Sierra County Manager Bruce Swingle among T or C city manager applicants

by Kathleen Sloan | March 15, 2021
4 min read
headshot of Bruce Swingle
Bruce Swingle told the Sun he had applied to be T or C city manager because of the challenge. "I have a history of going to places that are having trouble," he explained. Source: LinkedIn

The Sierra County Sentinel, owned and edited by Truth or Consequences City Commissioner Frances Luna, revealed information from the city commission executive session held today, publishing online the names of applicants for the city manager position an hour after the session let out this morning.

The Sun submitted an Inspection of Public Records Act request for the city manager applications on March 12—the application deadline—and was told by the city clerk those documents would not be available until March 25.

Luna shared her privileged information with the Sentinel’s government reporter, Chuck Wentworth, who announced the names of the five candidates who applied for the position: Sierra County Manager Bruce Swingle; Elephant Butte City Manager Vicki Ballinger; Julian Jay Ruybalid, the former acting city manager of Sunland Park, New Mexico; Erica DeLad-Medina; and Mark Payne.

Swingle said in an interview with the Sun this afternoon that he is applying for the job because “I think I can help. Things are going very well at the county [where he has been county manager for six and a half years], and I have a history of going to places that are having trouble. I want the challenge. I’m excited at the possibility of the opportunity.”

Ballinger could not be reached by press time. In 2018 she applied to be T or C city manager during a search that resulted in the hiring of Morris Madrid.

Ruybalid, according to various news articles, was hired as the interim town manager of Dolores, Colorado, on June 27, 2018, having recently been the acting city manager for Sunland Park. He was city manager of Belen, New Mexico, from 2014 to 2016.

No information on DeLad-Medina or Payne was found in an online search.

City Clerk Angela Torres, in response to a question from the Sun, declared that no action was taken in the open session that followed this morning’s executive session. The Sentinel reported, however, that a special commission meeting had been scheduled for Tuesday, March 23, at which the five candidates will be interviewed. According to the Sentinel, an executive session will be held after the regular city commission meeting on Wednesday, March 24, presumably with the purpose of selecting select a city manager.

Executive sessions are not open to the public, but neither Clerk Torres or Acting City Manager Traci Alvarez were available to answer the Sun’s question about whether the March 23 interview session will be open to the public. The Sun has called for the public to have input into the hiring of the city manager, but that appears unlikely.

Luna was highly critical of T or C’s previous city manager, Morris Madrid, whose resignation took effect March 5. Madrid gave no reason for his resignation.

Before Luna “termed out” of her position as Sierra County Commissioner on Jan. 1, she worked with Bruce Swingle during much of her two four-year terms.

Luna was appointed by fellow T or C commissioners to assume the city commission seat vacated by Brendan Tolley, who resigned in August 2020. She held both the county commissioner and city commissioner seats for three months.

Last week the Sun emailed each of the city commissioners, asking them how the public was to be informed if action was taken on the city manager position following the March 15 executive session. None responded.

Under the state’s Government Conduct Act, government officials are not supposed to use their positions of authority for their own financial benefit. In the case of Commissioner/Publisher Luna, activities that run afoul of the act might include preventing a competing publication from accessing public information on a timely basis or using insider information from her government work to enhance the competitive edge of her newspaper.

The pertinent section of the Government Conduct Act is 10-16-6, captioned “Confidential Information.” It states: “No legislator or public officer or employee shall use or disclose confidential information acquired by virtue of the legislator’s or public officer’s or employee’s position with a state agency or local government agency for the legislator’s, public officer’s or employee’s or another’s private gain.”

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.

1 thought on “Sierra County Manager Bruce Swingle among T or C city manager applicants”

  1. Isaac Eastvold

    Mr. Swingle has done well as county manager. It would be regrettable for the county to lose him; but, at this time, the city needs him.

Comments are closed.

Scroll to Top