The real reason Senator Siah Correa Hemphill announced she is resigning her seat (which she has NOT yet resigned months later) is because she was found out about her illegal use of tens of thousands of dollars of campaign funds for personal use in extreme violation of the state Campaign Reporting Act forbidding it.

The chronology:

On April 22nd Senator Siah Correa Hemphill apparently used personal funds to quietly reimburse her campaign for $11,000 of improper expenses she had made. (See the attached snapshot of her campaign expenditures report.) And that is just the tip of the iceberg of her wrongful spending.

Two weeks later on May 2nd, she suddenly announced she was withdrawing her candidacy to be on the 2024 ballot "to explore new career opportunities" instead. The truth is that she knew she would be in deep legal trouble if she tried to remain a senator when the reimbursement became public, which it did on May 13th. But nobody cared by then since she had quit.

It's another case of New Mexico's elected politicians using campaign contributions they receive from rich special interests as their own piggy banks for lavish personal spending – and breaking the law.

This year Rep. Ambrose Castellano and past Treasurer Laura Montoya were caught violating the campaign finance laws, using campaign funds for personal use and misreporting campaign contributions. Correa Hemphill has been doing the same thing - she just hasn't been caught yet.

Her campaign spending reports, as can be easily seen on the Secretary of State's website, are full of abuses of the campaign expenditure laws, going back years. She used campaign cash for personal use at hotels, restaurants, shopping and coffee shops - expenses not tied to her campaign in any visible way. When she realized it was about to be discovered in a reelection fight, she bailed out.

The proof is in her 2024 First Primary Report, she lists tons of personal expenditures, then amends the report and claims she reimbursed the campaign $11,000. All of a sudden, the spending on fancy dinners, hotels, coffee shops and airplane tickets stops. That's interesting.

What changed? A well-known Albuquerque lawyer volunteered to review Correa Hemphill's campaign finance reports and told her that she is going to have MAJOR problems because of all the illegitimate expenses she made using campaign funds. Correa Hemphill freaked out and announced she'd drop out of the race for reelection – to avoid facing scrutiny. Strangely she's still there as a senator today, but she's not attending any of the legislative meetings that happen in New Mexico all summer. She's just not running for reelection.

The Ethics Commission is taking a look at her case right now. The Attorney General should look into her campaign's bank documents, and also her own personal bank documents, to see if she had some lobbyist or donor give her the $11,000 real fast to reimburse her campaign. Did she really write a check to "correct" all the expenditures at all? Did her campaign manager not tell her that using your campaign account as a personal ATM was illegal? Correa Hemphill is a professional educator - any violation of the Campaign Reporting Act is not "accidental." She would surely be aware that it is a basic violation to use campaign contributions to supplement her lifestyle. These violations are flagrant abuse of the public's trust.

Correa Hemphill only corrected ONE of her many campaign reports, even though ALL of them contain questionable spending items. Only once is it indicated that she paid her campaign back. She needs to be held accountable for using campaign contributions as personal money. She portrays herself as a working mom who had to give up her senate perch because she could not afford to be an unpaid legislator. The truth is that she COULD afford it, but only when she was wrongly using campaign funds to supplement her lavish lifestyle.

Correa Hemphill quit because she was about to get caught.

Just a few examples: thousands of dollars at Santa Fe restaurants, hotels, airplane tickets, coffee shops, and taxi cabs in New Mexico and out of state in fancy resorts and destinations in California. It is all in her public campaign expenditures reports at the New Mexico Secretary of State website.

This is the same grandstanding senator who ripped into the Western New Mexico University president for supposedly "lavish spending" by the school on the taxpayers' dime, while she herself was living it up on the dime of powerful special interests' campaign contributions. O, the hypocrisy!

Michael Baca
Albuquerque