Local activist to challenge Frietze in city council race

Ron Gurley, a local activist with 50 years of public service experience, has announced his candidacy for the Las Cruces City Council District 1 seat.

A 14-year resident of the district, Gurley said he is running to assure meaningful involvement of residents in city policy-making.

“One of the things I am most proud of is that people came to me to get the public involved in the decisions related to the transition of Memorial Medical Center to private ownership,” Gurley said, adding that he arranged public input, including electronically beaming a hearing to outlying communities. He said “public involvement resulted in certain guarantees to the public in the lease contract.”

Gurley joins former Doña Ana County Commissioner Miguel G. Silva in challenging 12-year incumbent José Frietze for the District 1 seat on Nov. 6.

Gurley is active in health-care policy bodies, as a member of the state Medicaid Advisory Committee and the Dona Ana Health Alliance, which includes the DWI Council. He has worked as a chief probation officer and authored the book The Juvenile Offender and Texas Law. He is on the board of the J. Paul Taylor Juvenile Justice Center.

Gurley developed and is helping implement special intervention training for law enforcement and first responders who encounter the mentally ill in crisis situations.

“I think training, recruiting and compensation aimed at achieving the highest-performing police, fire and other first responders is a front-line priority for the city,” he said.

Gurley, a former chairman of the City of Las Cruces Ethics Board, is a retired national director of human resources development for the U.S. Department of Agriculture. He now works as a part-time development officer for New Mexico State University and runs his own human resources consulting business, through which he has been a strategic planning facilitator and equal employment opportunity investigator.

Gurley is a member of the League of United Latin American Citizens and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. He organized their first joint Regional Civil Rights and Race Relations Conference with NMSU in 2006.