Two residents complain EB didn’t put mayor’s empty seat on November 2019 ballot

by Kathleen Sloan | September 9, 2019
4 min read
​The Elephant Butte City Council couldn’t put its empty mayor’s seat on the county’s November 2019 election ballot, despite complaints from residents their right to vote has been denied. 

Mike Williams, who has submitted a letter of interest in filling the Mayor’s seat, as well as Kathy Norton, who has sent letters supporting Williams’ bid for mayor, said the seat could have been on the ballot at the Sept. 4 meeting. However, it is clear the Council was prohibited by state law. 

First, according to Sierra County Clerk Shelly Trujillo, who runs the “Regular Local Elections,”as titled in state law, said the state passed a new election law giving cities the choice of continuing to hold their own elections or letting the county combine them with regular local elections. The cities had to decide by Jan. 31, 2019.

If the city handed elections over to the county, their elections would change from March to November and their seating of winning candidates from March to January. Cities were given a choice. They could extend the current city board members’ terms from March 2020 to Jan. 1, 2022, with elections held November 2021. Or, they could shorten the terms from March 2020 to Dec. 31, 2019, with elections held November 2019. 

Elephant Butte and the Village of Williamsburg both chose to let the county run regular local elections and both opted to extend board members’ terms, saving thousands of dollars in elections costs. The City of Truth or Consequences will still run their own city-commission elections, three seats opening in March 2020.

The option for putting the mayor’s seat on the ballot disappeared when the Elephant Butte City Council opted for extended terms, said Trujillo. It was an irreversible decision. 

Elephant Butte Attorney Charles Rennick said the election options were on the Jan.9, 16 and 23 council-meeting agendas with minutes of those discussions on the website. 

When Elephant Butte’s city council made the opt-in/extended-terms decision, they had no idea Mayor Eunice Kent was going to resign, effective March 6, 2019.

Kent didn’t know either, she said, in a recent interview. Family issues came up that “became too much,” and she wanted to pursue personal interests. After 11 years of service, she decided to resign before her March 2020 term was up. 

No special election is possible either. State law makes no provision for holding a special election for a city-mayor’s seat, according to Rennick. 

In addition, Elephant Butte’s mayor-council form of government is different from Truth or Consequences’ city manager-council form of government. The mayor has greater powers, is elected by the people and the position is separate from council seats that fill in the order of highest vote. Therefore Elephant Butte does not have an open council seat; it has an open mayor’s seat that must be filled. 

Mayor Pro-Tem Edna Trager said they have received three letters of interest from electors interested in filling a city council seat, but none are open, and won’t be, unless the mayor position is filled by a council member.  

In lieu of an election, the city council has the power to fill the mayor’s seat by a majority vote. Eligible candidates must be Elephant Butte voters. Three people have submitted letters of interest, Kim Skinner and Edna Trager, both council members, and Mike Williams. 

The council has taken two votes on the candidates. Both times Williams’ name was not put forward by anyone on the board. Both times Skinner and Trager got two votes each, ending in a tie, “in which case a person is not selected and the mayor pro tem continues to serve,” said Attorney Rennick. The mayor pro-tem is Trager. 

The city council passed a motion to delay any further vote until October 16, “because we were dealing with the audit, the budget and changing staff,” said Trager, in a recent interview. 

If the mayor’s seat is filled by a council member, filling the resulting vacated council seat is a different process. According to Rennick, “If a council seat becomes open, the mayor appoints a new councilor with the advice and consent of the council, i.e., the council has to approve the appointment. The person appointed would serve until the next Regular Local Election, which in this case would be November, 2021. At that time, the position would be on the ballot for election by the voters to fill the remaining unexpired term of the original councilor, if any. Note that this is different from filling a mayor’s position. That person, when elected by the council, serves out the entire unexpired term of the original mayor, without an intervening election.”

Mike Williams’ phone number is unpublished and other attempts to reach him for comment were not successful 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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