LAS CRUCES COUNCILORS FAIL GOVERNMENT LEADERSHIP

Las Cruces touted its first City Council with all six Councilors female.  A fair question is whether this all-female cast of Councilors has achieved any qualitative improvements in city government or city services.  I consider only public safety and public works.

 

If Johana Bencomo is typical, the Councilors are subservient to Mayor Miyagishima.  As I have noted before, when she spoke in support of a citizens’ police review board, the mayor scolded her for being disloyal to the police, and she immediately and contritely withdrew her support.  Since then, given his aggressive opposition to police reform, they have opposed a citizens’ group formally constituted and empowered to review police performance.  They have also failed to exercise oversight themselves or to enact policies and practices to define and support police professionalism.

 

If Casandra Gandara’s close friendship with City Attorney Jennifer Vega is typical, the Councilors take their lead from Vega on matters affecting public safety.  The sisterhood is strong but fecklessness in avoiding public discussion of three important episodes:

 

The choke-hold killing of Antonio Valenzuela by Officer Christopher Smelser and the City’s $6.5 million, City Attorney-approved settlement of the lawsuit.  As part of that settlement, the City agreed to several reforms.  They have not publicly questioned whether the LCPD has complied with them.  No questions, no answers, no transparency, no accountability.

 

The mauling and maiming of Julian Valenzuela by a K-9 loosed by LCPD Officer Mathew Dollar on the victim after he had surrendered.  They have not publicly questioned why the Officer Involved Shooting Task Force, a self-serving police organization answerable to no one, exonerated Dollar.  No questions, no answers, no transparency, no accountability.

 

The killing of Amelia Baca by Officer Jared Cosper and the City’s $2.75, City Attorney-approved settlement (a federal suit is still pending).  They have not publicly questioned why the Officer Involved Shooting Task Force decided not to charge or exonerate Cosper and, instead, referred the case to the local District Attorney.  No questions, no answers, no transparency, no accountability.

 

To ask these questions, the Councilors would have to question Police Chief Miguel Dominguez about LCPD’s conflict-of-interest participation in and leadership of that task force and, in the Baca killing, LCPD’s biased public-relations audio-visual of the event.  They would have to risk the Mayor’s accusation of not supporting the police.

 

Despite large settlements paid by the City, the Councilors have not publicly discussed the problems arising from self-insurance, which the Mayor touts.  He has to.  Otherwise, he would have to admit that the city is uninsurable.  No insurer takes the risks of large settlements for incidents of police misconduct so frequent and egregious that premiums would not cover them.  The City’s response is to take the City Attorney’s advice—easy for Council, costly and risky for citizens—to deal with police misconduct: make settlements rather than undertake police reform.  That is, she urges Councilors to reject reform, approve settlements subsidizing police misconduct, and keep taxes high to pay for them.  Through the sisterhood, Vega thus imposes excessive costs on Las Cruces.

 

The Councilors have been unconcerned about ineffective, expensive public works projects.  They tolerate obvious managerial and technical incompetence—project failure, wasted resources, environmental damage—on a large scale.  They tolerate squandering taxpayer money and reducing funds for social programs which they profess to support.  Again, they likely fear that the Mayor will accuse them of disloyalty to City employees if they discuss staff incompetence.

 

An outstanding example because of its size is the failure of a flood-control project by the Public Works Department under David Sedillo and his deputy Tony Trujillo.  It shows poor leadership, and arrogant and incompetent staff.  Years ago, as Trujillo knows, PWD held public meetings to explain an over-designed, over-priced plan; ignored citizen input for a simpler design at lower cost; then last year adopted and executed a different, over-designed, over-priced, three-phase plan.  When the $500,000 first try at Phase 1 failed, PWD ignored more citizen input and, for an additional $100,000-plus, doubled-down for more of the same.  With Phase 1 a failure, Phases 2 and 3 are on hold.  City Manager Ifo Pili will likely repeat the Garza administration’s management strategy; abandon project, fund no remedial action, let site degradation continue—the city’s environmental policies be damned.  It could have been worse; had citizens not intervened, PWD would have cut down mature trees on the site—just because.  (Nor do Pili and Sedillo care about trash dumped on city property.  For over 6 months, they have promised citizens to require the farmer-lessee to remove piles of useless irrigation tubing and a long-abandoned tractor.  Peeved with me, they refuse to honor their promises by enforcing municipal codes.)

