Nov. 19--What? "Political flunkies" on the public payroll of the state Public Regulation Commission? The editorial "we" are shocked -- shocked, to borrow the immortal phrase of the Claude Rains police-chief character in Casablanca.

The PRC, created in the 1990s from a corporation commission and public-utilities commission in hopes of cleaning up corruption in both, has found its members mired in scandal after scandal. And since this is the agency regulating our state's utilities, common carriers and insurance, New Mexico consumers count on it being bribe-proof and otherwise incorruptible -- or at least we should be able to ...

So, in what he hoped would be a commission-cleaning exercise, Chairman Sandy Jones, whose hires include a felon, issued a 32-question survey on ethics to employees. Don't be bashful; say what you think about the honesty of our organization. You don't have to put your name on it ...

Turns out that the responses were, indeed, honest -- so brutally so that the commission was reluctant to release them; seems they "contain comments, allegations, opinions and viewpoints which exceeded the survey's intent and varied from its scope" -- code words for we don't like what we saw.

After The New Mexican's Kate Nash, later joined by other reporters around the state, filed public-records requests for the survey, it was released -- mas o menus; or is that mas menos que mas? Thirty of the 127 responses were blacked out -- and in some cases, entire sheets of paper were black. That's hardly a proper response to Nash's reasonable request for "all and any results" of the survey.

She's still on the case -- but yesterday Nash and New Mexican colleague Steve Terrell were at least able to bring you a report of what they could get so far. Given the damning nature of what was released, the, uh, redacted results must be real doozies.

Several respondents spilled what's been an open secret: The PRC has a tradition of hiring unqualified people -- "political flunkies," as one worker succinctly put it; people with family ties or political influence. Said another, "standards only apply to those who are not politically hired." Still another noted that "you have people in these positions that know absolutely nothing about what the job requires."

Wait -- it gets better: "There are a lot of unethical employees who have been practicing a lot of unethical behavior and have gotten away with it for years. Upper management seems to look the other way," came another comment. And more than 100 employees said they'd seen unethical behavior at the PRC during the past year.

To Chairman Jones' credit, he said he expected tough answers; to his discredit, the really tough ones remain under wraps.

As for what good this navel-contemplation will accomplish, perhaps the ethics courses being cooked up will supplement the employee-manual mentions of honesty. Or, once workers have sat through a few high-sounding sessions, will it be back to business as usual?

That might depend on the five commissioners themselves -- who, suggested yet another employee in the un-blacked-out part of a page, "must lead by example."

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