Getting the House in Order
Getting the House in Order
INTERVIEW: Cloudcroft Mayor Craig Turner, Part One
Right off the bat, newly-elected mayor Craig Turner wants you to know he is responsive and transparent. ‘Please let everybody know that I'm very, very sincere that my door is always open,’ he says. On Friday morning, April 5, 2024, the Cloudcroft Reader interviewed Turner in his office, alone, for nearly two hours before he had to run home to get his contribution to the Friday staff potluck lunch — one of several changes he’s already brought to the Village office.
We have broken the interview into three parts. Look for Part Two on April 21, and Part Three April 23. Part One begins here:
Mayor, as you near your first 100 days in office, what's your job been like?
The first hundred days have been no surprises, but more surprises than I could even imagine. (laughing) And I know that's redundant and an oxymoron. Still, there are things I anticipated that would hit me immediately, but there were things I didn't think would cross my desk that have.
For example, there were issues between people who live in the village, having arguments and having discussions with the police department, and feeling like it didn't get handled the way they would have liked to have seen it, so I was brought into it and handled it very well. I think both parties, when it was over, were happy.
More specifically, the village management sets clear expectations for the employees and makes sure that they understand. We're still working on this, starting with their job description. What is your role? How are you performing in the role?
I've now had an opportunity to meet with most of the employees one-on-one and ask them face-to-face how they feel about working at Cloudcroft.
What are your thoughts on the village? What could we do to improve? What are things that we could stop, maybe? What are things that are redundant or that we don't need to do?
I have been asking far more questions than giving comments, trying to learn from a maintenance perspective, okay?
How long does it take to clear the village of snow? What does that look like? What does that look like when we have a busted pipe? How long are the people out in the particular area? How long are they out of water? What does that look like?
So here in the office, I'm trying to get to know the ladies here in the office and what they do specifically, whether it be Laura in P&Z or Crystal handling the water.
I have spent the majority of my time getting to know employees, trying to build a foundation of trust, and letting them know that I'm here for them and I'm here to help them.
However, we need to step up our game. We need to be better for the village.
We need to make sure that we're getting tasks done timely and completing our daily tasks in a manner that is expedient and correct, yearly evaluations, six-month evaluations, clarifying and making sure we have job descriptions, how merit increases are aired — those are some of the things I've dived into in the first days.
At least while I'm mayor, the budget retreats will be here, right here in our village, from nine to four. Anyone can come hear it for themselves.
How modernized are the office and systems? Have you found it to be antiquated?
We do have a lot of stuff here that has been backed up and is digitally backed up, but yes, there are a lot of things where we've been flying by the seat of our pants.
I'm also trying to prepare us and build us so that we have those procedures in place, that we have, if you will, a plan of action, a business plan of what we have to do. For example, I don't want to discuss which roads we will repair in the summer months in the summer. We need to talk in February about which roads we will repair this summer, which we did.
We drove around the village, me and our maintenance supervisor, JJ, and we identified roads that we needed to start immediately with, which roads were most important, and which roads definitely needed to be fixed.
Here in the office, I'm just gonna be very transparent. We've had a lot of turnover and a lot of ladies here in the office doing jobs very, very well and working tremendously hard—however, with really no training on that.
We're beginning to implement cross-training, training in general, the training they need to be able to do their jobs. Working with COG, a nonprofit group that works through the state of New Mexico and grants, they can work with everybody in their particular region. They help us create evaluations, job descriptions, an HR department, and all the things that you need to run an office administratively.
And we've already begun the process.
Shae, for example, our clerk, is doing several jobs right now that she just absolutely got thrown into and really learned by fire.
So what that looks like is bringing in a third party, a vendor, to help us create policies, procedures, job descriptions, and a pay scale, something that's very important to me.
We don't have a pay scale right now. Pretty much every year, we go to budget retreat, and if you’re given a cost-of-living increase, it was just given. It wasn't based on performance. I want to move to performance-based.
I spoke with the Municipal League of New Mexico, and they said it's totally within our bounds to do that. That may not be a popular comment, but I told you guys I'd be honest with you.
I want to move to your merit increases based on your performance, not just I have been here for a year and the cost of living has increased by 2%.
