The city of Santa Fe receives 100 to 180 requests for public records each week.
City Attorney Marcos Martinez likened this to an “endless treadmill.”
“If there’s a backlog, it makes basically an impossible process,” he said. The city has three records custodians and an Inspection of Public Records Act manager, and it can take days to review things like police body camera footage — among the types of records in high demand with an increasing proliferation of YouTube channels streaming authentic police videos.
It’s an issue commonly raised by government officials and workers: A rising number of records requests in an evolving digital landscape outpaces the capacity of records custodians to respond. It was also part of the impetus for legislation this year establishing an IPRA Task Force to review the records law.
The New Mexico Department of Justice, leading the effort, notes on its website records requests have doubled since 2020 in many municipalities. This often leads to delays in fulfilling requests within the timeframe outlined in the law — or outright denials — which then can lead to lawsuits against government agencies and pricey payouts for violations.
Suggested solutions for the surge varied widely during the task force’s statewide listening tour, which ended Wednesday. While open government advocates and members of the media urged the panel to recommend more funding for record offices and publishing more public information online, government officials floated limits or bans on out-of-state records requesters and hourly fees to fulfill requests.
“The clear state purpose of IPRA is to promote government transparency and protect the public’s right to know,” said Daniel Williams, the deputy director of public policy at the American Civil Liberties Union of New Mexico. He sometimes stood in for a colleague during the task force’s listening sessions.
“And so I hope that as this task force is considering recommendations — either administrative changes or potentially legislative changes — that the focus can stay on protecting that core purpose,” Williams said.
New Mexico Foundation for Open Government Executive Director Christine Barber said records have been made open to the public because the nation’s Founding Fathers wanted people to have access to information.
“They said it over and over and over again: A public that is informed about its government is a public that can support and have a strong democracy,” she said.
Barber acknowledged the IPRA Task Force has a big job when it comes to balancing public transparency with records workers’ overload.
“It’s a lot,” she said. “It’s a lot of stuff to go through, and the task force has to come to — and wants to come to — conclusions that actually are going to make a difference.”
The task force will now move to its next phase: Members will discuss takeaways from public meetings, deliberate and compile a report by Oct. 1 with potential recommendations for legislative action.
‘It’s limited enough’
The New Mexico Foundation for Open Government sounded the alarm early in the task force’s listening tour — which began in late April and took the panel from Farmington to Silver City to Clovis — about the makeup of public comment sessions, which could inform the first major changes to IPRA since the law’s inception.
Specifically, the organization noted, there was a ratio problem.
A Facebook post by the group Thursday showed government officials outnumbered members of the public at eight task force meetings. In Clovis and Las Vegas, government officials were the only public commenters.
But that shifted toward the end: At the last two task force meetings in Santa Fe and Albuquerque, members of the public made up 56% and 64% of speakers, respectively.
“They basically all said, ‘Just stop limiting our access, please, it’s limited enough,’ ” Barber said. “And the records custodians basically said, ‘No, we want more limits because that will make our job easier.’ ”
The tone at the meetings also varied widely, Barber noted. Records custodians largely asked for changes and action, she said; members of the public largely asked the task force to ensure the law isn’t weakened.
Michel Rivera-Ramirez, deputy general counsel for the New Mexico Corrections Department, argued at a meeting in Santa Fe on Tuesday IPRA “doesn’t really help the common man.”
“It only serves those that are in the know,” he said. “And that’s not equitable at all.”
Corrections Department records custodian Sharon Alexander argued incarcerated people use lawsuits alleging IPRA violations as “schemes.”
“We see all the time where inmates are messaging each other, saying, ‘Well, this person didn’t respond to me,’ ‘Send them an IPRA and you’re going to win,’” Alexander said. “You just see through their messages that they know this is a way for them to make money, and a lot of money.”
Rooted in common law
IPRA, in its current form, was established in 1993, but the public’s right to inspect government records was first codified in 1978. Before that, the right was common law, affirmed a year earlier by the New Mexico Supreme Court.
An early mention of public records law appeared in a 1963 edition of the now-defunct Albuquerque Tribune, where an assistant attorney general said school budgets are public record.
The first mention of an IPRA lawsuit came in 1979, when the Albuquerque Journal reported then-Bernalillo County District Attorney Ira Robinson and KOAT-TV were trading lawsuits against each other over the station’s efforts to review records from Robinson’s “Pre-Prosecution Probation Program.”
“The bill sets out procedures for the release of records, fees, denial of access and enforcement,” The Associated Press reported in 1993 regarding the legislation that established IPRA as it is today. “It would prohibit access to certain medical and personnel records.”
