Gov. Bill Richardson’s current troubles have me thinking back on my first real experience with him. Here’s a story about the time he tried to bully a 22-year-old single mother — and lost.

Gov. Bill Richardson’s current troubles have me thinking back on past allegations that he was playing loose with the rules and bullying people. And that inevitably brings me back to my first real experience with the governor, during which I once compared him in a column to “Dictator Bush.” Richardson’s egregious actions actually inspired me to, for the first time, take advantage of my constitutional right to petition my government.

First the context:

In July 2003, Richardson summoned New Mexico State University Student Regent Felicia Ybarra to his office. On three key votes, the college student had disregarded the wishes of the governor who appointed her and who held her already signed but undated resignation letter in his hand, and he wanted an in-person meeting, on his turf.

So Ybarra, whose last name is now McCracken, made the trip from Las Cruces to Santa Fe with her mother. Richardson’s staff barred Ybarra’s mother from the meeting, and she had to wait outside while her daughter, then a 22-year-old, single mother, met behind closed doors on the fourth floor of the Roundhouse with Richardson and only a couple of members of his staff as witnesses.

Richardson proceeded to tell Ybarra she was too independent for the regents and he was moving her to a position on the now-defunct Commission on Higher Education, where she would have less power and, thus, less ability to stand up to the governor. With her resignation letter at his disposal, Richardson told Ybarra he wanted her to resign. Ybarra told the governor no, she wasn’t going to resign. She quickly became the center of a controversy over whether the governor had the constitutional authority to actually use the resignation letters he had required from all of his appointees to state boards and commissions.

Starting a petition drive

My involvement in the controversy actually began several months earlier, during Richardson’s second month in office. At the time, I was the editor of the Round Up, the student newspaper at NMSU, and finishing my final semester of college. I was a zealous idealist who didn’t mind a fight and was outraged that the governor was stepping on the toes of my university’s regents by requiring the three he appointed to submit to being puppets on strings.

The issue of Richardson’s heavy-handedness first caught my attention because Ybarra changed her political affiliation from Democrat to independent so she could be appointed to a board the state Constitution requires to have political balance. Governors of both major political parties have violated the spirit of the Constitution at schools around the state by pushing prospective regents to do what Ybarra did, but I still didn’t like it.

I was highly skeptical of Ybarra at the beginning because of that, and feared she would be a pawn for a governor whose D.C. political style threatened to take hold at my backwater university if Richardson was allowed to control the regents’ actions.

Soon thereafter, the head of the state Department of Agriculture, who Richardson wanted out, gave up and decided to retire. I was fed up. The combination of the regents’ resignation letters and that retirement drove me to approach NMSU’s student body president about jointly sponsoring a petition drive on campus demanding that Richardson leave the school’s regents alone and return to them the resignation letters he had forced them to sign. He agreed. We distributed the petition on the editorial page of the Round Up and personally manned tables at which the petition was available to sign. We set a goal of 5,000 signatures and received fewer than 600, but our petition was the talk of campus.

That was in February 2003. We sent the petitions to the governor, publicized the action as much as possible, and waited.

As can be expected, the governor himself never acknowledged our petition, and his office’s only response was to mail me a token letter thanking me for organizing the effort and acknowledging receipt of the petition.

Ybarra did what few politicos dared to do

I graduated in May 2003 and moved on to a new job in Santa Fe, so my involvement in the story ended, but I continued to follow it.

Richardson probably didn’t expect anything other than submission from Ybarra, but, by the time he tried to bully her into leaving the Board of Regents in July, I knew her well enough to expect more. I had praised her in a March 2003 column for standing up to the governor and, in defiance of political pressures, casting the deciding vote to elect an experienced regent appointed by the previous governor to chair the regents instead of a Richardson crony and new regent who admittedly knew little about the school’s budget.

So when Ybarra walked out of the governor’s office that day in July, daring the governor to do something about her refusal to resign, and gave a statement about the situation to the press, I wasn’t surprised. The governor was.

“We are flabbergasted by her unprofessional statement to the press about the private meeting with the governor,” his spokesman told the Las Cruces Sun-News back then. Some other Richardson cronies jumped on board with the governor’s office in disputing Ybarra’s version of what happened in her meeting with the governor and events that preceded it, but their words rang hollow against those of a single mother trying to make her way through college who was only attempting to do the right thing.

Ultimately, Ybarra did what few politicos around the state have dared to do throughout the governor’s tenure: She publicly stood up to the governor. She called Richardson’s bluff, and he backed down. Ybarra served out her two-year term on the regents, then moved on. She didn’t seek a future in politics, though many, including me, would like to see her do it. She’s simply living her life.

Her boldness and refusal to become a pawn in the state’s corrupt political game make her, to this day, one of my favorite people.