This first all-female cast of Councilors may mark the arrival of gender equality in City government, but they have not improved the quality of city government.  They care not about the causes and costs of police misconduct and the costs of public works fiascos.  They prefer public silence to transparency and accountability.  So they decline to ask questions, get answers, and enact public policies and city ordinances; and to supervise the City Manager and, tacitly, the Police Chief.  They prefer an amiable City Manager slack in exercising managerial authority, tolerant of staff arrogance and incompetence, and reluctant to hold anyone accountable for poor performance and wasted resources.  But, to City Council’s relief, Pili is no “militarist” who manages more than backscratches.

 

Because their inaction betrays their lofty words, these Councilors impose undesirable consequences of their fecklessness on citizens.  They avoid police reforms; citizens still fear undisciplined police officers.  They accept wasting funds on failed public work; some citizens—homeless, hungry, or unhealthy—thus have no roof over their head, no food on their tables, and no doctors to treat their problems.  They are too scared to ensure the proper allocation and application of resources to public services and too uncaring to meet urgent human needs.  They have not even asked the City Manager how his war on poverty is going, but, then, they have no way to measure progress or failure, and have to take him at his word that filling potholes and improving lighting on East Madrid counts.

 

Touted as the City’s first all-female cast of Councilors, they impede greater public safety or public works, and increased assistance to the need.  Are they impediments because they are female?  No.  But touting this cast of Councilors for being all female does invite scrutiny of their performance in light of continued government deficiencies.  Plainly, in two important areas, they do not measure up, and none of them is going to.

WATER BILLS--CITY SWINDLE?

On 10 November, I addressed the Utilities Board of Commissioners chaired by Edmund Archuleta about my bills from the Utilities Department for monthly water usage over the years.  (Usage shown on its bills differs from usage shown on its monitoring app UtilityHawk.)  My concern is not only the charges themselves, but also the possible bilking of citizens by systematic overcharges.

 

The Department’s and the Board’s explanations for an annual bell-shaped curve of water usage typify the response of City of Las Cruces government to citizen complaints.  It never makes mistakes, citizens always make mistakes, so it has nothing to admit or explain.

 

In the case of excessive water bills, the Department and the Board propose various explanations, however implausible, for my problem and let me alone assume the costs of verifying or refuting them.  The City takes no responsibility for the costs imposed if they are refuted.  Meanwhile, it never considers a problem on its side of the meter, continues collecting revenues—a form of taxation without the name—to which it may not entitled, and enjoys the sanction of Councilors, currently Tessa Abeyta and Johana Bencomo, who sit on the Board.

 

 

In 2007, I bought a property with a stone wall on three sides, no pool, and a house built on a concrete pad.  It had a drip irrigation system which I immediately tore out; I watered by measured bucketfuls until new vegetation was established by 2014.

 

Between 2007 and 2014, my wife and I used water in the usual ways: indoors for drinking water, bathing and showering, flushing toilets, doing laundry, cooking, and using the dishwasher; and outdoors for watering new shrubs and trees.  Our water usage averaged 2000 to 4000 gallons per month throughout the year, with seasonal variations.

 

After my wife and I divorced and she moved out in 2014, I used water for the same purposes except that I stopped using the dishwasher.  Yet the water usage reported on my bills not only did not decline, but actually increased.  Some months, it was at the usual level; other months, it rose to or fell from spikes.  My latest water bill reports October-through-October usage in these thousands of gallons:

 

2, 2, 6, 9, 11, 12 (March), 8, 8, 6, 5, 3, 3, 3.