In the years since, IPRA has changed some — new exemptions to the law have been added — but has not undergone a dramatic overhaul.
However, legal rulings have changed the way the state interprets some of its language.
Decades later, the state Department of Justice’s IPRA Task Force was established to study the law’s implementation and effectiveness.
The chair of the task force, New Mexico Department of Justice Special Counsel Adolfo Mendéz, stepped down before the third-to-last meeting of the tour in Las Vegas. He was replaced by IPRA Task Force records custodian Madeleine Zaritsky.
A Department of Justice spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment about why Mendéz left the panel.
‘We see the schemes’
The task force is the product of a bipartisan joint memorial spearheaded earlier this year by Rep. Cathrynn Brown, a Carlsbad Republican who in previous years introduced bills attempting to alter IPRA. Brown previously told The New Mexican she hoped the task force would pinpoint suggestions for improving the law.
“We want the transparency without the abuses,” she said, pointing to requests by data aggregators and individuals trying to harass a government agency.
Some of the ideas floated during the task force’s statewide tour harkened back to those introduced by Brown. In a failed 2025 bill, Brown proposed prisoners be barred from making public records requests. The bill stated the definition of “person” did not include “an individual incarcerated in a correctional facility.”
Alexander, the Corrections Department records custodian, acknowledged at Tuesday’s meeting that inmates have a right to access public records.
But, she added, “The current system can unintentionally create situations where inmates personally benefit from damages awarded under a law intended to protect transparency.”
She said, “I have to read through a lot of the inmates’ messages when requests are made. We have a lot of baby mamas asking for boyfriends’ messages, and we see the schemes, and we see them trying to work the system. And that’s what bogs a lot of us down.”
When asked by The New Mexican how many IPRA lawsuits New Mexico inmates have filed in the past year, a spokesperson for the agency said she could “potentially” provide the information by the end of the coming week.
In March, the department agreed to pay $112,000 to settle a lawsuit filed by an inmate who said the department had failed to provide him with public records related to a 2021 incident in which he said corrections officers battered him and broke his ribs.
The Corrections Department also faces a pending lawsuit by the New Mexico Foundation for Open Government, which alleges the department failed to provide records of legal costs associated with defending itself against lawsuits and settlements, and awards paid out in records cases between 2021 and 2024.
Santa Fe eyes changes
The city of Santa Fe, which also has paid out settlements in several lawsuits alleging IPRA violations in recent years, is making some changes to the way it deals with public records requests — including digitization of records and a potential new method of handling requests for body camera footage.
Santa Fe spokesperson Peter Olson said the city is exploring an idea of creating viewing stations for people who request body camera footage. The records requester could watch unreacted footage and then decide whether they want a copy of parts or all of the redacted footage.
“Then maybe a lot of their questions could be answered that way, without having to wait for weeks and weeks and weeks for all the video to be reviewed,” Olson said.
Martinez said body camera footage, which accounts for 8.5% of the city’s IPRA requests, takes up more than half of custodians’ time.
The city also plans to hire a public information officer for the Santa Fe Police Department and a record specialist for video, Olson said.
“That PIO will also help with records,” he said. “We’re hoping that will alleviate some of this backlog.”
IPRA manager Katherine Garcia-Gallegos said the city also is considering the possibility of posting some types of records online, as it has with crash reports — which has slowed the influx of requests for such reports.
The city has several points it hopes the task force will address, Garcia-Gallegos said:
- Clarification on when a request is deemed overly broad and burdensome.
- Clarification on what a denied request means.
- Clarification on the fees an agency can charge for staff time to review records.
- The elimination of attorney’s fees in IPRA lawsuits, and the addition of a maximum cap on damages and an opportunity for agencies to come into compliance with the law ahead of a lawsuit.
- An update to the statute to reflect modern record-keeping.
“I think the way the law was written — it was written with the mindset of records being kept in a filing cabinet in people’s offices that were very easily accessible,” Garcia-Gallegos said.
“What we’ve seen a lot now that we’d like to see change for modern record-keeping is the digitized records, the digital evidence, the fact that a lot of agencies are using cloud-based storage systems on top of different retention schedules for different departments and different types of records,” she added.
It takes more time for records custodians to gather records in different formats, she said.
Williams pointed to “proactive transparency” as one of the most common-ground solutions discussed during the IPRA Task Force meetings.
“We also heard about the fact that it’s not always as easy as ‘just put everything online,’ that there’s technical questions and all kinds of things,” he said.
He likes such discussions, he said, because they keep “the conversation focused on: How do we expand and protect the public’s right to know rather than contract it because of a sense that the public’s right to know is too burdensome?”
