Independent audit of dismissed Spaceport CEO Hicks to remain undisclosed to public

by Kathleen Sloan | November 4, 2020
3 min read
Virginia Galactic's White Knight 2 mothership over Truth or Consequences
Virgin Galactic's VMS Eve mothership was successfully launched from the Spaceport on Nov. 3 on a route that brought it over Truth or Consequences, while, on the ground, allegations of mismanagement at the taxpayer-supported spaceflight center are deemed inappropriate for public examination. Photograph by Andrew Potter copyright © 2020

More than two weeks after firing Chief Executive Officer Dan Hicks, the New Mexico Spaceport Authority board has still not released the independent audit that probably led to that firing.

Hicks, hired in 2016, was fired in a five-to-one vote during a closed special session of the board Oct. 16. The firing came shortly after the board received the independent audit report it had ordered to investigate various allegations leveled against Hicks by the former NMSA chief financial officer.

During the Oct. 16 meeting, NMSA Board Chairperson Alicia Keyes—who is also secretary of the New Mexico Economic Development Department—said the independent audit report was turned over to the Office of the State Auditor. “So it’s up to the State Auditor when the report is released,” Keyes said.

The Sun submitted an Inspection of Public Records Act request to NMSA on Oct. 19 for the NMSA-ordered independent audit, which was conducted byMcHard Accounting Consulting, based in Albuquerque.

At NMSA’s request, Public Information Officer Bruce Krasnow of the state Economic Development Department responded to the Sun via a phone call. It was best to make an IPRA request to the State Auditor, Krasnow said, not answering the question why that state entity would be the custodian of record for the Hicks audit.

The Sun sent an IPRA to OSA Records Custodian Bernadet Martinez on Oct. 27 and received an email response the same day.

“It’s an agency-initiated audit,” Martinez said, “and the firm performing the engagement is not one of the OSA’s IPAs [Independent Public Accountant]. That makes Spaceport America the record keeper as they contracted for the engagement. OSA understands it [the independent audit] will likely be released in the next couple weeks.”

The Sun went back to NMSA’s record custodian, attorney Lyndsay Hurilla, and PIO Krasnow, forwarding OSA Record Custodian Martinez’s statement that NMSA was the official record keeper. The Sun again asked for the independent audit or an official citation of an IPRA exemption for not fulfilling a records request. Yesterday, Nov. 3 was the 15th and last day NMSA had to respond to the Sun’s IPRA to be in compliance with the law.

Hurilla responded Nov. 3, stating, “We cannot permit inspection of these records because they are excepted from disclosure under the Inspection of Public Records Act (NMSA 1978, § 14-2-1).

“In consultation with other agencies and the Office of the Governor, the Spaceport Authority has determined that the records being sought are part of an employee’s confidential personnel file and not available to public inspection at this time under 1.7.1.12(C) NMAC.”

The administrative code cited by Hurilla states: “[D]ocuments concerning infractions and disciplinary actions; performance appraisals; opinions as to whether a person should be re-employed; . . .” are exempted from public disclosure.

According to the Las Cruces Sun’s reporter, Algernon D’Ammassa, in an Oct. 16 article, the former NMSA CEO Zach DeGregorio submitted a four-page complaint in June, accusing Hicks of pressuring him to ignore financial controls.

D’Ammassa also reported EDD Secretary Keyes informed the State Legislative Committee last summer Hicks was also accused of possible criminal activity.

After DeGregorio’s complaint, an unrelated lawsuit was filed by Karen Barker, a former space systems engineer for Spaceport America, D’Ammassa reported. She accused Hicks and other Spaceport staff of gender-bias discrimination.

Despite taxpayers having investing hundreds of millions to construct Spaceport America, provide an annual operating subsidy and pay Hicks’s $159,000 salary for four years, the reason for Hicks’s dismissal remains hidden from the public.

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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.

1 thought on “Independent audit of dismissed Spaceport CEO Hicks to remain undisclosed to public”

  1. Isaac Eastvold

    Sounds like very bad government, a plain violation of the NM IPRA, and a betrayal of the reasons for which Sierra and Dona Ana taxpayers were lured into supporting this project in the first place.

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