ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. (KRQE) – The city of Albuquerque is facing a lawsuit over the availability of records from its automated speed enforcement program. The lawsuit comes from the Southwest Public Policy Institute (SPPI), they say it stems from a public records request made to the city.
“It’s not a matter of whether we’re going to win, this is public record, there’s no question about that,” said president of SPPI, Patrick Brenner. “We will get access to it, it’s just a matter of how many games does the city want to play.”
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The institute says they have concerns the policies could be disproportionately impacting minorities and low-income drivers. They say they have requested public records from the city but haven’t received them in a timely or complete manner.
“They have produced an excel sheet, but it’s not the records that we were actually seeking,” Brenner explained. “They sent me the excel file and said, ‘Which of these citations would you like to inspect?’, not understanding that we were actually asking for an opportunity to inspect the entire database.”
News 13 reached out to the Albuquerque City Clerk’s Office, they state that they asked the institute to reduce the parameters, because of the scale of the request-nearly 30,000 citations- which the city says the institute did not agree to.
“The requester was not satisfied,” the Albuquerque City Clerk’s Office stated. “So, we made an initial production available for purchase or inspection, but he has not come to purchase or inspect the records, nor taken us up on the offer to come to the office to inspect the other records.
The city states that they process about 800-1,000 requests each month.
