T or C Manager Swingle tightens city procedures and money belt

by Kathleen Sloan | May 27, 2021
7 min read
graphic illustrating the keys to good government
Source: threemountain.academy

With less than a month’s service as the city manager of Truth or Consequences, Bruce Swingle has ushered in good government procedures that reverse years of decision-making by staff behind closed doors instead of by city commissioners in open meetings.

Swingle infused T or C’s budget process with sunshine when, at a public budgeting session that took place on May 5—his third day on the job—he asked department directors to rationalize their proposed expenses to the city commissioners and informed the city commissioners that they were responsible for making the fiscal policy decisions inherent in creating a budget.

Yesterday, during the city commission’s May 26 meeting, Swingle introduced several agenda items that again sought to reverse the usurpation by previous city managers of the commission’s authority and fiscal oversight.

RESOLUTION DEFINING CITY MANAGER AND CITY COMMISSION POWERS

Swingle presented a resolution that laid out what spending and negotiation powers the city manager has “with respect to funds and contracts,” and, in the process, made clear what expenditures and agreements must come before the city commission.

“It is clear no lines have been drawn . . . and staff has been pretty uncertain historically,” Swingle said, referring to the lack of established parameters defining staff’s authority to make procurement and contractual decisions.

Swingle’s resolution states that the city manager is “expressly authorized to execute contracts” of up to $20,000 for personal property [any asset other than real estate], services and construction, provided these expenditures are in the current fiscal year’s budget. The city commission, on the other hand, must approve contracts for items and services valued higher than $20,000 that are in the budget. It is also the city commission’s duty to approve contracts that are not part of the budget, no matter what the value of the contract.

“All procurements,” states the resolution, must follow city “Purchasing Regulations” and the state’s Procurement Code. According to T or C’s Chief Procurement Officer Kim Saavedra, the city’s procurement rules mirror the state’s. In addition, the resolution requires “a certified procurement officer” to sign off on contract and purchases to ensure their “conformance with procurement code.”

The city manager may approve transfer of monies between a department’s various funds, the resolution states. However, any transfer from one department to another must be approved by the city commission.

Legal settlements of up to $25,000 may be authorized by the city manager. Swingle explained that, since city managers are usually at the negotiating table in legal disputes, most attorneys assume the manager can negotiate up to this amount, which is the highest deductible of legal-insurance policies. All other legal settlement authority is retained by the city commission.

The city manager may apply for grants, but resulting awards must first be approved by the city commission before they are accepted.

All memorandums of agreement or understanding, as well as joint powers of agreement, must be reviewed by the city attorney before the city commission exerts its sole authority to enter into these agreements.  

The city commission approved the resolution unanimously.

Mayor Pro Tem Amanda Forrister commended Swingle for adding “checks and balances and transparency” to procurement and contracting processes.

REIMBURSABLE GRANTS ARE STRAINING CITY’S LIQUID CASH POOL

On the agenda as a discussion item was a $1.2 million grant awarded MainStreet Truth or Consequences by the New Mexico Department of Transportation to renovate Foch Street between Main and Broadway streets. Swingle advised the commission that it is a “reimbursement grant.” In other words, he explained, the city has to come up with the cash to do the project and then grant monies will be disbursed based on receipts and proof of work.

“This will be hard for us to pull off with our cash problem,” Swingle said, illustrating that, unlike his predecessors, he intends to guide commission decision-making by providing pertinent financial information.

“The city already has a lot of reimbursable grants,” Swingle added. 

Mayor Pro Tem Amanda Forrister asked if acceptance of the MainStreet grant should be “postponed.”

The grant, Assistant City Manager Traci Alvarez pointed out, had already been accepted by former City Manager Morris Madrid.

City Attorney Jay Rubin confirmed that the grant “was already executed.” In any case, Rubin elaborated, no action could be taken, as the grant was on the agenda for discussion only.

Forrister asked how long it would take for NMDOT to reimburse the city. In her past dealings with the agency, Alvarez replied, “they are pretty quick to respond.”

