Governor under fire after noise complaint at hotel
Gov. Susana Martinez faced more scrutiny, criticism and satirical online commentary this week over her recorded interactions with dispatchers, police and a hotel security guard the night of Dec. 12, after the front desk clerk at the Eldorado Hotel & Spa called emergency dispatch to report loud noise and bottles being thrown from a room rented to one of her staff members, despite warnings.
Police came to the hotel about 1:30 a.m., where Martinez and others were having pizza in the fourth-floor room after a governor’s staff party in the hotel ballroom that was paid for with $7,900 from a public contingency fund that traditionally covers costs for entertaining at the Governor’s Mansion.
On a recording of a Martinez call released late last week, she tries to get an emergency dispatcher to call off police officers responding to the Eldorado and she demands to know who had complained. She says any bottle-throwing had happened six hours before.
Another recording from Santa Fe police Sgt. Anthony Tapia’s belt recorder, released Tuesday, shows Tapia and an Eldorado security guard discussing whether Martinez is intoxicated. The security guard says, “I really don’t know what to do in this situation because like I can tell that she’s, that she’s kind of ... .”
“Inebriated,” Tapia finished. “Yes,” the guard replied. Martinez said last week she was “absolutely not” intoxicated.
On the belt recording, the governor tells Tapia the room has been empty for the past couple of hours. “We finished downstairs at midnight, at your ballroom. It’s been empty. Five hours ago, there was somebody that we said, ‘Get out of the room. Do not be doing what you’re doing.’ And there were bottles being thrown over.”
A statement from Chris Sanchez, Martinez’s spokesman, last week said snowballs had been thrown from the fourth-floor balcony, not bottles. The police have said they found no broken glass beneath the balcony.
On Tuesday, the Governor’s Office stood by the snowball version of the story and said that, when Martinez told Tapia that bottles had been thrown, she was only recounting what she had been told by someone at the hotel’s front desk. “The Governor does not believe that throwing snowballs off a 4th story balcony at night is somehow less serious than throwing a bottle,” Sanchez said Tuesday. “Either behavior is dangerous and entirely unacceptable.”