Cloudcroft Crowns King Mayor: Village Council Moves Swiftly After Turner's Sudden Resignation
Trustee King sworn in mid-meeting; Payroll and account reconciliation help on contract; Grant updates; Attorney Rhodes retires; Officer Mackewich officially onboard, and more.
The village council didn’t waste any time moving on.
Tuesday night, just 12 days after Craig Turner’s surprise resignation—following a dead-on-the-table motion by Trustee Gail McCoy to delay appointing a new mayor until a special meeting—Trustee Tabitha Foster nominated Trustee Tim King for mayor, and King seconded her nomination. He was elected without dissent.
Mayor King will serve the current term through 2028. (Watch for the Reader’s profile of the new mayor in the coming days.)
While the Council meeting crowd was smaller than last week, and the number and ferocity of speakers were fewer, palpable tension about who would be appointed mayor hung in the air.
Back-and-Forth
Before Cloudcroft’s mayor decision, the council and audience members learned more about the short and long-term challenges facing the village administration.
In his Pro-tem Mayor’s report, Jim Maynard listed his priorities from his short tenure as acting mayor: making payroll, the temporary hiring of CRI (an accounting firm) to ensure payroll was made on time and in full, reaching back into IRS notices, and finding passwords to gain access to electronic payment and tax platforms.
Maynard explained, “There were things like overtime and holiday pay that had been mixed up. This is something where you can't just take a payroll and run with it once you discover errors. We got our payroll done late this afternoon.”
He then addressed the audit, which was recently completed by the independent firm Beasley, Mitchell & Co.:
“We have about 11 or 12 deficiencies that are noted. We have contacted our auditors. They will come up in our January meeting, and I would rather they go over the audit with us than we try to do it because that is something beyond what we're prepared for.
It’s extensive [the audit]. Some of these items we inherited, some of these items just got perpetuated. This is the first time that Cloudcroft, in my memory, has had more than a couple of findings…These are some items that are going to take some heavy corrective measures. So when the auditors present this to us, then we'll be able to ask them the detailed questions that I don't feel like, particularly for me, I'm prepared to answer.”
Interim Clerk Suzanne Peralta informed the group that evidence of more missing reports and tax payments has been surfacing recently:
“So as we were going through some of the emails and the documentation, we discovered that the Gross Receipt Tax hasn't been filed for two years. The water conservation fee has gone unpaid for three years. We have some unemployment insurance wage reports that haven't been filed over one quarter in 2021, and one quarter in 2023-’24. We’re past due on various wage recordings from the 941 reports.
We're five months past due on quarterly reports and our accounting software Abila was not closed for the fiscal year 2023. It's my understanding that we had bank reconciliations sometime through 2022 because our audit was fine in 2022, but I don't have hard documentation for that, and I can't find them in the system somewhere. There's a possibility that we're gonna have to do four years of bank reconciliations. So that's kind of where we're at right now.”
A handful of citizens signed-up to speak, and after last week’s council devotion to the 2-minute speaking cut-off, speakers' questions were addressed in a relaxed, open manner with Attorney Jefferson Rhodes. For example, Rhodes weighed in on state statutes involving how the council may proceed to fill the mayor vacancy. The questions were polite and varied.
While former mayor Craig Turner elected to skip the podium at this meeting, his wife, Phyllis Turner, still agitated by the recent turn of events, returned to the mic to question the current council, first about their reluctance to hire a financial clerk and then about the temporary hiring of CRI.
P. Turner: “Can you please help us understand why our four trustees stood firmly together to continue to deny the request for a financial clerk only a week and a half ago when we had a mayor who was responsibly asking in a public meeting for reasonable help but was denied. And now, suddenly, we’ve decided to hire a payroll company outside of a public meeting. That is what I’m asking. Please help us understand.”
Maynard: “I can answer for myself. Once you hire a public employee, you've got them almost forever. Without us knowing our position, I wasn't comfortable hiring a new person. We had a year to get this stuff under control. It would not have made any difference to hire a new person two weeks ago. We’d still have everything we have today. When we go to these third-party contractors, this is a very affordable way to get short-term clarification and sort out the information, and then we know what we need. And that was my vote and my opinion on it.”
P. Turner: “How were you able to make decisions to hire this outsourced company about public financial information outside of a public meeting? Why didn’t that have to come before for us to hear about here who this company is make sure what this is going to cost”
Maynard: “To me, and again, I'm the one who hired CRI to come in and get our payroll done. We had about five days to get a grip on that. This is similar to if we had a toilet back up, we're going to call the plumber. We're not going to bring it before the council. Which plumber do we hire? We've got to take care of these things as they arise.”
This Turner wasn’t ready to give up.