I can't say that it's never been done before, I know that by me asking questions — when's the last time you've had an evaluation plan? well, I really haven't had one — it hasn't been done in a long time.
What do you believe has contributed to the office’s high turnover?
I can't pinpoint one thing. I can give you this answer though: you have to have leadership.
You have to be present. And I've been very present since I've been here. I'm here every day unless I'm out of town. If I'm in this village, I'm in this office.
What I'm doing proactively to prevent turnover is being present and letting them know that I'm here to support them in a positive way and make them feel confident that they're doing a good job.
But also, in a sense, if they're missing the boat on something, I'm here to say, hey, let's work on this.
This is something we can work on.
I feel like it's always been the mayor and the council against the village. It's like whenever you would have a council meeting you could just feel it in the air.
Are you working to improve responsiveness to inquiries of the Village office?
It's going to change, it has to change and it's not acceptable at all if it doesn't because we work for the village.
I have staff meetings every Monday morning at nine with my leaders. There are approximately 19 staff members there, including the police department, library, and maintenance. We meet here in the office and go around the table. What's going on this week? What's been requested of you? What's due? What's on the agenda this week? Tell me, if it's maintenance, are we working on a road? Which road is it? Let's let the village know.
What I would say to anybody is that if anyone reaches out to someone in the village and for whatever reason one of the employees doesn't get back to you in a timely manner, you contact me and they will be in touch with you within the next 30 minutes, because it's not acceptable otherwise.
But I feel like it's always been the mayor and the council against the village. It's like whenever you would have a council meeting you could just feel it in the air.
It was just there, you could cut the air with a knife. I want to dissolve that. I don't want that anymore. I want people to come to our meetings and feel welcome, feel free to talk, feel encourage to bring up something, feel that this is their village.
This isn't my village. This is not the council's village. This village belongs to the people, and I want them to be able to say what they want to say.
I’ve told them, ‘If somebody needs something from you, stop what you're doing, and get it.’ It's not even negotiable.
So, I hope that's getting better. I have heard people come in and tell me it's getting better.
But I want to hear about it, and we'll make it timely if somebody wants something from our village and they're not, or the response is not timely.
You made the decision to hold the April budget retreat in the Village offices and open to the public. Why?
In the spirit of transparency, in the spirit of I want anybody and everybody to come if they want to.
How many people will come? I don't know. They may fall asleep if they come. They may get bored.
But I wanted them to have the opportunity to come if they want.
So, at least while I'm mayor, the budget retreats will be here, right here in our village, from nine to four. Anyone can come to hear it for themselves.
On the website, the most recent financial audit was conducted on June 30, ’22. Where's the ‘23?
We're completing it right now. We're behind. We asked for an extension and they gave it to us, so by saying we're behind, we're not out of compliance.
You've engaged Mountain Top Accounting for about a six month, is that because you've lost some expertise, some manpower to do that and you're using them as a stop gap?
We've had an opening in the village for payroll and accounting for quite some time and we just, whenever we post it, we just haven't got any good candidates.
And so my fix for that was just to get a third party vendor. Julie Speer at Mountain Top Accounting is going to be doing this for us for the next six months and if I have it my way, it'll be indefinitely, indefinite and she'll just continue to do it.
We're gonna look at it for six months, that's what the council approved.
But what that'll do is that'll take so much off of Shae's plate so that some of these other things that we're behind on, for example, an audit or something like that, that she'll be able to concentrate, put her efforts toward, it's gonna save her, on days that she's reconciling the checking, the accounts and stuff like that, on any given day it's gonna save her two, three, four hours a day.
The village is not in any dire straits for financial money. Do we need money? Do we need grant money? Yes, absolutely, but if we didn't have grant money to be able to do our day-in and day-out business, would we be okay? Yes, we would.
And I've also always said let's not do something just 'cause we've never done it.
My point is that one of my goals during this budget retreat is to really going line item by line item and really look at each one and not just blanket approval, one page, through this and let's go to the next page.
Let's go through this line item by line item. Do we really need a new tennis court? I'm just making that up. If we do, then let's keep it in there. But if we don't, let's get rid of it 'cause that could save us $50,000, whatever.
