City government transparency grows more opaque in the age of the coronavirus

by Kathleen Sloan | November 9, 2020
4 min read
The murky and faraway video recordings of T or C commission meetings (from one of which this screen shot was taken) are emblematic of how public access to these decision-making proceedings has been reduced by pandemic precautions and abandonment of oral management reports.

Truth or Consequences City Commissioner Randall Aragon complimented City Manager Morris Madrid on his written weekly reports at the Oct. 28 commission meeting, revealing there is a new back-room procedure that blocks sunshine on city activities. 

The Sun asked each city commissioner when and how this new procedure was instituted and if it had gone to a public vote, but none responded.

The Sun also submitted an Inspection of Public Records Act request for the last four reports and received those from Oct. 16, Oct. 23 and Oct. 30. Madrid didn’t send a report to city commissioners on Oct. 9, City Clerk Angela Torres said.

Madrid’s written reports are as slim as the prior verbal reports he made during city commission meetings, but even the few details they contain are no longer made public.

The Oct. 30 report states the city declared a disaster after the “July 26 flood event.” “We prepared and submitted this Emergency Request to the State of New Mexico Office of Emergency Management (OEM),” Madrid’s report states. It doesn’t give the dollar amount of the request or when it was submitted. Madrid has said in past commission meetings the request was “under $750,000.”

“The OEM reviewed the request and forwarded it to the Governor’s Office for approval a few weeks ago. Neither the OEM, nor we, has received a response,” Madrid wrote.

State Representative Rebecca Dow has agreed “to intervene in order to get a status on the request,” Madrid stated.

Madrid is meeting with an unnamed person at Sierra Vista Hospital sometime this week, according to the Oct. 30 report. The Civic Center might have to be utilized “should the Hospital near its capacity. We will provide every accommodation possible. . . .”

In the Oct. 23 report, Madrid warns: “Covid cases are rising.” In response, he is “restricting access to city buildings” and declared that the Oct. 28 meeting would not be open to the public. The agenda was also “shortened,” he stated.

T or C’s commissioners all declined to respond to the Sun’s inquiries as to when, why and at whose behest City Manager Madrid began submitting written management reports instead of presenting public updates at commission meetings.

Despite the rise in cases, Madrid told commissioners in the Oct. 23 and the Oct. 16 reports that the utilities department is “now sending out cut-off notices.” Since March, the city had kept utilities on for those unable to pay. Payment plans are being considered, he stated.

The police department, also in reaction to the spike in COVID-19 cases, is enforcing the governor’s mask-wearing mandate at Walmart, Madrid said, as well as “other high-traffic areas.”

The Oct. 16 report announces: “Our next Commission meeting will likely not include public attendance. Measures are already in place to conduct meetings in compliance with all requirements.”

Madrid made the same claim at the Oct. 14 meeting. After the meeting, the Sun told Madrid the online audio is so bad that preventing physical attendance will essentially close the meeting. Madrid said no one had complained about the audio.

The Sun has been copied on letters from residents to Madrid and the city commission complaining about the poor audio quality of the city’s online meeting platforms and witnessed “chat box” comments to the same effect made online during meetings. The city’s response to these complaints was to cut off the public’s ability to use the chat function in online meetings.  

Transparency about the details and costs of capital projects, always dim, will get worse as well. Madrid’s Oct. 16 report states he is preparing an “update” on capital projects, but it will be given to the city commission in writing, he said, “rather than in-person at the Commission meeting.”

Madrid was hired a year and 10 months ago. Capital projects have grown during his tenure from $4 million to $20 million, he reported, during the Aug. 26 meeting. That meeting, described as a retreat by Mayor Sandra Whitehead at the time, was held 45 miles out of town. It was a yearly “tradition,” Whitehead said in explaining why the board’s sole planning session is conducted far from the public eye.  

TAGS:
author
Kathleen Sloan is the Sun’s founder and chief reporter. She can be reached at kathleen.sloan@gmail.com or 575-297-4146.
Share this:
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.

Scroll to Top