Down to the Brass Tacks: Cloudcroft’s FY 2026–27 Budget Workshops
Due by the end of May, the council and Clerk Jini Turri mapped out the village's projected revenues and expenditures for the upcoming year. Plus, a new VoC office hire.
Clerk Jini Turri has been here before.
For three days last week, Turri guided Cloudcroft's newest governing body through their first budget process. Over a three-day workshop at the Inn of the Mountain Gods in Mescalero, she spread worksheets across a table and explained how the money moves, and started at the top.
Mayor Dusty Wiley and Trustees Keith Hamilton, Danny Hardwick, and Matt Willett — all in their seats for less than a year — sat around the U-shaped tables and worked through the village's revenues, expenses, grants, water, roads, and the two police officers on the street.
Trustee Gail McCoy did not attend. Her employment with the Cloudcroft Public Library created a conflict of interest with budget deliberations, and her absence was appropriate according to Turri.
Former Trustee, now-volunteer Grover Sterling attended and video-recorded the proceedings for village records.
The Reader was present for all three days.
The meeting began with a deadline: The interim budget must be submitted to the state Department of Finance and Administration (DFA) by midnight, May 31.
Turri plans to have everything ready for the council to formally approve at the May 19 council meeting. The final adopted budget takes effect July 1.
Turri and Mayor Dusty Wiley often called department heads on speakerphone mid-session to verify line items. Turri continually printed updated figures, the council reviewed them, and tossed the old sheets on the floor, the pile growing as each day went on. They ate sandwiches and kept going.
The Reader has sat through three years of Cloudcroft budget meetings.
The first in 2024, under Mayor Craig Turner, was technically complete but built on incomplete reporting from years prior; the council was operating on what it was given, which wasn’t the full picture.
In 2025, freshly appointed Mayor Tim King played “You Can’t Always Get What You Want” by the Rolling Stones over the speakers as department heads came in to make their requests.
This year, Turri, whose experience in doing this clearly shows, led the workshop for the new administration, along with explanations about the process.
The Working Numbers
Projected revenues: $3,013,088
Projected expenditures: $3,149,481
Projected deficit: approximately $140,000, which “could change either way,” Turri said.
Cash in the bank: approximately $4.5 million across all accounts
A note on all of these figures: they are working projections from a discussion-only workshop. No votes were taken, no formal action.
Turri led from the center in a small conference room.
She returned as the village clerk to Cloudcroft in January 2026 — she previously served the village from 2010 to 2019, including as administrator and deputy clerk under Mayors Venable and Denney — inheriting a financial record system that hadn't been properly maintained for years.
After Cloudcroft, Turri worked in the Clerk’s Office/Administration department for the village of Ruidoso from 2022 until 2026.
Now, Turri has been spending a significant portion of her time not just building next year’s budget but also trying to understand what happened in the last several years.
The value of her experience showed in keeping the council on topic and in describing what the numbers she presented meant. And what the council did and didn’t know.
Some discoveries: expenses coded to the wrong account, subscriptions that nobody authorized were running, money that was supposed to go to one purpose is sitting somewhere else.
To help manage the load, Turri requested that the council hire a Clerk and Finance Administrative Assistant.
At a special meeting on Monday, May 4, the council unanimously voted to hire Barbara Garcia for the position. Garcia has previously worked as a clerk and in other roles for the village under the administrations of Mayors Venable and Denney.
Go Deeper: The Chart of Accounts Problem
Every expenditure the village makes is assigned a code, a fund, a department, and a line item, which determine which budget is charged and what the DFA sees when it reviews the village’s finances. For years, those codes were applied inconsistently.
Financial reconciliation problems and incomplete reporting date back to 2022.
The village’s annual property insurance premium, a single bill covering everything from the police building to the library, had been posted as a $100,000 charge against the finance department’s budget, according to Turri.
In reality, that cost should have been distributed across every department and fund the policy covers: police, fire, library, public works, water, sewer, and others. Sitting in one place made finance look expensive, and every other department look artificially lean.
The gas tax that should have flowed to the municipal streets fund landed in the general fund. Library rental revenue was credited to the recreation fund rather than the general fund. Employee benefits for a public works staffer paid from the water/sewer fund were being posted to the operations and maintenance general fund.