 

On two or three different occasions since about 2018, staff from the Department have inspected my house—baths, showers, toilets, sinks, dishwasher, hot water heater, water softener—and found no leak.  I told them that I had taken out a drip irrigation system, so they did not look for one.  My plumber has probed or dug the ground in the front yard around the meter box and between it and the front walls of the house, and found no evidence of water.  The Department has changed the water meter, with no noticeable difference; it shows a steady leak of about 1.5 gallons per hour.

 

 

The Department offers two explanations for this bell-shaped curve.  A new one: a still-buried drip irrigation system unknown to me, with no visible connection or control box.  The old one repeated every time staff inspect the premises: a leak, though leaks do not swell and shrink by a factor of six on an annual cycle.

 

Simple arithmetic shows that a leak cannot account for monthly water usage reported in my bills.  A leak of 1.5 gallons per hour would amount to 36 gallons per day.  Rounded to 40 gallons a day, the leak for a 30-day month would be 1200 gallons.  If that much water leaked, the range of water usage would increase from 2000 to 4000 gallons, to 3200 to 5200 gallons, a range of water usage far below a range fluctuating from 6000 to 12,000 gallons over six months.

 

Again, simple arithmetic shows that a leak of 11,000 gallons in February and 12,000 gallons in March in my residence or on my property could not escape detection.  One gallon equals 0.134 cubic inches; 12,000 gallons equals about 1,604 cubic feet of water.  That volume of water would fill a pool 4 feet deep, 20 feet long, and 20 feet wide.  That much water in my yard would turn it into quicksand.

 

During my presentation, Chair Archuleta offered a another possibility: a neighbor tapping into an outdoor faucet and using my hose attached to it.  I am sure that a near-retirement nurse with no pool on one side and an elderly retired couple on the other with a hot-tub would not appreciate his gratuitous slur of water-pilfering.  Of course, the possibility still leaves open where the water presumably diverted to their property went.

 

Given their efforts to deflect responsibility by imagining implausible explanations of reported wildly fluctuating water usage, the Department or the Board may soon imagine a George-Soros-funded, space-based tractor beam which draws water from my property up to the drought-plagued planet from which came The Man Who Fell to Earth.

 

In the meantime, the Department wants me not only to ignore these spikes, which I pay for, and consider only the most recent, a 3000-gallon month, but also to agree that the curve of annual water consumption with its spikes in years past will not recur.  Despite its insistence that a leak must be on my side of the meter, the lack of evidence means that no leak is there to be found, certainly not one fluctuating wildly.

 

My conclusion: My problem arises in the Department, in its hardware, software, policies, or personnel.  It persists because, after several years of complaint, it would be embarrassed to admit a mistake, and the Board, with Councilors on it, serves to spare it, not serve citizens with competent and honest government.  Worse, my problem may be one shared by many others who have long been overcharged, as I have been.

 

My recommendation: a technical analysis, an accounting audit, a forensic review of both the analysis and the audit—all independent—, and a public report to the City Manager and the City Council.  Also help for those who cannot face the facts, cannot admit a problem, and cannot adopt a reality-based approach to both facts and problems.

WHO REMEMBERS AMELIA BACA?

 On 16 April, Jared Gosper, a veteran LCPD police officer, killed Sra. Amelia Baca.

 

Every police agency involved—LCPD, DASO, NMSUPD, and NMSP—worked to absolve this killer.  LCPD Police Chief Miguel Dominguez resorted to a PR film which presented the 75-year-old Hispanic woman with dementia in a bad light and her killer in a good light.  Despite the conflict of interest, six LCPD officers, including Dominguez, sat on the task force which sent a secret report to Third District Attorney Gerald Byers.  He ducked the decision to prosecute the killer by sending the case to NM Attorney General Hector Balderas.  After today’s election, Banderas will decide not to prosecute the killer.  Such is justice in New Mexico.

