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Recent lawsuit highlights city's struggle to respond to records requests in a timely manner Aug 1, 2024 By Carina Julig cjulig@sfnewmexican.com A Los Alamos lawyer has filed a lawsuit on behalf of his wife, joining a growing list of people accusing the city of Santa Fe of violating the state’s public records law. Paul Geisik filed the lawsuit July 3 in the First District Court, and on Wednesday, the city delivered the police video he and his wife, Laura Geisik, had requested months earlier. Paul Geisik said he was grateful to finally receive the video this week, but it was too late for the couple to use it as valuable evidence in a case involving a custody dispute between Laura Geisik and her former partner. Their lawsuit is one of series of civil complaints against the city over its slow process of providing public records and a practice of claiming many requests for records are “excessively burdensome or broad,” which allows for delays under the law. The city contends its high number of requests for records prevents it from complying with the law’s requirement to provide them within 15 days. Paul Geisik doesn’t buy that excuse. “Frankly, this is a little brazen. I’ve never seen constant, consistent delays like this,” the attorney said Tuesday. He added, “I don’t think we wouldn’t have gotten anything had my wife not sued to get this record.” He noted the New Mexico Inspection of Public Records Act is inaccessible to most people if enforcement requires retaining a lawyer. “The whole point of these laws is transparency, and I don’t see transparency there,” he said. Geisik submitted a records request to the city Jan. 2 seeking body camera video from a Christmas Day incident in which Santa Fe police had shown up at his door. The records request alleged his wife’s former partner had accused her of interfering with his custodial rights. The Geisiks wanted video of an officer’s interview with the man to show he had filed a false police report, Paul Geisik said. City records custodian Cindy Whiting wrote in a response Jan. 17 the request was “excessively burdensome or broad” and the city would need more time to fulfill it, pushing the deadline to Feb. 2. That day came and went with no response. Several future deadlines set by the city also were missed. Representatives from the city administration and the Santa Fe Police Department blamed a high volume of records requests for its lengthy response times. “The City has had a video review backlog that we are working on, providing highest priority for the oldest requests,” City Attorney Erin McSherry wrote in an email Thursday. She noted an April letter from Deputy Attorney General Daniel Rubin to the city regarding a records request response. Rubin wrote in the letter the “sheer volume of IPRA requests received by the City is grounds for extensions of the 15-day response time” otherwise required by state law. Santa Fe police Deputy Chief Ben Valdez said the review and production of body-worn camera video is especially time-consuming. “It’s a minute-by-minute review,” he said. Paul Geisik said he wondered whether the video would still exist if the records request dragged past the 180-day state requirement for a law enforcement agency to preserve officers’ video. Valdez said Santa Fe police preserve footage for about five years, far above state requirements, to avoid those issues. Adding more employees to the records office to help process requests would be “a step in the right direction,” the deputy chief said, though he didn’t comment on how many more workers might be needed to ensure the city meets its 15-day deadline under state law. The city has faced a number of lawsuits over unfulfilled records requests. It reached a $50,000 settlement with former city councilor Steven Farber, both of whom alleged the city had improperly withheld records. Several similar lawsuits are pending, including a complaint in May filed by the Los Alamos Study Group. The anti-nuclear organization alleged the city is slow-walking a records request the group filed seeking communications between city officials and Los Alamos National Laboratory regarding a potential mini-campus in Santa Fe. The group’s executive director, Greg Mello, said Tuesday the process has been “totally frustrating.” He described the legal battle as a waste of city resources. “I don’t know why they don’t want to comply with IPRA,” he said. “Is it just ego? Or do they want to make requests difficult in order to discourage more requests?” McSherry denied the claim at the time the lawsuit was filed. “We did not do deliberate foot-dragging,” she told The New Mexican in May. Ken Stalter, an Albuquerque attorney who has filed several public records-related lawsuits against the city in recent years, said the city struggles to respond to requests more than many other agencies in New Mexico. The city “needs to make the choice to devote the resources to get these processed,” he said. “And it’s a choice not to do so.” When he deposed a records custodian as part of a previous lawsuit, he said, the employee told him the office focuses on processing records requests that have a due date of the current day. If the office cannot fulfill the request that day, Stalter recalled the worker saying, it designates the request as “excessively burdensome or broad” so the deadline can be pushed back. “Once something is delayed once, it inevitably is delayed again and again and again,” he said. Stalter noted every government agency and entity in the state is required to comply with the public records law. “The city of Santa Fe takes on a lot of things that it is not mandated to do ... but responding to public records requests is something the law mandates it has to do,” he said. “There should be a commensurate effort dedicated to fulfilling that obligation.” |
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