Rey Garduño is running an Albuquerque City Council campaign based on clean elections and ethical government.
The Democrat is running for the District 6 seat in the state’s largest city – a seat being vacated by congressional candidate Martin Heinrich. He has the support of many who are fighting for good government in
But Garduño’s latest misstep is cause for concern that the man who is running a campaign based on ethical government may not know how to avoid the appearance of impropriety.
It’s one thing to use a government e-mail address to campaign – which he’s doing. It’s another completely to defend that action and say critics of it are ignorant – which he did in an interview with the Albuquerque Journal.
He told the newspaper there’s nothing wrong with his use of a University of New Mexico e-mail account for his campaign because he is retired, not a current employee, and because his use of the e-mail carries no real cost for the university.
He’s wrong.
It doesn’t matter if he’s no longer on the payroll at UNM. Even though he’s granted the account for life, he’s still using state resources for his campaign. The cost might be minimal, but it’s not nothing. His e-mail account takes up state government server space, and maintenance and other costs for the system are attributable to every account on the system.
Another UNM employee recently used her school account to send out an invitation to a fundraiser for Gov. Bill Richardson’s presidential campaign, and she had to reimburse the school $25 for the cost.
Is this the biggest ethical lapse out there? Not even close. But if a candidate is going to run a campaign based on ethical, clean government, he needs to prove he understands what is and what is not ethical. Instead, Garduño criticized the “ignorance” of his critics in the Journal interview.
How hard would it be to get a free e-mail account through one of countless sites on the Internet that offer them and avoid even the remotest appearance of impropriety?
A prior version of this posting misspelled Garduño’s name.