It'll be my first budget retreat as well. I'm trying to approach this from a business standpoint like I did in pharmaceuticals. By doing this line item by line item and looking very closely, I truly believe I can save the village some money and also use that money to go to other places. And that's how you do it in a professional world.
Has the village made any efforts to attract new industries or employers, or is the focus primarily on tourism?
So, the short answer is not yet.
I've been tackling so many other things, just learning the jobs, so I haven't even really dove into that yet as far as what possibly could be brought in.
Two things I believe a village needs.
Cloudcroft needs a grocery store, okay? And Cloudcroft needs a pharmacy.
Cloudcroft, as we get older, we have more and more people moving up here that are more mature, retirement age and stuff like that. Well, if those people are on an anti-acid, that's not an emergency. And if we have a snowstorm, they can wait until we get, they can get down the mountain to get that. If we have a person up here on insulin and they can't get down the mountain and their insulin is out, that can be deathly. I mean, that can be a matter of life and death.
As I said, we need a grocery store desperately.
One of the questions I hear on my boardwalk, not as mayor, but just being around all the time, more than anything, is, where's your grocery store? Well, we don't have a grocery store.
So those are two things I think we really need.
Now, here's the quagmire: where do we put them? We just don't have a lot of land in Cloudcroft, right? If we were to bring anything like that in, it would almost have to be an existing building.
We're kinda in a mess. The only way I can bring somebody in and promote to Lowe's down the mountain, would you think about opening up a Lowe's Market? The only way I can do that is if I can go to 'em and tell 'em I have a place for you to go. I looked at that years ago when I first bought the building when the Mercantile closed. I approached Lowe's about putting in a little bitty mini market right there, and they weren't against it, but their final review was, ‘Well, if we're gonna do something up there, we want to build our own building so we're not paying a lease.’
So the problem with Cloudcroft, as far as bringing more stuff in, is we don't have a lot of land. It would almost be a situation where someone has to leave before I can bring someone in.
The backlog of timely posted meeting minutes seems to be resolved. Did you recently push for the update on the website after a period of inconsistency?
Yes, sir, I did. It's not a village thing. It's a New Mexico state statute and federal statute. That stuff has to be up within 72 hours, and I have resolved that.
The problem was the company that handles our Facebook and our village website and stuff is Spectrum, okay? And they were the administrator of the website, which means they controlled our website; we didn’t. And so we were at the mercy of them to say, hey, here are our minutes, get 'em up.
And if they didn't get 'em up, there was nothing we could do other than call them again, say hey, our minutes need to be up, and our agenda needs to be up, a notification of a meeting that needs to be up.
So immediately, I called Spectrum and said, this is not acceptable; what do we do to change this? I need control of this web.
And that's all it took. It could've been done two years ago, could've been done four years ago. Now we have complete control over it. Now the buck does stop with us, not Spectrum.
Police, do you feel like that's resolved? Are there still some open wounds that are gonna have to be dealt with?
I think so.
However, I think in our last council meeting, I was able to diffuse that just by being honest and sharing with everyone what happened. I took some of the ownership of that because if you look at the Chief's W-2, we weren't taking into the fact that half a year he was at an older salary, a new salary. So I own that.
Look, if I mess up, I will tell you, I am not gonna keep anything from the village people.
I'm looking at many things right now for our police department. Two things that I really care about and I shared this when I interviewed for the chief position is I really believe my number one responsibility of this village as leader of this village is the protection of this village, one.
To do that, I believe we need 24-hour coverage of this village, not temporary coverage, not coverage where you get to go home and sleep or something like that. I’m working on a schedule right now that would make it safer for the village, but also safer for our patrolmen.
I care about our patrolmen and officers and don't want them to be unsafe.
And when you're expected to be awake for 48 hours, that's unsafe.
I'm working on several things right now. In fact, I've already met with the Municipal League, and I have some good ideas that I think will make everyone happy, including our village residents and police officers.
I have been working on that diligently. Do I think it's still a hot topic? Yes, but do I have a plan to make maybe everyone happy, both the village and our officers?
Sunday, April 20, 2024
Part Two: Fire, Water, Council