Albuquerque, NM -- The City of Santa Fe has paid a substantial amount of legal fees and statutory damages for its failure to provide public records to the Los Alamos Study Group in a timely manner, as required by the New Mexico Inspection of Public Records Act (IPRA). The Study Group was represented in this case by attorney Thomas Grover of Albuquerque. 

The long-running legal case, which has now finally concluded with last week's payment by the City, concerns a request made on January 22, 2024, for City correspondence with Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) and the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) from the date of the request back to January 1, 2023, a little more than a year. 

On February 6, 2024, the City wrote that it had identified 5,550 responsive emails. The City then proceeded to slow-walk the release of these emails in small and disorganized batches in a seemingly random order that was often repetitive over the next several months, precluding any meaningful review. 

In April of 2024 the Study Group petitioned for a Writ of Mandamus and then in October of 2024 First District Court Chief Judge Biedscheid granted the petition and ordered the City to produce the remainder of the withheld documents. 

Instead of simply complying with their statutory obligations under IPRA, the City hired a private law firm to help contest the presiding judge's own order even after it was issued by the Court.

On June 15 of this year, Judge Biedsheid ordered the City to pay for reasonable attorney's fees and costs, as well as 20% of the statutory penalty for 280 days of delay, noting that there were "mitigating circumstances," presumably the series of partial responses the City had provided over that period. 

Study Group director Greg Mello:

"While we are reasonably pleased with the outcome overall, observers should understand that the City was willing to go to legal extremes to prevent having to open its record of correspondence with LANL to the public, and the City continues to stall simple requests for what should be public information right down to the present day. 

"Our request was very simple, and the City could have released the requested records within hours or at most days, as opposed to months. Instead, the City chose to 'bread-crumb' us. We had no idea what the bases for the City's constructive denial really were. 

"We asked for emails because we thought emails would be easy to filter from City records with a few search terms, copy to a storage medium, and send to us -- as the City has done in the past -- without our request being burdensome in any way. 

"We are grateful for the effective representation in this matter by our attorney, Tom Grover. An IPRA legal action was our last option, but eventually it bore fruit. 

"We found it strange, and still find it strange, that the City would fight so hard to keep its correspondence with LANL sequestered from public eyes for so long. Oddly, the City never asserted any objections or denials to any of the records responsive to our request.

"The subject matter of this request bears closely on the future of Santa Fe, in which LANL is now playing a major part. 

Partial background: 

• The Director of LANL and the Manager of the NNSA Los Alamos Field Office have both stated that NNSA was actively seeking to build a laboratory installation in Santa Fe. NNSA spoke of a nuclear weapons component manufacturing plant as a possible part of the plan for Santa Fe.

• Such satellite laboratories were proposed and discussed (video) at a public Los Alamos County Council meeting in July 2023.

• NNSA already leases two office properties in Santa Fe, one of them with two large buildings (i.e. three buildings in all), which are now part of LANL's "Technical Area 47."

• A prominent realty company CEO told us he had been in negotiations with LANL to lease a former school property for a biological laboratory in Santa Fe that would house infectious organisms. Those private negotiations collapsed.

• NNSA had previously formally offered to purchase a large parcel of land owned by the City in central Santa Fe and redevelop it as a national nuclear weapons center. This is the City’s Midtown Campus, formerly Bruns Army Base, completed in 1943, and until 1960 LANL’s "Technical Area 47," the core portion of which later became the College of Santa Fe. That plan fell through.

• A previous IPRA request to the City revealed a series of private meetings between then-Mayor Webber, LANL, NNSA, a wealthy developer, and representatives of other large New Mexico institutions to discuss three huge laboratory-oriented mixed-use developments, one of which would be in south Santa Fe.
• NNSA, LANL, and the whole region are struggling with housing and transportation issues related to LANL's rapid expansion and conversion into a nuclear weapons component manufacturing center.

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