T or C City Commission news roundup

by Kathleen Sloan | May 19, 2021
4 min read
Traci Alvarez in council chambers accepting a certificate of appreciation
Community Development Director Traci Alvarez stepped to the public microphone in the T or C commission chambers last week to accept a certificate of appreciation for her recent service as acting city manager. Source: City of Truth or Consequences Commission meeting video

The Truth or Consequences City Commission approved the promotion of Community Development Director Traci Alvarez to assistant city manager at its May 12 meeting. The promotion had new City Manager Bruce Swingle’s enthusiastic support.

Swingle, as he promised during the commission’s May 5 budget hearing, presented a resolution that sets the city’s policy for collecting overdue utility bills.

At the end of the meeting, Swingle asked the commission “for direction” about which city officials and staff members should speak to the press, but received no guidance.

ALVAREZ NAMED ASSISTANT CITY MANAGER

After former City Manager Morris Madrid’s resigned in early March, Traci Alvarez served as acting city manager for a little over two months until Swingle came on board, May 3. The May 10 meeting agenda called for Alvarez to receive a certificate of appreciation. She also received a promotion that was not on the agenda.

“Traci has shown time and time again she steps up to the plate,” City Commissioner Frances Luna said. “I say we make her assistant city manager. We are at the bewitching hour. It should be in the budget. Is it the will of the commission?”

“Normally I would need time to consider,” Swingle offered during the pause, “but I would very much support moving her into the assistant city manager position.”

Commissioner Randall Aragon questioned whether it was feasible for one person to serve as both the assistant city manager and community development director. “We can’t overwhelm her.”

City Clerk Angela Torres noted that William Slettom had served in both positions concurrently before his retirement about five years ago.

Swingle promised: “We will work on her workload.” Since Alvarez, he added, “would be doing both jobs anyway . . . she should be paid for it.”

Mayor Sandra Whitehead suggested Swingle, Finance Director Carol Kirkpatrick and Alvarez “come up with a salary.”

“Thank you for your vote of confidence,” Alvarez said.

RESOLUTION REGARDING COLLECTION OF PAST-DUE UTILITY BILLS

“There are a lot of informal policies or practices on collecting overdue accounts,” Swingle said, referring to Utility Office Manager Sonya Williams’ revelation at the commission’s May 5 budget session that unnamed superiors had sometimes intervened on behalf of delinquent utility customers to change the collection arrangements she had negotiated.

Favoritism or bullying and other inequitable treatment of utility customers with past-due balances can be prevented by “reducing practices to writing,” Swingle said, introducing a resolution clarifying the city’s collection policies.

Resolution 41 20/21 states city staff may “use all available resources authorized by ordinance or law to collect past-due utility accounts.”

Discretionary payment arrangements have been restricted, however. “The City will require residents having past-due utility account(s) to make full payment on current and subsequent monthly bills and pay off the balance within 12 months,” the resolution states.

In “rare and extreme circumstances,” the utility office manager may petition the city manager to allow a customer to pay off the overdue amount over a longer period of up to two years.

Mayor Pro Tem Amanda Forrister asked if past-due balances were “tied to the person, not the property?”

City Attorney Jay Rubin cited city ordinance 14-36 (H), which allows the city to “file a lien against the property.”

“That doesn’t sound reasonable to me,” Commissioner Aragon said. He expressed the opinion that a landlord should not be held to account for a renter’s utility debt.

Commissioner Luna, taking matters into her own hands, directed the utility office to inform landlords they can be held responsible for tenants’ utility bills. She also unilaterally declared they should be told they can receive copies of tenants’ utility bills, a means of staying apprised of the status of those accounts.

The city commission approved Resolution 41 20/21 unanimously.

PRESS RELATIONS

During the city manager’s report, Swingle asked the commissioners for “direction” on how to handle the press.

“Do you want me to answer their questions?” Swingle asked. “Do you want the press to have access to department heads? It’s not that they don’t know the answers. They are very knowledgeable.”

Earlier, Swingle had commented: “The public is craving information.” He elaborated: “The public feels it is beating its head against a wall. I need some direction.”

He attributed the public demand for more government transparency in part to the practice of prior city managers, who insisted on “signing contracts that the public often doesn’t know about.”

“That has to change,” Swingle stated.

Only Commissioner Aragon responded to the city manager’s request for guidance about how to handle inquiries from the press—by throwing the ball back to Swingle. “Concerning media access,” Aragon said, “tell us what you want.”

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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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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.

2 thoughts on “T or C City Commission news roundup”

  1. Peter Lawton

    I did a little research. The landlord does not seem to be responsible (nor should she, in my opinion) for tenant’s utility bills if the bill is in the tenant’s name and the rental or lease agreement clearly states the tenant has this responsibility. This doesn’t seem to be something our commissioners are particularly knowledgeable about, despite their zeal for collection of overdue electric bills.

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