In the future, Alvarez said she will consider “what we can float,” in terms of up-front cash, noting that projects initiated by the Senior Joint Office on Aging also use city cash that is reimbursed later.

TOO MANY LOANS

Over the past two years the commission has not been given a comprehensive overview by staff of the city’s capital projects priorities. Project grants/loans and bond refinancings have been largely rubber-stamped by the city commission, with no questions asked about their impact on the city’s debt or ability to cover repayment. In Swingle’s first month, he has provided context and guidance to help the city commission set capital priorities.  

At the May 5 budget meeting, the commission agreed that replacement of one of the city’s two 60-year-old electrical transformers is a top priority. The estimated cost has varied from $1.6 million to $1 million.

In the period since the budget meeting, Swingle determined that T or C “has too many loans already.” Nevertheless, he informed the commissioners on May 26, the need to replace the transformer is so urgent, his administration is seeking a loan from the New Mexico Finance Authority. The electric department’s profits are too high to qualify for grants, Electric Department Director Bo Easley had explained during his May 5 budget presentation.

Even though the city commission cut $1.8 million from the fiscal year 2021-2022 budget at the May 5 meeting, the cuts were not sufficient to cover the transformer-replacement cost, as evidenced by Swingle’s NMFA loan negotiation.

Commissioner Frances Luna stated on May 5 that $3 million needed to be cut from the budget, grasping the implications of Swingle’s explanation at the time that the transformer replacement was urgent. 

Swingle said he would keep the city commission informed about the NMFA loan negotiations.

Swingle is familiarizing himself with the expirations of existing city contracts and has run up against a tight deadline.

Swingle acknowledged that the city’s legal services contracts “have to go out to bid,” but also pointed out that there is not enough time to go through the bidding and award process by the time the existing contracts expire.

The city’s contracts with City Attorney Jaime (Jay) Rubin and John Appel, an associate attorney with the Coppler Law Firm of Santa Fe, expire at the end of June, Swingle said.

Both are four-year contracts. State procurement code 3-1-150 states that no contracts for professional services may exceed four years, “including all extensions and renewals.”

Rubin acknowledged that his four-year contract “ended February” and “it was extended from March 1 to June 30.”

Without guidance from Swingle that contract extensions are not allowed, the city commission granted Rubin a second extension on his contract, from July 1 through Sept. 30, and Appel his first extension for the same time period.

“We will use legal services quite a bit in the near future,” Swingle warned the commissioners.

$36 MILLION TO BE SOUGHT FOR WATER/WASTEWATER INFRASTRUCTURE

Although past city managers have opined the city’s water and wastewater infrastructure is in bad shape, Swingle is the first to act on the realization that the 50-year-old systems have hit the critical point where they must be replaced rather than continuously repaired.

Having evidently conferred with Wilson & Company, the city’s on-call engineering firm, Swingle reported that about $36 million should be spent on new water and wastewater infrastructure. By seeking money for concurrent repairs to both systems, Swingle also recognizes the city will save millions in labor, equipment mobilization and street resurfacing. The previous administration tackled infrastructure replacement in separate, piecemeal projects.

Swingle said he’s already in touch with possible granting agencies, but told the commissioners that he was not yet ready to “divulge who they are at this time.”

Swingle is also the first city manager in 15 years or more to insist that the practice of transferring utility fee revenue out of department budgets and into the General Fund to pay for deficit spending must stop. He told city commissioners during the May 5 budget session that the practice is leaving the utilities without money to spend on upkeep and repairs.

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Kathleen Sloan is the Sun’s founder and chief reporter. She can be reached at kathleen.sloan@gmail.com or 575-297-4146.
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HAVE YOU SEEN?

