Saturday, April 7, 2007

Suit alleges conservancy board met privately, violating Open Meetings Act

Juan-Carlos Rodriguez Copyright © 2007 Albuquerque Journal; Journal Staff Writer

Albuquerque A conservancy district official claims the Middle Rio Grande Conservancy District Board violated the state Open Meetings Act by holding meetings before regularly scheduled meetings.

Board member Bill Turner is taking five fellow board members to court, saying they violated the act on numerous occasions over the past several years.

The lawsuit, filed Friday in state District Court, is the latest escalation in months of conflict between Turner and other MRGCD board members and staff. They have clashed over Turner's assertions of district impropriety and the district's claims that his water rights business is a conflict of interest.

"The MRGCD has been breaking the law for so long, and they need to be stopped," Turner said. "The public needs to be aware of the malfeasance in that office."

The lawsuit alleges board members Jose Otero, Gary Perry, James Roberts, Augusta Meyers and Jimmy Wagner — constituting a quorum of the board — have gathered before official meetings to plan agenda items and craft resolutions in violation of state law.

Otero, the board's chairman, denied the allegation.

"I think (Turner's) real push is to influence the upcoming election," Otero said. "I think this is all a strategy on his part to make the board look bad."

The district's June 5 election is to fill three board seats — those of Otero, Meyers and Hector Gonzales, the only other board member not named in the lawsuit.

The New Mexico Open Meetings Act requires the board to notify the public of its official meetings and requires they be open to the public. The board can vote to go into a closed session under certain exceptions allowed by the act. A quorum is the number of elected officials required to do the board's business.

The lawsuit claims "pre-meeting meetings" took place in chief engineer Subhas Shah's office before publicly advertised board meetings and sometimes included MRGCD legal counsel Chuck DuMars or his law partner Tanya Scott. The lawsuit also names Shah, DuMars and Scott.

Bob Johnson, executive director of the New Mexico Foundation for Open Government, said such meetings don't necessarily constitute a violation of the Open Meetings Act.

"The fact that these people were in the same room together doesn't mean they were discussing public business," Johnson said. "Certainly it's suspicious, but the law does not say a quorum cannot be together outside of a public meeting."

DuMars said Turner's lawsuit is frivolous.

"There's absolutely no basis for any allegation of a violation of the Open Meetings Act," DuMars said. "For a while, these guys, who are friends, would sit around and talk — maybe 10 minutes before the meetings — but they stopped doing that as soon as Mary Smith said you should basically never have a quorum if you're going to talk."

Smith, a staff attorney with the state Attorney General's Office, at DuMars' request made a presentation to the board in June 2005 regarding compliance with the Open Meetings Act.

The lawsuit claims the "pre-meeting meetings" continued after that.

Roberts said he occasionally met with a couple of other board members when they arrived at scheduled meetings early, but their conversations revolved around their businesses.

Turner isn't the only one claiming to have witnessed the "pre-meeting meetings."

Attached to the lawsuit are affidavits from three people who say they saw quorum gatherings in Shah's office. They are Daniel Hernandez, an Albuquerque Metropolitan Arroyo and Flood Control Authority board member; James Maestas, an organizer with the New Mexico Acequia Association; and Lisa Robert, secretary of the Assessment Payers Association of the MRGCD.

"I was shocked to see a quorum together out of the public eye," Hernandez said in his affidavit.

Turner takes issue with a "pre-meeting meeting" in July 2005 that he claims was held to discuss Karen Hill, the MRGCD's secretary at the time.

Turner says a well-prepared resolution presented by Perry at the scheduled board meeting made him suspicious that it had been discussed and crafted in the earlier meeting.

The district has filed two lawsuits of its own against Turner, including one to remove him from the board for insubordination and alleged conflicts of interest with his water brokerage business.

Turner denied any conflict of interest.

"I don't deal at all in MRGCD water rights," he said.

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