Problems with information used to rationalize water-rate increase

by Kathleen Sloan | February 3, 2020
5 min read
​The City of Truth or Consequences City Commission took on a huge debt several weeks ago to fix the water pipes downtown, as well as other critical water-system improvements, and now it wants to raise rates to pay for the debt.  

The City is holding a series of town halls on the proposed 55-percent water rate increase, but that’s like shutting the barn door after the horse has bolted. 

The City Commission should have held the town halls on the water project itself, to see if the public approved of the indebtedness it would have to pay for. 

The City Commission approved the debt with no public hearing, without being given a presentation on the project by the engineering firm and without being given the City’s application for the $9.4-million loan and grant money from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, which comes with the condition that the City raise rates.

But the most important piece not presented to the City Commission and public was a cost analysis. 

The water project is going to tear up City streets downtown. The City has sewer pipes that are just as old as the water pipes that are not going to be replaced at the same time. That means the streets will have to be torn up twice. 

Maybe three times. The City also has a big drainage problem that street-replacement design may only partially solve during the water project. 

What will it cost City residents to fix each infrastructure problem separately versus at the same time? 

A few candidates running for City Commission and members of the public are also suggesting fiber-optic cable be installed at the same time water and sewer are repaired. 

The City is set on spending $1 million on smart meters installed on customer buildings, which give off spikes of electro-magnetic radiation. Residents are so against the possible ill-health effects they have presented an initiative ordinance banning smart meters to the City Commission. 

If the city put the $1 million into buried fiber-optic cable instead of smart meters, residents argue, it would create a smart-grid with leasable cable space, creating an income stream for the city. 

The other problem with the upcoming town halls is the Rural Community Assistance Corporation rate study that is being used to rationalize the rate increase. 

The RCAC is supplying a bridge loan of about $940,000 to the city over the next year before the USDA loan/grant of $9.4 million is disbursed. The RCAC is a not-for-profit hired by the USDA to train the rural government how to meet the debt and run the project to ensure the federal money is not wasted. Such a bridge loan is a condition of receiving the USDA loan. Therefore the RCAC is representing the USDA, not the City, yet the City is presenting the RCAC rate study to the people as a neutral study.

Karl Pennock, the RCAC representative, said during an interview, he got the City’s water-department financial figures from the City.

Pennock did not get his figures from an independent source, such as from the third-party firm the City hires to do its year-end audit. He also said, “I assume the transfers were legitimate,” not questioning where water funds went. His figures show that transfers out of the water fund put it in deficit five years out of the last six years. 

The Sun compared Pennock’s figures with the City’s financial statements attending the audits and they don’t match.  

Pennock’s rate study says the Water Department was in deficit $256,361 in fiscal-year 2017-18. The rate study shows $510,573 was transferred out. In contrast, the financial statement attending the audit says $2,718,799 was transferred out and $1,956,345 was transferred in, for a difference of negative $808,282 in the fund. 

In fiscal-year 2016-17, Pennock’s rate study says the water fund was $160,014 in the black and $308,777 was transferred out of the water fund. The audit’s financial statement says $10,217,873 was transferred out and $11,790,507 was transferred in, for a difference of positive $2,070,934 in the fund. 

This huge amount of money put in and out of the water fund demonstrates it is used as an inter-fund transfer weigh station. 

Pennock’s rate study goes back three more years, but the City’s financial statements for those years do not break out the electric, water and wastewater funds from each other, pooling them into the Joint Utility Fund, with massive transfers going in and out to numerous funds.  

Pennock also has figures for fiscal-year 2018-19, but the City turned in its financial statement and audit late to the State, and it is still not available to the public. 

The point is, the City and RCAC are treating the water fund in isolation for examining its “losses” over the last six years, when the City does not run it or any of its utilities as separate entities, thus making it impossible to separate out real costs and profits from the Joint Utility Fund and other City-operation costs.

Since the people’s rate money was pooled, where it went needs to be presented to determine if the people have paid their fair share to maintain the utilities in concert. 

If the City used the rate funds for non-utility purposes, the City’s management of the funds needs to be examined alongside a possible rate increase.  

In any case, it is unfair to present a rate study that presumes the water department has been run as a separate entity, when it has not.  

author
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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