Understanding New Mexico's proposed new social studies standards for K-12 students

“The primary purpose of social studies is to help young people develop the ability to make informed and reasoned decisions for the public good as citizens of a culturally diverse, democratic society in an interdependent world.”
—National Council for the Social Studies 

Reader Michael L. Hayes of Las Cruces commented: What impresses me is that both the proposed standards and some of the criticisms of them are equally grotesque. I make this bold statement on the basis of my experience as a peripatetic high school and college English teacher for 45 years in many states with many students differing in race, religion, gender and socioeconomic background, and as a civic activist (PTA) in public education (My career, however, was as an independent consultant mainly in defense, energy and the environment.)

The proposed social studies standards are conceptually and instructionally flawed. For starters, a “performance standard” is not a standard at all; it is a task. Asking someone to explain something is not unlike asking someone to water the lawn. Nothing measures the performance, but without a measure, there is no standard. The teacher’s subjective judgment will be all that matters, and almost anything will count as satisfying a “performance standard,” even just trying. Students will be left to wonder “what is on the teacher’s mind?” or “have I sucked up enough.”

Four other quick criticisms of the performance standards. One, they are nearly unintelligible because they are written in jargon. PED’s use of jargon in a document intended for the public is worrisome. Bureaucrats often use jargon to confuse or conceal something uninformed, wrong or unworthy. As a result, most parents, some school board members and more than a few teachers do not understand them.

Two, the performance standards are so vague that they fail to define the education which teachers are supposed to teach, students are supposed to learn, and parents are supposed to understand. PED does not define words like “explain” or “describe” so that teachers can apply “standards” consistently and fairly. The standards do not indicate what teachers are supposed to know in order to teach or specify what students are supposed to learn. Supervisors cannot know whether teachers are teaching social studies well or poorly. The standards are so vague that the public, especially parents or guardians, cannot know the content of public education.

Three, many performance standards are simply unrealistic, especially at grade level. Under “Ethnic, Cultural and Identity Performance Standards”; then under “Diversity and Identity”; then under “Kindergarten,” one such standard is: “Identify how their family does things both the same as and different from how other people do things.” Do six-year-olds know how other people do things? Do they know whether these things are relevant to diversity and identity? Or another standard: “Describe their family history, culture, and past to current contributions of people in their main identity groups.” (A proficient writer would have hyphenated the compound adjective to avoid confusing the reader.) Do six-year-olds know so much about these things in relation to their “identity group”? Since teachers obviously do not teach them about these other people and have not taught them about these groups, why are these and similar items in the curriculum; or do teachers assign them to go home and collect this information?

Point four follows from “three”; some information relevant to some performance measures requires a disclosure of personal or family matters. The younger the students, the easier it is for teachers to invade their privacy and not only their privacy, but also the privacy of their parents or guardians, or neighbors, who may never be aware of these disclosures or not become aware of them until afterward. PED has no right to design a curriculum which requires teachers to ask students for information about themselves, parents or guardians, or neighbors, or puts teachers on the spot if the disclosures reveal criminal conduct. (Bill says Jeff’s father plays games in bed with his daughter. Lila says Angelo’s mother gives herself shots in the arm.) Since teacher-student communications have no legal protection to ensure privacy, those disclosures may become public accidentally or deliberately. The effect of these proposal standards is to turn New Mexico schools and teachers into investigative agents of the state and students into little informants or spies.

This PED proposal for social studies standards is a travesty of education despite its appeals to purportedly enlightened principles. It constitutes a clear and present danger to individual liberty and civil liberties. It should be repudiated; its development, investigated; its PED perpetrators, dismissed. No state curriculum should encourage or require the disclosure of private personal information.

I am equally outraged by the comments of some of T or C’s school board members: Christine LaFont and Julianne Stroup, two white Christian women, who belong to one of the larger minorities in America and assume white and Christian privileges. In different terms but for essentially the same reason, both oppose an education which includes lessons about historical events and trends, and social movements and developments, of other minorities. They object to the proposal for the new social studies standards because of its emphasis on individual and group identities not white or Christian. I am not going to reply with specific objections; they are too numerous and too pointed.