P. Turner: “You do know the jobs of trustees versus the job of the mayor. The mayor is the administrator.”
That provoked a blunt reply by Trustee King: “I’d like to say something. Somebody quit their job: that’s the reason that we’re all here now is because we didn’t quit. And we are facing it. And I haven’t been able to sleep because of all this stuff. And I didn’t quit. If you want to get to your problem, turn around and look at the person that quit.”
The Ayes Have It: A Swath of Approvals
The open forum feel was most apparent during the High Water Mark, LLC consulting presentation. The council approved High Water Mark CFO Karen Gutierrez to start today with helping the village reconcile banking and get a grip on the books. The questions from the council, and the plea from the village’s Interim Clerk, Suzanne Peralta, enlightened the room:
“So for me, when I think about what I need… we have bank reconciliations that probably, we don't have records up for four years.
We have five quarterly reports that are not due. I think you know the Abila system, correct? It didn't get closed for fiscal year ‘23-’24. I have no idea how we're gonna do that.
So those items, and then we have to clean up our budget. We have to get a budget. We need a budget for ‘24-’25. We're halfway through that fiscal year and we don't have a budget yet. So that's the help I need.”
“I'll be honest with you, when I went to work for the Village of Ruidoso, they were in a way worse situation than you all were. They were 18 months behind on bank reports, but 3 years behind on audits,” reassured Gutierrez.
The council approved the contract with Gutierrez, pending negotiations on her hourly rate. While High Water Mark is located in Bernalillo, Gutierrez is based in Tularosa and can hopefully give the council the “boots on the ground” help they requested.
Other approvals from last night:
Amendments to the Uniform Traffic Ordinance, some of which provide penalties for traffic citations and the like.
Updated authorized signatures for grants, including these existing agreements:
Changes to authorized First National Bank signatories and the removal of former employee access.
A resolution regarding the Open Meetings Act. Meetings will now take place on the 3rd Tuesday of each month.
An accepted contract with Paywerx, a payroll processing vendor whose services include “payroll and tax compliance,” for around $3,000 a year.
An update to the village employee holiday schedule.
It seems Parks and Rec may receive at least part of the $8,000 needed for a trailhead kiosk at Elevation Park.
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Filling the Empty Trustee Seat, GIS-Style
Mayor King announced his plan to select a trustee nominee to fill his former seat. True to form, King created a Cloudcroft GIS form on the village website for willing folks to self-nominate. The link should go live soon.
King’s chosen nominee must be approved by the village council.
More Changing of the Guard, New Hires
The council welcomed new Village Attorney Zach Cook, who also serves the municipalities of Ruidoso and Capitan.
Attorney Jeff Rhodes served as counsel on his last night as the village’s attorney through to the very end, a stint lasting since December of 1971.
The council presented Rhodes with a plaque and claps of appreciation, after which he delivered impassioned remarks to the crowd: “I have more respect for these folks than I do a U.S. Senator, a U.S. representative, a State Governor. I have more respect for you because you are the front line of government in this country. You do more—they do more for you as citizens. Water, sewer, garbage, police protection, fire protection.”
After the meeting, Rhodes told the Reader, “I went straight from Vietnam to this [gestures at the council chambers.] In the same month and half.”
Public Works welcomes new employee Kristopher Parks, and the council approved removing Aaron Foster’s probationary period. Public Works Supervisor JJ Carrizal announced Foster is taking more tests soon but is currently at Water Level Four and Wastewater Level Two certifications.
The council officially hired police officer Michael Mackewich after some discussion:
Police Chief Roger Schoolcraft acknowledged the misunderstanding on Cloudcroft department heads’ power to hire, fire, and set salaries. “I got some good advice and instruction from two trustees. And that was Mr. Maynard and Mrs. Foster, giving some direction. I made a couple of turns, but I was used to Alamogordo when I was the Deputy Chief there, hiring new officers,” he said.
Mayor King asked, “You said that you felt you had the authority to hire, but did it go through anybody else?”
“When I brought Michael on board, the former village clerk asked me, and the mayor at that time asked me what I was bringing him on at. And I told them because they wanted to be able to put that into the payroll,” said Schoolcraft.
After the meeting, Mayor King officially swore in Officer Mackewich and welcomed him aboard. According to Attorney Rhodes, Mackewich’s pay rate must be decided and approved at or before the next regularly scheduled meeting.
Ending with the Zamboni
James Sewell Natural Ice Rink manager Donald Wiklund asked the council to fund a Zamboni storage container. JJ Carrizal addressed issues of access, location, and snow-load bearing.
The council approved paying half of the delivered costs for the storage container for the vintage 1967 Zamboni, around $2,500, and asked Wiklund to fundraise and come up with the remaining portion. Bea Haecker implored citizens in the room to pitch in, helping Wiklund kickstart his funding efforts.
Playing catch up? Check out these Cloudcroft Reader reports:
No-Vote November: A Chilly Village Council Meeting and Your Cloudcroft Updates
Aftermath: Cloudcroft Council Begins Process of Resetting Police Force
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