Within a few months of relocating to Las Cruces, I had a read on the governance of the state and the city. As an outsider with considerable experience elsewhere in local government, I soon realized that, in New Mexico and Las Cruces, political rule was in the hands of GAGA, my acronym for Gringo and Grandee Alliance. As in the territory’s past and in the state’s present, the real power of rule has been in the hands of a few powerful, usually rich, Whites and Hispanics, and devil take the hindmost. Today, all others are valued only as a source of votes and taxes, and otherwise for silent subservience.
Within a year, I was writing a column for the Sun-News. Under the leadership of Jim Lawitz, who wanted something spicier than the usual bland editorial stuff in the paper at that time, it got at least as much as, perhaps more than, he wanted. Yet, to his credit, Jim censored only one column, “ It’s Time to Mess with Texas” because of the paper’s ownership. I ran the column as a blog, a popular one, as you can imagine. By contrast, today’s Sun-News has the idea that a free press should see no evil, hear no evil, and do nothing about evil. Not surprisingly, the paper is much smaller than it was.
My blog has not been popular with local GAGA members, for obvious reasons. My blogs describe and analyze what I have experienced in my dealings with city officials. I doubt that I am the only citizen with criticisms of government to get shabby treatment, but I believe that I have been treated more shabbily because city officials resent me for my blogs publicizing my criticisms and their responses. Regardless, the responses of GAGA members, their words or works, reflect on their character and conduct, and reveal their underlying attitudes and motives. Citizens may idolize city officials but should also know about their clay feet. They have less reason to be proud of themselves than their hubristic speechifying and strutting suggest.
The Brown Farm fiasco was the subject of repeated blogs on the city’s efforts to remediate a nearby floodplain. Earlier blogs skewered Public Works’s incompetence and City Manager Robert Garza’s mismanagement. They drew blood. Garza issued a report which insinuated that an “angry citizen”—guess who—did not understand the topography; Councilor Sharon Thomas invited me to meet to dissuade me from further criticism. She said that Garza was trying to change the “culture” in city government and my blogs were making his attempt more difficult. I wanted to laugh; instead I rejected her claim and effort to silence me. She never spoke to me again; how her snubs hurt—not. Subsequent work by Public Works has worsened the mess at much greater expense.
Resentment of apt criticism does not subside. Last year, before a Council meeting on a proposal for a citizens’ police review board, I encountered Tony Trevino, the Deputy Director of Public Works, in the hall outside chambers. After greetings, he said, “you don’t like us very much.” I said, “I do not like the messes you make and walk away from.” He replied, “Well, we do not like you,” and walked away. Tony is the epitome of the unprofessionalism of city leaders; it is all about personal likes and dislikes.
Another instance of unprofessionalism is former City Attorney Jennifer Vega-Brown’s series of exchanges, copied to others, about my case of LCPD’s five false allegations of code violations. Long after then IA Sgt. Sean Mullen reported that the allegations were unsupported, she lied that the violations had occurred and were well documented. In rebutting her lawyerly quibbles about the terms of the warning notice, I advised her not to get her knickers in a twist. Ignorant of the history of the phrase, she implied that I was sexist and resented my talking about her undergarments. I remedied her ignorance and quipped that she should exercise caution in explaining to her husband how I knew anything about them. She never thanked me for the instruction or the advice.
I have also blogged about City Clerk Christine Rivera’s deliberate, repeated violations of IPRA requirements in response to my IPRA requests, violations committed to vent her spleen and that of city employees whose conduct in office I have criticized. So she chose to play hard-ass with taxpayers’ dollars; she knew that her misconduct, unprofessional as it is, would have the support of the City Attorney, City Manager, and City Councilors.
Councilors are frequent targets. One is Johana Bencomo. At a Council meeting just after the George Floyd murder, she was for police reform, including a review board, until Mayor Ken Miyagishima attacked her for disloyalty to the police. She submissively, swiftly shifted to the opposite position. Later, when a panel made a case for a review board, she opposed it in the name of, as she emphasized it, “real police reform.” Her little joke; Bencomo has never proposed or supported anything leading to police reform, real or otherwise. More evidence of her submissiveness to male authority showed when, learning that former City Manager Ifo Pili broke his promise of an apology to me for the LCPD’s false allegations, she said and did nothing lest it prompt his rebuke.
Such is the quality of Councilor commitment to their constituents that they do not act on their behalf by either addressing issues to the City Manager or raising them in public Council meetings when they can speak at the end of the meeting. Cassie McClure is the most recent instance of this type of failure. When a friend and I met with her to discuss issues of good government, she was all for it and let on that she was not one to take the party line or be a team player if it was not on the up-and-up. But acting no differently from her predecessor, Kasandra Gandara, she has done nothing more than urge me to meet with the City Manager or the Police Chief, neither of whom, like the insecure or the juvenile, can address, much less admit, minor LCPD mistakes after five years. Even when she learned that Police Chief Jeremy Story broke a promise to me and failed to respond to my inquiries, she, like Bencomo, said and did nothing.
Councilors’ indifference to constituent service is matched only by their presumption of having some special understanding of how local government really works which those not elected to office lack. Thus, Becki Graham suggested that we meet, purportedly to discuss my issues. She did listen to me, then quietly, patiently explained that much of the Council’s and Councilors’ work goes on in private, to which I could not be privy. I remarked that I could see no difference in results and that back-room conversations did not square with invocations of transparency. I said nothing about her condescension to me, whom she presumed to be, despite my age, a naif in the world of the wise. She did not know that I had led the reform of the computer program and the effort to terminate a merit-pay program, in the Fairfax County, VA, public schools; that, through a meeting with the Secretary of Commerce, I persuaded the White House to drop a major proposal to realign two cabinet departments; and that I consulted to a Presidential Blue Ribbon Task Group—all before she graduated from high school.
The point of these unflattering stories is to show that local GAGA members prefer to focus on and react to people according to their likes and dislikes, not problems and solutions. Confronted by criticism, they are defensive and resentful. They either protect their employees and themselves by denying mistakes or dodging responsibility, or fear alienating them if they act on their constituents’ behalf. They resist suggestions for improvements or reform because they perceive them as implying employee deficiencies and deflating their presumption to know more and better than others. Their sense of importance is disproportionate to the size and insularity of a city known for its culture of political indifference, inertia, or ineffectuality. They regard themselves superior to their constituents, especially their critics, whom they scorn and treat shabbily. A little humility rather than hubris would go a long way to improving city government and public service.
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