We have to give the New Mexico Office of Recovery and Reinvestment an ‘A’ in public records inspection compliance.  We submitted a very broad–intentionally broad, we might add–request to inspect all the applications for funding under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009.  We also wanted to inspect all the responses.  It took some time to round up the files, but we were kept apprised of the office’s efforts and not left hanging.  That sense of floating in limbo, a Kafkaesque state of bureaucratic indifference, too frequently follows public records requests to certain prominent executive offices of state government located on the fourth floor of the Roundhouse.

Today we were treated to thousands of pages of documents, including responses from agencies outside the NMORR proper.  Our eyes grew weary, but there was a smile on our face.  We got the feeling that this is one agency of state government taking very seriously the transparency pledge that came with the billions of federal dollars flowing into the state.  Their website also goes the extra mile in trying to explain what is being done with the state’s share of funds.  The NMORR isn’t responsible for how the money gets spent.  They act as a clearinghouse, and in that regard they are doing a mighty fine job.  Indeed, their information feels a lot more accessible and accurate than what I’ve found at recovery.gov, the multi-million dollar website established by the Obama Administration that promised to track every penny of the stimulus.  It is at the latter the site, the much ballyhooed federal portal, that I found the phantom Congressional districts and phantom zip codes that brought this site national attention.   Finding errors at that site has been described to me by an Associated Press reporter based in D.C. as “shooting fish in a barrel.”  I didn’t find any trapped carp at the New Mexico counterpart.

Special compliments go to Andrew Lenderman, the public information officer of the NMORR.  He’s a former Albuquerque Journal reporter.  I know he’s trying hard to bring credibility and integrity to the statements and representations from the NMORR.  His effort shows.

A solid ‘A’ to this state agency.  Now if we could get them to conduct some training for other state agencies in how to respond to inspection of public records requests, we’d be writing a lot more positive things about state government on this website.

We’ll be posting what I think will be two interesting stories about discoveries in these voluminous files.  No smoking guns ahead, but rather one story about dreams and desperate needs, and another about Republican hypocrisy.