NMSU librarians and local journalists hosted the annual Sunshine Week IPRA Talk at Branson Library on March 20. The journalists and other members of the Las Cruces community discussed with four panelists the value of IPRA requests.
The Inspection of Public Records Act, or IPRA, is New Mexico’s sunshine law that mandates its residents’ ability to access the records of governmental entities through requests, known locally as IPRA requests. Sunshine laws are legislation that require the public disclosure of government records or documents and are found in other states.
The panel consisted of Doña Ana County clerk Amanda Lopez Askin, journalist Christine Barber, Las Cruces city clerk Christine Rivera, and criminal justice reporter Joshua Bowling. Special Collections Librarian Dylan McDonald was one of the main event hosts and asked most of the discussion questions. The topics ranged from the lack of staff responding to IPRA requests, the importance of making adequate and specific IPRA requests, and protecting IPRA from potential weaponization for profit or political goals.
Bowling addressed the panel’s concern about members of the public sending vague requests by mentioning his own struggles with making proper IPRA requests to Bernalillo County and its detention centers.
“I would have this issue with Bernalillo County, where I would call with a very simple question such as, ‘can you tell me what the population is in juvie today?’” Bowling said. “And they would say ‘no, you need to submit an IPRA for that.’ What I am doing here is tantamount to calling and saying, ‘what time do you open tomorrow?’ That’s not a records request, and I think that is something we have a lot of work to do with educating folks.”
County clerks like Askin authorize warehouse teams to tally and scan the ballots of voters during local, state, and national elections in the given county. Askin pointed out a past incident involving the online posting of Doña Ana County’s ballots for the 2018 midterm elections. To her, it was proof that IPRA requests have been misused by a growing number of election skeptics.
Before concluding the panel event, Special Collections Librarian McDonald explained why it is important for events like the Sunshine Week’s IPRA Panel to discuss and spread public awareness of sunshine laws.
“Sunshine Week is a thing that started about 20 years ago,” McDonald said. “The idea was that journalists wanted to have public forums and opinion pieces published that talked about the importance of sunshine laws that we have in our nation, whether at the state or federal level. It is basically to let people discuss why open government is so important in democracy.”
