Walz gets Dixon Award - what were they thinking?

Whatever else Journal Editor in Chief Kent Walz has done in his lifetime to earn the NM Foundation for Open Government's most prestigious award, how do they simply overlook what he is doing right now?

How does FOG not see, not care, that Walz is part of a cover up of public corruption and incompetence in the leadership of the Albuquerque Public Schools?

Kent Walz knows that felonies were committed.  He reported, link, on the misappropriation of cash; a state felony.  He reported on the misuse of a national criminal database to harass whistleblowers and vet a deputy supt.'s girl friend; a federal felony.

Walz knows that the District Attorney never considered prosecution because she never saw the evidence and testimony that had been gathered.  That evidence and testimony are the public records that operational funds are being squandered in the effort to hide public knowledge.

The leadership of the APS and their lawyers do not want the public to see findings of investigations into allegations of felony criminal misconduct.  The findings name names and will make clear that felonies were in fact, committed.  That knowledge makes it obvious that felony criminal misconduct has been covered up.

The leadership of the APS is to this day, paying lawyers to hide records that implicate senior APS administrators in felony criminal misconduct.  The records enjoy no honest exception under the Inspection of Public Records Act.  Their exception is underwritten by unlimited resources for litigation against the public interests.

The public interests are not being served by spending operational dollars; dollars that should, would and could be spent actually educating children, on litigation and legal weaselry serving no purpose but to hide the names of politicians and public servants who committed felonies and or covered them up.

It was Kent Walz by the way,
who along with Marty Esquivel,
bamboozled the FOG board into
giving Brooks the Dixon Award
in the midst of their cover up
of a cover up of felony criminal
misconduct.

There is an ethics, standards and accountability crisis in the leadership of the APS.

There is no controverting evidence to that allegation.  None.  There is no evidence that politicians and public servants in the APS are actually honestly accountable to meaningful standards of conduct and competence by any due process.  Any independent examination and review will find inadequate standards and or inadequate accountability to whatever standards there are.

If school board members and senior administrators are actually honestly accountable to high enough standards of conduct, that in itself would be newsworthy.  Surely the people should know, and would want to know that their trust and treasure are protected by high enough standards, and swift and certain accountability to them.*

*The board by the way, is meeting tonight to lower the standards of conduct for students from "ethical" standards to lower standards.  They are unwilling to step up as role models of "ethical" standards of conduct and rather than prolong the manifestly hypocritical double standards of conduct, they decided to lower student standards instead.  It is a move abjectly devoid of moral courage and character.

School board members and senior administrators are spending hundreds of thousands of operational dollars every year on litigation and legal weaselry to escape accountability even to the law.  In my case alone, they have spent nearly a million operational dollars in a non-viable defense of school board member's ego.  They spend without limit and without oversight.

Kent Walz is helping them
cover it up.

He will take a night off at
some point, to go pick up
his Dixon Award.

I feel for the good and decent
people who get Dixon Awards
and who deserve them.

Their award is diminished when the award is also given to the likes of former APS Supt. Winston Brooks and now Kent Walz.




photos Mark Bralley