 

Las Cruces was briefly excited by the police killing and the film of this killing.  A few people protested for a day or two at Picacho and Main, not far from LCPD headquarters.. Then, they went home or moved on to another cause.  They have forgotten Sra. Baca.

 

City officials—Mayor Miyagishima; Councilors Kasandra Gandara, Johanna Bencomo, Gabe Vasquez, who had touted police reform; City Manager Ifo Pili; City Attorney Jennifer Vega—have stayed silent.  They have forgotten Sra. Baca.

 

The Las Cruces Sun-News and its investigative reporters, Justin Garcia and Algernon D'Ammassa—, after headline-grabbing articles, dropped the subject.  They have not reported or commented on the task force composition or the DA’s decision to turn the case over to the NMAG.  They have forgotten Sra. Baca.

 

Two VIPs dropped the subject.  One VIP, Peter Goodman, first wrote an on-the-one-hand, on-the-other-hand column: poor Sra. Baca, who suffered dementia; poor Officer Gosper, who awoke with no intent to kill.  He then wrote to advocate a Civilian Police Oversight Board.  Later, he joined other VIPs to lobby local officials, lost, but wrote nothing about lessons learned from their resistance to police reform.  Nor did this now-and-then lawyer write about the handling of this case by police and prosecutors.  He has forgotten Sra. Baca.

 

The other VIP, Bobbie Green, president of the local NAACP chapter, joined other VIPs to lobby officials for a CPOB.  She did not lead chapter members to protest the killing of a Hispanic woman of color, push for police reform, or support the CPOB proposal.  She has forgotten Sra. Baca.

 

Apparently, those who have forgotten Sra. Baca do not value the life of an elderly Hispanic woman killed by a police officer or condemn another police execution of a harmless citizen.  Otherwise, they would have remembered her by pursuing police reform.  I have not forgotten Sra. Baca, scorn those who have, and hope that her family will receive the justice due them.

ANTISEMITISM HERE AND NOW--IS A POGROM COMING?

“The first thing we do, let’s kill all the Jews.”  I misquote Shakespeare; in Henry VI, part ii, Jack Cade, leading a populist rebellion, wants to kill all the lawyers.  Given a joke current in New England decades ago—every Jewish family has one lawyer, except those which have two or three—, kill the one, kill the other, it almost comes to the same thing.

 

Dana Milbank’s recent editorial “American Jews start to think the unthinkable” (The Washington Post, 28 October) reports that some Jews are beginning to think of leaving America and going into exile.  Some people hope that they do—or else.  As Trump warns American Jews in obvious mobster lingo, they had better cozy up to him “before it is too late.”  “Too late” for what?  What would this dictator-would-be do if it were “too late”?

 

Nothing in the recent surge in antisemitism elsewhere—none yet reported in New Mexico—surprises me.  By the time I was 10, I had taught myself that America could turn antisemitic in a fascist revival.  I had read about Henry Ford’s Dearborn Independent’s 1920s diatribes on Jewish plans to control the world and about Father Coughlin’s 1930s antisemitic and pro-fascist radio broadcasts.  I had read newspaper stories of the 1945 discoveries of the death camps--the starvation, overwork, beatings, tortures, medical experiments, murders, incinerations—designed for Jews.  I had heard about anti-Jewish residential restrictions in my hometown, Shaker Heights.  The legacy of my early self-education is forbearance in the face of antisemitism, now accelerating and increasing the chances of a pogrom in America.

 

But most Americans know little about Holocaustic antisemitism in fascist Germany for three reasons.  One, Auschwitz, the icon of antisemitism in Europe, teaches nothing about it.  Two, the atrocities are so horrific, so enormous, and so long ago and far away that they make perpetuation by a state or acceptance by its people incomprehensible or unimaginable.  Fact: Germany, a modern state, became genocidally antisemitic, and its cultivated, educated people accepted genocide for Jews.  Three, atrocities resulting from antisemitic polices start small, then worsen exponentially.  Fact: antisemitic leaders slowly harden those with moral or religious principles to the coarseness required to accept ever more brutal behavior toward Jews.  With antisemitism rife in their history, always latent, sometimes overt, Germans quickly adjusted to barbarities against Jews.

