Human resources could crowd out historical ones
Governor’s personnel move would scuttle state archives’ plan to expand
New Mexico’s history is competing for floor space with a bunch of office cubicles. Officials at the State Records Center and Archives say the State Personnel Office plans to move about 90 employees into its building off Camino Carlos Rey, crowding space archivists had hoped to turn into another vault for New Mexico’s growing collection of historic documents, files, photos and other artifacts.
The move is just the latest turn in a controversial plan by Gov. Susana Martinez’s administration to consolidate human resources operations from across New Mexico government into a single agency. The New Mexican reported late last year the project has fallen behind schedule and run into unexpected costs. And now it threatens to squeeze an often overlooked agency that is nonetheless at the heart of the state’s identity.
A boxy, nondescript two-story building next to General Franklin E. Miles Park, the archives and records center might seem like the ideal place to move staff of state government’s newly reorganized human resources service. The building is right behind the State Personnel Office. Stroll around the airy state library on the second floor, and it would appear there is plenty of room.
But behind the locked doors of the facility’s cavernous vault, State Records Administrator Melissa Salazar sees it very differently. All around are towering shelves loaded with boxes. There are the papers of New Mexico leaders, including those of Gen. Stephen Watts Kearny, the military governor who seized control for the United States government during the Mexican-American War. There are military records from the Civil War (kept in metal drawers). There are reels of old films and boxes of photos of times, places and people long gone.
Behind another locked door are original records from land grants and even a document dated 1512 and signed by King Ferdinand II.
A big piece of the story of how New Mexico became a state is here.
A big piece of the story of how New Mexico became a state is here.
And the vault is pretty much full, Salazar says.
But these documents are not just relics of the past, she argues.
These records protect the rights of New Mexicans, Salazar says, outlining their land, military service, laws and court battles.
“Records are basically the rights of individuals,” she says.
The archives have to keep up with the present and make room for the future, too, Salazar adds.
The center is keeping about 800 cubic feet available for papers that Gov. Martinez will turn over when she leaves office.
The backup has left little space in a separate room where government agencies temporarily store records — usually several years — before either destroying the documents or committing the files to New Mexico’s archives.
Salazar says that backup has in turn left agencies to store records wherever there is space.
And she describes that as a disaster waiting to happen.
The archives and state agencies are already digitizing much of the government’s work and storing records on computers.
But Salazar argues that only goes so far. The archives have to ensure files are available not just in a few years but several decades from now. Will we be using the same computers and the same software programs to read those files?
“It’s a representation of 1s and 0s. If you have a hardware problem, a software problem, you’ve lost it,” she says. “That’s not something we want to do with the records of New Mexico.”
Legislators have already approved more than a half-million dollars in recent years for designing how to expand and remodel the facility.
Officials had hoped to turn space on the facility’s ground floor into another vault — an area where the climate could be controlled and the conditions maintained with the sort of precision that helps preserve materials.
The Southwest Book Collection would move upstairs to the rest of the state library’s collection.
But Salazar says the General Services Department recently announced it plans to move State Personnel Office employees into that very same space.
Gov. Martinez issued a directive last year that called on the state to consolidate human resources offices across New Mexico’s bureaucracy. Instead of each department having human services staff, the State Personnel Office would manage human resources from so-called Service Driven Centers of Excellence.
Martinez offered it as a means of saving money for a state that has been strapped for cash in recent years, though the initiative has since run into unexpected costs.
The windowless space at the state archives would seem to be one of those service centers.
“It came as quite a shock,” says Salazar, who views the move as scuttling years of planning to create more space for archives. “We always knew an expansion would be necessary. We were on that path.”
Representatives for the two departments could not be reached Tuesday afternoon and did not respond to emails or voicemail messages seeking comment.
The General Services Department owns the facility, which was built about 20 years ago and is formally known as the Garrey Carruthers Building, after the former governor.
The State Records Center and Archives is considered a tenant of the building. But it is run separately by the Commission of Public Records, which includes the state historian, attorney general, secretary of state, state auditor and secretaries of the Department of Cultural Affairs and General Services Department.
“The idea of filling this space with people is counterproductive given the state’s needs,” says Rep. Linda Trujillo, D-Santa Fe, who formerly served as the state’s records administrator.
Trujillo has generally been skeptical of the State Personnel Office’s plan, arguing it does not make sense to pull human resources staff out of government agencies and assign them to manage human resources from afar.
The legislator was not familiar with the State Personnel Office’s plans for the Carruthers Building. But she maintained that what the facility really needs is room for archives.