A janitorial contract valued at over $50,000 was charged almost entirely to one department, even though it covered buildings across the village.
When a council evaluates prior-year spending to assess whether a department is efficient, comparisons are unreliable if the underlying categories aren’t consistent.
A hypothetical line item that jumped tens of thousands might simply mean a cost that was previously miscoded elsewhere finally landed in the right place. A department that appears to have spent nothing on utilities might have hidden those costs elsewhere.
Turri, Finance Director Sylvia Hall, and now Garcia are tasked with going through last year’s spending and income line by line.
“Once you get it figured out and you just make a chart of accounts,” Turri said.
Go Deeper: How Money Can and Cannot Move
For a village with limited resources and an impatient to-do list, understanding the rules matters.
Within some funds, there’s flexibility.
"Budget adjustments that are within a fund, like if we're looking at the general fund and we're looking at the police budget, adjustments within that fund that do not affect the bottom line, don't require DFA approval, as it doesn't affect the final budget,” Turri explained.
Between funds, DFA must approve.
Moving money from the general fund to cover a recreation fund deficit requires a Budget Adjustment Request, submitted to DFA, which can reject it. The village cannot freely shift money between enterprise funds and the general fund. Turri was explicit: avoiding these transfers is a priority.
Enterprise funds are supposed to pay for themselves.
Water, sewer, sanitation, and ambulance are enterprise funds. They should generate enough revenue to cover their own costs without supplementation from the general fund.
When the village found that the garbage service rate increases had been formally approved by the council but never implemented, it explained why the sanitation fund was running short. The revenue simply hadn’t been collected. “Our contractual services expenditures had already exceeded what we were bringing in each month because we hadn’t implemented those increases,” Turri said. The increase was recently applied.
Lodgers’ Tax is tightly restricted.
These funds must be used for tourism promotion and related purposes. They cannot be pooled with other funds or tapped for general operations.
Go Deeper: Village Leadership
Cloudcroft is governed entirely by volunteers.
The people signing off on decisions about loan repayment schedules, enterprise fund separation, and infrastructure prioritization are doing so as a civic contribution. They reviewed dense financial documents, cross-referenced worksheets, and pushed back on line items on their own time.
Turri is the one paid professional at the table who can connect legal requirements to operational reality. She is simultaneously the records officer, the budget architect, the compliance manager, and, increasingly, the institutional memory of an office that has recently cycled through employees. There have been at least 7 clerk/interim clerk turnovers in the office since 2023.
Turri is the veteran in the room. Finance Director Sylvia Hall and Utility Clerk Ashley White have both been with the village since 2025. Garcia's hire adds a third person to a finance operation that has been running short-staffed through the most complex catch-up period in recent village history.
“I still have the last quarter of 2024–25 to do, and I have all three quarters of the budget we’re in right now done once it’s approved,” Turri said at one point, describing the catch-up work running parallel to the new budget preparation. “So, DFA will not approve the budget we’re in right now because we don’t have the true and accurate starting cash balances.”
Turri said she expected a draft audit from Beasley and Mitchell by the week following the retreat. That audit goes to the state auditor before it is released publicly.
Once the state auditor signs off, Turri explained, there is a ten-day waiting period. Then the numbers become public record, and the village can close out the prior year and formally open this one.
What Comes Next
The governing body is expected to formally approve the interim budget at the May 19 council meeting. The submission to DFA must be in by midnight, May 31. A new audit covering fiscal year 2025–26 will begin around August, Turri said.
The question is, what budget actually gets adopted, and what will the audit reveal when it comes out? These workshops produced a working document. Now come the decisions.
The Reader attended all three days of the FY 2026–27 budget retreat.
This report draws on real-time notes, audio transcripts, and budget documents reviewed during the sessions. All figures are working projections unless explicitly noted as confirmed.
We will follow up with reporting on the adopted budget once formally submitted and approved.
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A meeting at the Inn of the Mountain Gods? No wander we can’t get the potholes filled and the streets repaved.
Nice to see the teamwork displayed by the Mayor, the Council, and the Village employees. Looks like things are finally falling into place for Cloudcroft!