APS Board knowingly permited or negligently allowed the squandering of $865,000

If the Albuquerque Public Schools Board of Education did not negligently allow former school board president Marty Esquivel to spend $865,000 on a non-viable defense* of his ego, they knowingly permitted it.

*There is yet to be offered, a learned opinion from anyone not in Esquivel's employ, who believes Marty Esquivel ever had a case; the money was squandered.

If the Albuquerque Public Schools Board of Education did not negligently allow this money to be spent; if it was not spent without their knowledge, then there are minutes of meetings where they gave their willing permission.

If there are no minutes; no public records of any kind that demonstrate the board's knowing approval, then they did not give that approval except in violation of both the Open Meetings Act and the Inspection of Public Records Act.

When and where did the board agree that the complaint would not be settled for $20K and decided to spend $100K to prevent it.  When and where did they agree to go $200K, then $300K ... and finally $865K?!  Can they even prove they were listening to the lawyers?

They either agreed to Esquivel's spending, or didn't know he was doing it.

The one no less reprehensible than the other.

The one no less irresponsible, no less indefensible;
no lesser a breach of the trust placed in them. 

The first ethic in the school board's own code of ethics, link, reads:

Make the education and well-being of students 
the basis for all decision making.

How was Esquivel's spending even remotely in the best interests of students and their well-being?

Fortunately for the board, their code of ethics is utterly unenforceable.  If we did not know it was unenforceable by their own free admission, it is unenforceable in its face.

KOAT President and General
Manager Mary Lynn Roper

Worth noting; alone among local media, KOAT TV refuses still, to let their viewers know that APS has wasted another few hundred thousand of their dollars.

Unclear at this point, how it is in Mary Lynn Roper and KOAT's interests to refuse even to publish APS' press release, which is basically all KOB TV did.  KRQE offered coverage so biased that I have a whole new group of their trolls insulting me.  The Journal coverage amounted to letting Marty Esquivel repeat all the allegations that the federal judge had soundly dismissed and as the proximate result, sicced all of their trolls on me.

KOAT viewers trusting Roper and KOAT to inform them in anticipation of an upcoming quarter Billion dollar bond issue election, don't even know they've been screwed, again.

After all, what could spending nearly a million dollars irresponsibly  possibly have to do with likelihood that they will spend 270 million dollars just as irresponsibly?

ABQ Free Press was the first and remains alone among the heavy hitters in local news in informing the democracy about what really happened, link.




photo Mark Bralley