Ms. LaFont urges: “It’s better to address what’s similar with all Americans. It’s not good to differentiate.” Ms. Stroup adds: “Our country is not a racist country. We have to teach to respect each other. We have civil rights laws that protect everyone from discrimination. We need to teach civics, love and respect. We need to teach how to be color blind.”

Their desires for unity and homogeneity, and for mutual respect, are a contradiction and an impossibility. Aside from a shared citizenship, which implies acceptance of the Constitution, the rule of law and equality under the law, little else defines Americans. We are additionally defined by our race, religion, national origin, etc. So mutual respect requires individuals to respect others different from themselves. Disrespect desires blacks, Jews or Palestinians to assimilate or to suppress or conceal racial, religious or national origin aspects of their identity. The only people who want erasure of nonwhite, non-Christian, non-American origin aspects of identity are bigots. Ms. LaFont and Ms. Stroud want standards which, by stressing similarities and eliding differences, desire the erasure of such aspects. What they want will result in a social studies curriculum that enables white, Christian, native-born children to grow up to be bigots and all others to be their victims. This would be the academic equivalent of ethnic cleansing.

H.E.L.P.

This postmortem of a case involving a 75-year-old women who went missing from her home in Hillsboro last September sheds light on the bounds of law enforcement’s capacity to respond, especially in large rural jurisdictions such as Sierra County, and underscores the critical role the public, as well as concerned family and friends, can play in assisting a missing person’s search.

Reader Jane Debrott of Hillsboro commented: Thank you for your article on the tragic loss of Betsey. I am a resident of Hillsboro, a friend of Rick and Betsey, and a member of H.E.L.P. The thing that most distresses me now, is the emphasis on Rick’s mis-naming of the color of their car. I fear that this fact will cause Rick to feel that if he had only gotten the facts right, Betsey may have been rescued before it was too late. The incident was a series of unavoidable events, out of everyone’s control, and we will never know what place the correct color of her car may have had in the outcome. It breaks my heart to think that Rick has had one more thing added to his “what ifs” concerning this incident.

Diana Tittle responded: Dear Jane, the Sun undertook this investigation at the request of a Hillsboro resident concerned about the town’s inability to mount a prompt, coordinated response to the disappearance of a neighbor. From the beginning, I shared your concern about how our findings might affect Betsy’s family and friends. After I completed my research and began writing, I weighed each detail I eventually chose to include against my desire to cause no pain and the public’s right to know about the strengths and limitations of law enforcement’s response and the public’s need to know about how to be of meaningful assistance.

There was information I withheld about the state police investigation and the recovery. But I decided to include the issue of the car’s color because the individuals who spotted Betsy’s car emphasized how its color had been key to their identification of it as the vehicle described in Betsy’s Silver Alert. Because the misinformation was corrected within a couple of hours, I also included in this story the following editorial comment meant to put the error in perspective: “The fact that law enforcement throughout the state was on the lookout in the crucial early hours after Betsy’s disappearance for an elderly woman driving a “light blue” instead of a “silver” Accord would, in retrospect, likely not have changed the outcome of the search” [emphasis added].

I would also point to the story’s overarching conclusion about the inadvisability of assigning blame for what happened: “In this case, a perfect storm of unfortunate circumstances, many of them beyond human control, hindered the search that it would fall to Hamilton’s department to lead.”

It is my hope that any pain caused by my reporting will eventually be outweighed by its contribution to a better community understanding of what it will take in the future to mount a successful missing person’s search in rural Sierra County.

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2 thoughts on “T or C Manager Swingle tightens city procedures and money belt”

  1. Barb Dewell

    Wow. We may all have to tighten our belts for a while, and probably open our wallets more than we’re used to, but Mr. Swingle seems to have a good grasp of what’s needed in T or C. I think we’re going to be very happy to have him here! Let’s try not to complain for a while, as he figures it all out and starts the process of getting us back on track as a successful city.

  2. Carol Borsello

    The uncommon practice of common sense … I commend Mr. Swingle! Thanks for looking out for us.

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