“The press release was inaccurate, in my opinion and recollection of events,” Councilor Jack Eakman told NMPolitics.net. “We interviewed candidates and then set Oct. 3\u00a0as the date we would take action on whomever the collective Council thought would be best to lead the municipal government of Las Cruces.”<\/p>\n
![\"Las](\"http:\/\/nmpolitics.net\/index\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/08\/LasCrucesCityHall1-336x186.jpg\")
Heath Haussamen \/ NMPolitics.net<\/p>
Las Cruces City Hall<\/p><\/div>\n
Councilors Gregory Z. Smith and Ceil Levatino agreed that the news release was not accurate and the Council has made no final decision.<\/p>\n
The action the city’s news release detailed would be problematic\u00a0because the Council hasn’t publicly voted<\/a> to select a city manager. The state’s\u00a0Open Meetings Act<\/a> requires a public vote. The news release’s version of Monday’s events would violate that\u00a0law, according to Susan Boe, executive director of the N.M. Foundation for Open Government.<\/p>\n The law is intended to give the public a record of how each councilor voted and insight into the Council’s decision-making process.<\/p>\n The situation has caused confusion about the city’s search. The Las Cruces Sun-News’ article about Monday’s news release asked a question with its\u00a0headline: “Does Las Cruces have a new city manager?”<\/a><\/p>\n The Council plans to offer\u00a0the position to and negotiate with Ed, who was most recently\u00a0president and chief executive officer of Goodwill Industries of El Paso. “After deliberations by Council, there was a general consensus that Stuart Ed should be offered the position of city manager,” Udell Vigil, director of the city’s Public Information Office, said Wednesday.<\/p>\n \u201cStuart Ed is a very strong candidate and we will be very well served if he accepts the position,\u201d Smith said earlier this week<\/a>.<\/p>\n That’s different than making the “decision” the city’s news release claimed councilors made on Monday.\u00a0Negotiations might lead to Ed\u00a0accepting the job, or they might not. If they\u00a0don’t reach\u00a0an agreement with Ed, councilors might decide to instead talk\u00a0with the other finalist,\u00a0Dan Biles, deputy county manager of infrastructure for Jefferson County, Ala.<\/p>\n “We expected the press release to say that there were two candidates,” Smith\u00a0said. “There is significant\u00a0consternation on the part of councilors because the message that\u00a0we believed we had agreed upon was not the message the city press release\u00a0shared with the public.”<\/p>\n “And, as you know, the message that was shared with the public puts us in an extremely compromised situation,” Smith said.<\/p>\n So if the Council didn’t select a city manager on Monday, how did a news release go out stating otherwise? Smith says the city attorney, William “Rusty” Babington, was brought in toward the end of the Council’s closed session on Monday to discuss what information to include in the news release. Vigil said he “wrote the news release with information provided by the city attorney, who approved the release.”<\/p>\n Vigil isn’t to blame, Smith said, adding, “as far as I’m concerned, Udell is not where the message got turned.” He didn’t elaborate on how he thinks things went wrong.<\/p>\n Levatino placed the blame on Mayor Ken Miyagishima. She said she believes the mayor had\u00a0the news release changed after councilors agreed on what it should\u00a0say.<\/p>\n “Once again the mayor has chosen to misrepresent what happened and caused the public unnecessary concern and confusion,” Levatino said.<\/p>\n The “once again” in Levatino’s statement refers to Miyagishima’s public claim\u00a0earlier this month<\/a> that there were four finalists for the city manager job when, in fact, there were two.<\/p>\n Miyagishima, in a text message exchange, didn’t respond to Levatino’s claim that he had Monday’s\u00a0news release changed. Other than saying the Council has made no final decision on the hiring of a city manager, he referred\u00a0questions to Babington. Vigil, not Babington, answered those questions: “The mayor was not involved in the drafting of the release,” he said.<\/p>\n Neither Eakman nor Smith blamed Miyagishima.<\/p>\n “I have no idea what happened in the process. I have no idea, and so I’m certainly not going to point a finger at anyone,” Eakman said.<\/p>\n Councilor Gill Sorg declined to comment on the accuracy of Monday’s news release. He did say the Council is aware it must vote in a public meeting to select a new city manager.<\/p>\n “As far as I\u2019m concerned, nothing\u2019s done yet. We have our candidate but it is not final, it is not decided, until we all vote,” Sorg said.\u00a0\u201cThere\u2019s a lot of pieces yet to get together.\u201d<\/p>\n Councilors Olga Pedroza and Kasandra Gandara declined to comment.<\/p>\n Smith said he is concerned that the confusion caused by the news release and questions about the Open Meetings Act could affect negotiations with candidates for the job. And, he said, the stakes are high.<\/p>\n “The selection of the city manager could very well be the most important decision we\u00a0make as councilors,” Smith said. “He or she puts into motion or makes into reality what we put forward as policy or the decisions we make as a Council.”<\/p>\n Eakman said he hadn’t considered the\u00a0possibility that the situation\u00a0“might compromise\u00a0us in any way with the candidates,\u00a0but if it does that would be terrible.” Levatino said her hope “is that this confusion does not hurt our ability or our chances to bring one of these two highly qualified gentlemen in as our next city manager.”<\/p>\n Smith and Eakman also praised Ed and Biles, calling both strong candidates.<\/p>\n Boe, the director\u00a0of the Foundation for Open Government, said there’s a way to avoid such confusion in the future. Many government boards meet publicly following closed sessions to state what exactly was done in private. The city should adopt such a practice, Boe said.<\/p>\n If the Council had stated in a public meeting on Monday what Smith says\u00a0was intended — that there were two candidates and the Council planned to vote to hire a city manager on Oct. 3 — whatever happened in the process of creating the news release might have been avoided, Boe said.<\/p>\n “The bottom line: Do it the right way. Then we don’t have these problems,” she\u00a0said.<\/p>\n This isn\u2019t the first controversy surrounding Las Cruces\u2019 city manager search. Though the city has released 13 applications for the job, it has withheld dozens of others from the public.<\/p>\n The state’s Inspection of Public Records Act<\/a>\u00a0makes applications for high-profile government jobs like city manager public.\u00a0But the city contends that\u00a0applications its contract\u00a0search firm hasn\u2019t turned over to the city\u00a0aren\u2019t public records. NMPolitics.net has sued<\/a>, seeking release of all applications. The case is pending<\/a>.<\/p>\n A prior version of this posting incorrectly spelled Sorg’s first name as Gil instead of Gill.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Three Las Cruces city councilors are emphatic that they haven’t made a final decision on who will be the next city manager and didn’t violate the state’s Open Meetings Act.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":71632,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[145,3295,706],"class_list":["post-188603","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news-and-analysis","tag-las-cruces","tag-las-cruces-city-manager-search","tag-transparency"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/nmpolitics.net\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/188603","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/nmpolitics.net\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/nmpolitics.net\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nmpolitics.net\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nmpolitics.net\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=188603"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/nmpolitics.net\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/188603\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nmpolitics.net\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/71632"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/nmpolitics.net\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=188603"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nmpolitics.net\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=188603"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nmpolitics.net\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=188603"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}What happened?<\/h3>\n
‘The bottom line: Do it the right way’<\/h3>\n