Bosque Farms meeting canceled after councilor allegations

BOSQUE FARMS — The regular June council meeting of a local municipality came to a abrupt end last week after a councilor accused the mayor and two councilors of breaking the law.

The conflict began when Bosque Farms Mayor Chris Gillespie asked the agenda for the June 26 meeting be approved with the removal of an action item concerning the requested annexation of a property by the neighboring town of Peralta.

Gillespie said after a long conversation with Peralta Mayor Bryan Olguin, they agreed the annexation request and a proposed memorandum of understanding between the two municipalities for EMS services needed more discussion.

“We would like to move the MOU and annexation into a meeting between the mayors, municipal clerks and attorneys to make sure both attorneys are comfortable from a legal standpoint,” Gillespie said. “We want to make sure the MOU is legal and in compliance with both municipalities’ rules and regulations.”

Councilor Erica De Smet held up an issue of the Valencia County News-Bulletin, opened to Page 2, saying the agenda for the meeting had been published with both the MOU and annexation included.

“Residents have the reasonable expectation to have those things back on the agenda,” De Smet said.

The News-Bulletin publishes draft agendas for upcoming public meetings in its DataBank as a courtesy to the public. Governing bodies can make changes to their agendas up to 72 hours before a meeting, which is noted in the paper. What is printed in the DataBank may or may not be the final version of an agenda, depending on how far the meeting is from publication.

De Smet then accused Gillespie and Councilors Tim Baughman and Ronita Wood, who was not at the June 26 meeting, of participating in a “rolling quorum,” which is when a majority of a governing body has a series of discussions or communications outside of a public meeting to discuss public business or take action in violation of the New Mexico Open Meetings Act.

According to De Smet, Gillespie called Baughman and Wood to discuss removing the MOU from the agenda before the meeting. The agenda was posted on June 19 with the MOU but after the conversations between the mayor and councilors, it was removed and an amended agenda was posted on June 20, she said.

“Per an email (from village clerk/administrator Michael Limon) the mayor called (the councilors) separately to discuss removing the MOU from the agenda. Three people using a rolling quorum decided to remove it from the agenda,” De Smet said. “That is an illegal act and makes anything we do tonight invalid.”

She asked Councilor Michael Cheromiah if he had received a call from the mayor regarding the removal of the MOU. Cheromiah said he’d like to ask village attorney Mark Jarmie for his opinion on the issue.

Jarmie said he didn’t know what was said to Baughman or Wood.

“I don’t want to give a legal opinion in a vacuum. I would need to discuss this with the people involved and see what happened,” Jarmie said. “If you have a concern with a rolling quorum, one option available to address it is canceling the meeting and not taking any further action.”

De Smet said since the rolling quorum has already taken place, the only recourse was to go back to the agenda published in the News-Bulletin and originally posted by the village on June 19.

“The new agenda was posted on Friday (June 20) without those two items,” she said.

The agenda and meeting packet supplied to the News-Bulletin by Limon on June 19 listed action items for both the MOU and annexation request. An amended agenda was sent to the paper on June 20 with the MOU removed.

Gillespie called De Smet’s statements supposition, while Baughman said that isn’t what happened.

“I walked into the (village) offices with concerns about the MOU. There were details not spelled out. I wanted to have the mayors discuss it and said it shouldn’t be on the agenda,” Baughman said. “Michael (Limon) is misspeaking. I don’t know what other phone calls occurred. The MOU is incomplete and not detailed enough, and I felt the mayors and government administrators should meet.”

De Smet said anything that happened at the June 26 meeting would be invalid.

“You have three people making decisions for all of you,” she told the standing room only crowd at the meeting.

Cheromiah said if the council was at risk of some kind of violation it would be better to cancel the meeting and made a motion to do so. Baughman seconded the motion, which passed 2-0. De Smet did not vote on the motion.

The meeting adjourned with cheers and clapping from the audience members, along with declarations of, “Thank you, Erica!”

After the meeting, De Smet said she didn’t vote because she didn’t agree with the reason given for the cancellation.

“They could have gone back to the original agenda that was posted in the paper and made things right,” she said. “We could have easily talked about the MOU and the annexation, and tabled it if they had questions and they chose to stick to their rolling quorum.”

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De Smet filed an OMA complaint about the alleged rolling quorum with the New Mexico Department of Justice, the agency which handles such complaints, on June 25.

Gillespie said he hadn’t seen the OMA complaint as of Monday, June 30, and would wait until the village had received it before responding further to the allegations.

He did say after reading through the MOU, which was approved by the Peralta Town Council 4-0 on June 10, there wasn’t a lot of detail in the document.

“We don’t know where the money is being spent once it’s allocated. We don’t know what the operational plans are,” the mayor said. “Any one councilor does not have the ability to obligate funds of the village or write a contract to obligate funds with another entity of any kind. There are a lot of questions.”