Elephant Butte board dynamic sure to change with new city council member

by Kathleen Sloan | May 2, 2020
4 min read
A slight tussle and it was all over, making Mike Williams the new city council member bringing the board up to five members, which has struggled as a four-person board prone to tie votes since last March. 

Making the Elephant Butte City Council whole was finally accomplished at the Nov. 6 meeting. It had to be done in a certain order to follow state law. 

First, the mayor’s seat had to be filled, since the mayor appoints others to vacancies with the consent of remaining city council members. The remaining four City Council members decided who was to be mayor after Eunice Kent resigned as mayor last March. 

Mayor Pro Tem Edna Trager and City Council Member Kim Skinner both wanted to be mayor. City Council Member Gerald LaFont voted with Trager and City Council Member Travis Atwell voted with Skinner, resulting in two tie votes held over the seven intervening months. 

Skinner gave way, casting her vote for Trager at the October meeting, who was sworn in as mayor at the Nov. 6 meeting. 

Trager was mayor pro tem, who takes over mayoral duties when the mayor is absent, leaving that office open. On the Nov. 6 agenda she announced Skinner would be appointed mayor pro tem, but Skinner and Atwell objected to Trager making a unilateral decision. 

Skinner read the state law that says:
3-12-1 Any vacancy on the governing body of a mayor-council municipality shall be filled by appointment of a qualified elector by the mayor of the municipality, with the advice and consent of the governing body. Any qualified elector appointed to fill a vacancy on the governing body shall serve until the next regular local election, at which time a qualified elector shall be elected to fill the remaining unexpired term, if any.

Trager said earlier in the meeting, “It’s not a vote.” She had consulted the newly-hired law firm, Holt Mynatt Martinez, which advised the city council does not put appointments on the board to a vote. 

Atwell disagreed, and said prior-City Attorney Charles Rennick had said such appointments do require a board vote. 

Skinner said “advise and consent” meant putting it to a vote, adding “I would feel better,” if fellow members confirmed they wanted her in the position. Trager conceded, stating the board had always behaved in a “collegial” manner.  

The vote was unanimous and Skinner is now mayor pro tem. 

That left Skinner’s position as city council member open. Trager said she would start by stating who she wanted among the four electors who had expressed interest: Mike Williams, Johanna Tighe, Ken Swan and Patsy Barnett. 

Trager said Ken Swan was an active businessman and had done a lot for the community, including supporting ATV events. 

Swan said, in his letter of interest, “As a long time, self-made business owner and community involved individual, I understand the daily workings of any business, and that’s what the operation of the City is, a business.” 

“I second Ken Swan’s appointment,” LaFont said, who attended by phone. 

Atwell objected, stating Trager didn’t put forth Swan’s name as a motion. 

Skinner said, “I disapprove of that,” putting forth Mike Williams’s name in a motion, claiming he was more qualified.

Atwell seconded Skinner’s motion. 

Since the mayor does not vote unless there is a tie, Trager realized immediately Skinner and Atwell held a majority over LaFont among the three council members. “There you have it,” Trager said. 

Williams was sworn in shortly after and took his seat on the city council. 

Williams was in law enforcement for 30 years. He investigated alcohol, mortgage, construction and securities wrongdoing for New Mexico. He did all aspects of law enforcement as a deputy for the Bernalillo Sheriff’s Department. For 25 years he helped negotiate union contracts on the labor side of the table. His resume shows he held public office in Rio Rancho, a city of over 100,000. He was deputy mayor for five years and voted mayor by his fellow-board members in 2007. He was a city council member from 2000 to 2012. He was the general manager for Turtleback Mountain Resort’s Sierra del Rio Golf Course for two years until it was turned over to the city, April 15, 2017. 

“I want to move the city forward,” Williams said. “I’ve got a lot of work to do.” 

Neither Skinner nor Atwell returned calls for comment by press time. 

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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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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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