or for records that take tremendous time to compile.

Yet, this legislation requires all to justify their interest in records, seemingly overlooking the fact that these records, by law, belong to you — the public. What you do with them is your business, not the government’s. As such, you shouldn’t be burdened with proving you are requesting the records in good faith; nor should the threat of being charged exorbitant amounts impact your ability to access records that you have already paid for as a taxpayer.

Furthermore, this legislation would transform records custodians into information gatekeepers. Since information — especially timely information — is power, the bill as proposed would hand records custodians a degree of influence over your power.

Certainly, records custodians deserve the resources and procedural protections necessary to perform a public service, but not at the cost of weakening the power of citizens.

For all its faults, HB283 also contains a potential path forward in creating a task force to assess the procedures, enforcement and dispute resolution for IPRA, and make recommendations for future legislation. If provided with funding and balanced membership, such a task force could reach a true compromise, providing custodians the resources they need while fulfilling IPRA’s mandate on behalf of the people of New Mexico.

The bill, in its current form, does not offer that balanced approach and should be scrapped. A task force with municipal leaders, journalists and government transparency advocates all at the table could develop a stronger bill in time for the next session.