Cloudcroft’s sewage treatment plant is running on borrowed time, and the Village Council has yet to vote on the paperwork to replace it.
At Tuesday’s meeting, Chad Johnson of CDM Smith laid out a master plan to tear out the aging plant, a rusted-through trickling filter paired with an aging membrane bioreactor (MBR) system, and replace it with a new MBR package plant.
“Package plant means that a lot of it is manufactured and assembled off-site, so that reduces the construction timeline,” Johnson told the council.
The price tag: $15 million to $17 million. Construction to update the Wastewater Treatment Plant (WWTP) will run 12 to 18 months once it starts, weather allowing.
Over the past few years, the village has operated on around or less than a $2 million annual budget, nowhere near the $15 million required to update the WWTP.
Next Steps
After his inaugural meeting as trustee, John Snook spoke with the Reader, Johnson, and WWTP Operator Scott Powell outside the village chambers. Snook noted that to even compete for state funding, the Village must first authorize a Preliminary Engineering Report (PER). Johnson said the required document takes four to six weeks to complete.
The timeline is tight. The council needs to approve the PER, send it to the state, and get it back before trustees travel to Santa Fe in January to lobby for money. Miss the window, and the ask slips a year while the plant keeps aging.
A report from Robert George, an independent expert contracted by the state, warned in an April 2026 letter to NMED’s Construction Programs Bureau that corrosion “has reached the point that catastrophic failure of one (or several) of the key components is imminent,” calling the situation an emergency. Read it here: https://www.cloudcroftreader.com/p/failing-wastewater-treatment-plant
If the state funds arrive in pieces, $5 million one year, $5 million the next, the project gets more expensive, not less, according to Snook. Engineering and construction crews get pulled off once the money runs out, then have to relearn the site when funding resumes. Without state money at all, the fallback is what the Village has been doing: nursing an aging plant along and hoping it holds.
“We need help, and we need it now,” Powell said.
Audit Flags Nine Problems. Some Old, One New
The Village’s finances got a formal grade Tuesday.
Hannah Lee of Beasley, Mitchell & Co. presented the audit for the fiscal year ending June 30, 2025. The result: a qualified opinion, meaning auditors couldn’t get enough documentation to sign off cleanly on several account balances.
Trustees Hamilton, Hardwick, and Snook, all in attendance, voted unanimously to approve the resolution to accept the audit.
Nine findings in all. Eight were repeats from the prior year. One finding from previous years explains why the others linger: a previous Village Clerk deleted documents including receipts, invoices, and financial records from the Village’s digital storage system, leaving no way to verify what the money actually paid for. Auditors wrote that the missing paperwork meant the “financial statements were materially misstated.”
That position also controlled every financial step: entering transactions, printing accounts-payable checks, and reconciling bank statements, with no one checking the work. Auditors called that setup an “increased possibility of misstatement or fraud.” More here: https://www.cloudcroftreader.com/p/cloudcrofts-murky-accounting
The village now has Village Clerk Jini Turri and Deputy Clerk Barbara Garcia in office, though the segregation of duties won’t be reflected until after the next audit cycle.
The one new finding: Village bank deposits were under-collateralized by $38,412 at fiscal year-end. New Mexico law requires financial institutions holding public deposits to pledge collateral worth at least 50% of anything above FDIC insurance limits. Lee told trustees it’s a shared responsibility: the bank’s obligation to post it, the Village’s job to confirm it did. She said it’s often triggered by a late, unanticipated deposit landing right before the books close, and that the issue has since been addressed.
Trustees also pressed on budget overruns from FY ‘24-’25 across several funds in a total excess of $1.1 million.
During the audit presentation, it was clarified that these “expenditures in excess of budget” were primarily accounting and classification issues, meaning funds were recorded or paid out of the wrong accounts without formal end-of-year budget adjustments being submitted to the state, rather than actual unauthorized overspending.
This finding was no surprise to the council—Turri had raised the same issue during the budget workshop weekend in May. More on that here: https://www.cloudcroftreader.com/p/down-to-the-brass-tacks-cloudcrofts
Lee told trustees the money wasn’t misspent so much as misfiled, paid out of the wrong account rather than actually exceeding what the Village had. “Those over-expenditures are all listed,” she said. “They were just not accounted for properly, for the most part.” Fixing it requires a formal budget adjustment at year’s end.
Download the full audit report here:
Holiday Weekend Drain
Public Works Supervisor JJ Carrizal told the council that the busy village burned through roughly 700,000 gallons over the holiday weekend, dropping the water tank down to about six feet. Cloudcroft remains under Water Restriction Level 3.
Library Board Down to Two Members, Risking State Funding
Library Director Sandra Barr made an urgent plea for volunteers: the Library Board has only two of its five required members, and neither the board nor the Friends of the Library can hit quorum.
“We need the library board, I plead with you,” Barr told the council. “We don’t have a quorum...we need five people, we only have two.”
The stakes go beyond bylaws. Under state rule 4.5.2.9 NMAC, a public library needs an active board meeting at least twice a year to qualify for State Grants-in-Aid, and it needs current accreditation and a certified director to draw state aid and General Obligation Bond funding.
Barr also flagged the library’s food and clothing drive ahead of fall programming. “Twenty-one percent of the population up here are below the poverty line,” she said. “People need food and clothing.”
Send Offs & Service
Mayor Dusty Wiley began the meeting by presenting a plaque to former trustee Gail McCoy for her years of service on the council. Barr announced in her report that the McCoys’ 75th birthday will be celebrated at the library on September 18 from 5-6 p.m., coinciding with the return of the historic schoolhouse bell.
Wiley proclaimed September 11, 2026, as Patriot Day and National Day of Service and Remembrance in Cloudcroft.
And a special thanks from the Reader: resident A/V volunteer Grover Sterling keeps the Village’s YouTube stream running at @CloudcroftNewmexico, giving anyone who missed the room a way to watch it all happen.
This report was written through in-person and phone interviews, meeting livestreams, audio recordings and transcripts, audit and engineering presentation materials, independent research, and previous reporting.
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