 

Note: My subject is antisemitism, but the same principles and practices applied to other groups, whether social (Roma, Sinti), religious (Jehovah’s Witnesses), racial (Blacks especially but not exclusively), political (socialists, communists), national (Poles, etc.), gender (LGBTQ), or medical (the disabled).  They apply to a society’s outliers and others stigmatized.  We have outliers right here is America.  Among those stigmatized here: Jews, Blacks, Hispanics and Asian-Americans, and LGBTQs.  Trump’s mocking a reporter with a disability or RNC chair Ronna McDaniel’s mocking Pennsylvania’s Democratic Senatorial candidate with a stroke-induced speech impediment is no aberration.  The party is built on a diverse array of forms of abuse, as their anti-people policies imply.

 

So what about America and Americans?  Has the country and its people become used to antisemitism?  Is the concept of America as a “Christian nation” justifying the growth of antisemitism?  The increasing number of antisemitic episodes and the lack of prompt and unqualified repudiation by elected Republican leaders and officials mean that they know two things: the country and its citizens already tolerate antisemitism, and they can exploit antisemitism for their political purposes with impunity.  (Progressives do not use antisemitism in their campaigns for office.)  Republicans have succeeded in anesthetizing the righteous, and arousing and emboldening the rest.  Trump’s appeal to his base, most members of the Republican Party, and other voters under his sway have already forsaken America’s first foundational value, the equality of all people.  Any departure from that value is necessarily a step prompted by and taken toward bigotry.

 

Antisemitism is one such step.  As I have blogged, institutional racism is the result of its essential pre-condition, individual racism.  Likewise, other kinds of bigotry, including antisemitism.  Antisemitism begins, not with death camps and furnaces, but with slurs and violence.  It spreads when people ignore or deny such evidence of antisemitism in their community, neighborhood, circle of friends, and family—unless they themselves utter or act them.  Then this popular toleration enables antisemitic miscarriages of justice by the legal community—police, prosecutors, judges.

 

I recently asked a lawyer in the Governor’s administration about the circumstances prompting the Governor’s executive order about antisemitism.  The lawyer did not know.  I said that it did not apply to government personnel acting antisemitically in the exercise of their duties.  I gave the example of five false code violations alleged by a police officer who saw a Jewish star on my house but tolerated by city officials to resist the obvious inference about the officer’s motive.  The lawyer’s prompt response: antisemitism.

 

The 3-year-and-counting refusal of the Las Cruces mayor, all councilors, two police chiefs, and, notably, the city attorney to admit the facts and rectify the wrongs identifies each as an antisemite.  The mayor and councilors excluded them from police review; the LCPD closed my complaint without mentioning them; the city attorney defied them by asserting counter-factually that the violations were valid.  Worse, when the city manager admitted the facts and agreed to apologize for the false charges, the city attorney intervened to stop him from doing so.  Rule of thumb: antisemites never apologize for words or deeds offensive to Jews.  Their acts of omission or commission identify these officials as tenacious antisemites.

 

Is there a link between the antisemitism of Las Cruces officials and a pogrom?  Not if citizen disapprove of and protest antisemitic speech and acts.  But if they become more numerous and widespread, these antisemitic public officials will act in support of trends which play to their propensities.  They will do more of what comes naturally to them.  The exception to the rule of law in my case will likely become the rule in other false but more serious allegations against Jews, with jailing, penalties, and worse to follow.  In Las Cruces, with citizens indifferent to or tolerant of the abuse of law by their antisemitic officials, a pogrom is quite possible.  Will there be one?  Maybe.  If so, I may live to see it.

 

The lesson: Auschwitz ends what the antisemitic begin and the morally tainted or weak abide.