Transparency is not a function of volume

Not to be outdone by Mayor Richard Berry who recently posted already available information (on city employee's salaries) and claimed "transparency!", Governor Susana Martinez has posted already available information (on state employee's salaries) and claimed "transparency!" too.

In the Journal this morning, link, Martinez is given front page, top of the fold credit for "pushing" for transparency in state government; transparency as measured by volume. Volume is not a measure of anything but volume. It is not a measure of the willingness of politicians and public servants to tell the truth about the public interests and about their public service.

Information about the spending of public power and resources falls legitimately into three piles;

1. information which should be shared,
2. information which should not be shared, and
3. information, the sharing of which is in honest dispute over the propriety and legality of its sharing.

There is a fourth pile. It contains information which rightly belongs in the first pile, but is placed in the third pile in an effort to obfuscate its surrender by people whose self interests are served by the obfuscation. Public power and resources are used to forestall the surrender for as long as the law allows. The law, the lowest of all standards of conduct, allows the truth to be hidden for a long, long time.

We can't talk about this without talking without pointing to the illustrative example; not only in point, but a textbook example.

There exists, a body of information regarding criminal misconduct by APS senior administrators and the leadership of the APS Police Department.

That body of information has been sorted (by people whose interests are affected by the sorting) into four piles.

The first is nearly microscopic in terms of the information they have actually surrendered. The second and third, if not microscopic, are non-existent.

All of the rest of the evidence and testimony about felony public corruption and incompetence in the leadership of the APS Police Department, is languishing in a fourth pile on the desk of the APS Chief of Police Steve Tellez.

Tellez was recently, and secretly, promoted to Chief despite overwhelming contraindications including a vote of no confidence by the APS PD rank and file.

Despite the fact that the original criminal investigation was of the APS Chief of Police, the results of the investigation were placed on the APS Chief's desk and no other (in law enforcement, not even the DA).

They sat there during the next Chief of Police Bill Reed's tenure, and they will sit there for as long as Tellez sits there, and they will sit there during the tenure of whomever "serves" next, and next, and next.

There is a lot of information about government and the wielding of public power and resources. In the age of computers, it is easy to put a lot of information online. If you can convince people that it's a measure of transparency, you've got it made. They need you to believe that large amounts of disclosure represent real transparency; they don't.

The measure of transparency in government is the size of the fourth pile.

The Journal, in order to maintain access, will tout the government line; more is better.

The Journal will print more about more, and they will continue to present Marty Esquivel and Winston Brooks as all about transparency.

The three of them; Kent Walz, Esquivel, and Brooks managed to get a NM FOG Dixon Award for Brooks at the same time they were all working together to hide evidence and testimony of a full blown criminal conspiracy in the leadership of the APS.

Yet by their standards; lots and lots of information on line,
they are as transparent as can be.




photo Mark Bralley