Inspector General calls city’s pandemic book a “waste” of tax dollars

By Web Staff

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    ALBUQUERQUE, New Mexico (KOAT) — The city’s inspector general calls a book about how the city got through the pandemic a “waste” of taxpayer money.

City officials spent $97,000 to publish “City at a Crossroads,” a book that heavily mentions the work of Mayor Tim Keller and how he helped the city get through the pandemic. It’s sold fewer than 100 copies to the public.

The inspector general is not the only critic to notice how frequently the mayor is mentioned. “I saw a chapter, ‘The Metal Mayor,'” said Paul Gessing of the Rio Grande Foundation, a taxpayer watch group. Flipping through the book with Target 7, he continued, “There’s the mayor. Yeah. I mean, we’re less than halfway through the book, and he’s already in there about ten or so times… It is a way to promote the mayor. And that’s where we really have a big problem with it.”

City officials paid former Albuquerque Journal columnist Joline Gutierrez Krueger more than $44,000 to write the book. “I never worked directly with the mayor on any of this. He was never… I never, like, sat down with him to discuss what he was envisioning,” Krueger told Target 7.

“I had to interview him, obviously, for the book because you can’t write a story about the city and not write about the mayor. That’s as far as it went for me.”

Still, the city inspector general heavily criticized the book in its report, calling it “a misuse or waste of public funds.”

The report made several recommendations to the city to change policy. “The questions that were raised were, ‘were these funds spent appropriately,’ ‘were the contracts to publish the book entered into appropriately,’ ‘were the people involved dealt with according to procedures,’ and so on. The inspector general takes a look at this and says, ‘there’s nothing illegal here, but there are three specific areas that we need to tighten up controls,'” said KOAT Legal Expert John Day.

Day doesn’t expect anything else to happen to the mayor or city staff. “They can also just take these papers, take the recommendations and stick them in the shredder if they want. There’s not any teeth to this necessarily. The inspector general can’t force the city to make it to adopt these recommendations,” Day said.

In the report, the city responded, saying in writing, “the findings were inaccurate, misleading, oversimplification of this investigation.”

Target 7 reached out to the city for a response. City officials would not agree to an interview unless we provided them with questions in advance. Instead, they sent us a statement saying, “We stand behind the book, and we know the IG doesn’t like the book.”

Gutierrez Krueger stands behind it as well, saying the book was not about the mayor. She says it’s instead about people who struggled, like store owners and nurses. “The OIG report does a disservice to those people,” she told Target 7, adding, “I think that’s what makes me the saddest, is these are stories, I think, and these are people that should be known by their community. And with this negativity, I worry that, you know, people are going to get the wrong idea of what the book was.”

Gutierrez Krueger has also come under criticism for being paid by the city to write the book while she was still writing a front page opinion column for the Journal. The newspaper acknowledged that, and in its own reporting, states, “Gutierrez Krueger contracted with the city while still employed by the Journal, a violation of company policy that prohibits moonlighting for government entities to avoid conflicts of interest.”

Former Journal editor Karen Moses wrote in a column that the 2018 freelance policy prohibits writing for “any organization or person related to a political party, candidate, or government agency.”

Gutierrez Kreuger said she was planning to retire before the book was published. She retired before the book came out in October 2022. “I already had a foot out the door. I would have retired sooner, but it’s like every day there were people that were asking for more columns,” she said.

Along with paying Gutierrez Kruger, the city also paid just under $50,000 to a project manager.

While the city has sold fewer than 100 copies of the book, the proceeds go to the One Albuquerque Fund, a non-profit that was set up by Mayor Tim Keller. It currently sells on Amazon for about $20.

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