Trashing NM: Budget-Breaking Ads
Absentee Governor Grisham recklessly squanders funds with a single ad agency
If you think the State of New Mexico bothers to keep coherent expense records, you’re sadly mistaken. Typically, the numbers are jumbled and inconsistent, making it difficult to understand what any given collection of invoices and purchase orders actually means. It’s even more confusing when the records are heavily redacted.
An example of this phenomena is contained within a set of records provided by the NM Tourism Department, in response to questions about the Breaking Bad litter campaign.
As you can see, the absentee Governor of New Mexico is quite proud of this little production, even going so far as to insert her own image into the ad:
The State Legislature allocated two million dollars to the Tourism Department, for an ad campaign about trash. Somehow, the Department of Transportation was also required to provide $500,000 in additional funds.
This is the first page of the Memorandum Agreement between the two agencies:
It’s hard to imagine why the Tourism Department couldn’t get by with the multi-million dollar allocation they already had. Sadly, the records which accompanied this document do not provide clarification.
This is a State of NM Purchase Order, dated July 1, 2024. The supplier is Talweg Creative, Inc, a Santa Fe advertising and media firm:
Yes, that’s what it says. Item total of $100,000, with a total Purchase Order Amount of $17,250,000.
There’s also a second Purchase Order, from the same date:
Notice, all of the items have the same Contract ID. It appears that Talweg Creative INC has one open contract with the NM Tourism Department, where various projects get lumped together in the billing process.
What was the actual expenditure for the Breaking Bad litter campaign? Your guess is as good as mine. This is an invoice from July 29, 2024:
This is another invoice, from September 2024:
Here’s the billing estimate for a Press Conference on October 17, 2024, at the Jean Cocteau Cinema in Santa Fe:
This is an oddly redacted document, exactly as it was delivered, no description or anything else:
All of these records were provided in response to a request for the Breaking Bad litter campaign expenses. No explanation was provided.
The Tourism Department Marketing & Promotions Budget Projections for FY25 were included, but this five-page document offers next to nothing.
This is the first page, which sounds promising enough:
However, that’s about all there is to this document. This is what pages 2 and 3 look like:
Why? Why would the Tourism Department redact entire pages out of the Budget Projections? What are they hiding? These weren’t the only redactions.
These are pages four and five:
It’s one thing to hear that records were redacted, but it’s quite another to see it for yourself. The same holds true for unprofessional accounting practices. When it’s this bad, you really do have to see the records, in order to understand how sloppy they actually are.
How much did this frivolous ad campaign cost? We can be certain it was more than $2,5000,000. How much money are we pumping into Talweg Creative INC every year? With records like these, it’s hard to say.
I’ll be looking into it further, of course.
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Much Love,
Auntie B.