Paranoia: Smoke and Mirrors at the Town of Taos

“We came into office talking about openness and transparency but this smacks of an old-bro deal,” [Fritz Hahn] told Cantu (The Taos News online post)

“The yard sale to honor Cesar Chavez and the Xicano Movement is unbelievably insulting and naive. Taos will become the laughing stock of Aztlan if that were to occur. How about one for Martin Luther King? How bout Jesus himself? Yes! Clean the Closet for Christ – Amen brorthers and sisters! And use public money to do it. Yes! Celebrate the Emancipation Proclamation with a 7 mile yard sale, Free yourself from your unwanted possessions! Yes Sir! Wait! A 9/11 mile yard sale. You honor a social movement and icons with parades, alters, celebrations, and charitable acts – not crass yard sales so people can get rid of crap in the yard, barn, garage and closet.” —Helen Lopez

El pendejo asks himself: why did I vote for these people?

Recently, this site posted a series of stories, based on public documents and interviews, about road and water costs administered by the Public Works Department in the Town of Taos. Due to manipulation of the procurement code by town personnel, contractors and engineers benefited while taxpayers picked up an estimated $600,000 in cost over-runs during the current and former administrations. In effect nobody at Town Hall seems to monitor road and water/sewer infrastructure projects.

Both tourists and residents can see the results of poorly managed budgets and road maintenance practices: the unending number of potholes that plague drivers. The cost overruns selectively subsidize the profits of the “contracts for cuates” program for contractors and engineers. In Councilor Hahn’s terms, the program benefits “the bros.”

Private contracts with OMI for managing the wastewater treatment plant continue to cost citizens hundreds of thousands of dollars. Training and hiring locals in-house, locals who are already working at the plant could easily correct the imbalance. But the Concil does not act. Nor does the Town enforce longtime water ordinances equally and require all residents to hook-up to the town’s water system. (Former Councilor Gene Sanchez has a list of “non payers” from his time served.) These well-connected “bros” use their own wells in lieu of hooking up to the Town’s water and sewer system, which depletes the enterprise fund, causing water bills to rise for average citizens who subsidize said “bros.”

Meanwhile the Mayor, Manager, and Town Council focus on controversies designed to divert attention: the Farmer’s Market, the Red Willow project, already rejected by Taos Pueblo, and a Cesar Chavez commemoration and community yard sale. Certainly, I agree that Councilor Cantu’s idea about Chavez and the yard sale should be budgeted at a modest figure of say five or six thousand dollars for its first year.

While Hahn was impugning the integrity of Ms. Cantu and her suspect “bros,” he failed to recognize distinctions between the “bros” with influence at Town Hall and their “cuates” who are fleecing the community, and those terrible Cordovas from El Prado, who are historically involved in the nonprofit sector and have put on events and donated their time, including their musical gifts each Sunday at Church or to Las Pastores at Christmas.

This council allocated $20,000 or so for the “Kongos” and their producers, a free concert, attended by almost two-thousand locals on the Plaza. Ironically, the Chamber of Commerce for years has been offering a highly successful series of free live music events on Thursday nights during the summer featuring local musicians. The Council subsidizes, I’m told, the Solar Music Festival, a festival promoted by folks who took advantage of bankruptcy laws to avoid paying local vendors in the past.Councilor Cantu may have made a false start, influenced as she is by the free spenders in Town Hall and its top-down policies.

But there is something disingenuous about the Barrone, Bellis, Hahn cabal, wherein they pretend to listen to Plaza Merchants but ignore a re-configured plan for the Farmer’s Market on the Plaza, a plan that also keeps some traffic lanes open. Apparently, when Bellis and Barrone were interviewed by the legendary sports caster, Paddy Mac recently on KTAO, they couldn’t answer the DJ’s questions about Plaza Merchant dissatisfaction.

It’s part of the “Ostrich Syndrome.”

Barrone, no slouch when it comes to “physical courage,” was quick to order a merchant, out of a recent meeting when he considered the merchant rude. While nobody doubts the Mayor’s physical courage, the Town needs “moral courage” to confront the corrupt culture in the Public Works Department (and the feisty merchants themselves). The three “bros,” Barrone, Bellis, and Hahn, might take a look at the 21st Century ledgers and accounts, the paper trail, which reveals how the other “bros” and “cuates” are picking the pockets of taxpayers. And what’s with all the support for out-of-town vegans? Eh?

A little history (The past is always present in Taos.)

Hahn, the social engineer, seeks reconciliation for 19th Century injustices associated with Manifest Destiny and signs petitions, reportedly, promoted by an Iron Horseman of questionable Native American identity. If the councilor were serious he might promote a series of seminars on Kit Carson’s alleged crimes, install panels with folks, who are grounded in the lore and facts of 1847 and what went before and after the massacre memorialized now at the Bent Museum and at Taos Pueblo’s old San Geronimo Church. (That might require becoming informed! Before stereotyping  “middle-aged white” authors, it’s always good to read the books!)

Here, in the summer of 1970 Luis Valdez’s troupe of commedia dell’arte” performers, El Teatro Campesino, gathered to support the strike i.e. Viva Huelga against Coors’s sugar beet farms in Colorado at Old Martinez Hall. The hall reverberated with cheers for the Teatro and jeers for “the man.” Among other injustices, the farm workers protested against the use of the “short hoe” in the fields of the Southwest, including Southern New Mexico. In Taos your local bar flies joined the boycott in solidarity and switched from Coors to Schlitz.

Cesar Chavez and the United Farm Workers fought against the top-down government-supported industrial farmers and the police state of that era. It is fitting to acknowledge the man, who led the charge against “injustice,” injustice that continues today in terms of the inequality of income and wealth or “top down” governing today, whether in Washington D.C. or at the Town of Taos, where, apparently the “bros” rule.

One of the great “Chicano” victories occurred in Silver City, New Mexico, when copper miners went on strike and won a victory over the owners, an event memorialized in the wonderful movie, Salt of the Earth. The film deal was put together at Craig and Jenny Vincent’s ranch in San Cristobal despite the McCarthy-era repression: see James J. Lorence’s book, The Suppression of Salt of the Earth,  a story about the union’s struggle for human dignity and a film that so frightened the establishment union projectionists refused to show it. J.Edgar Hoover stationed FBI agents in Taos to keep an eye on Los Vincents. Damn commies.

Taos Friction believes Councilor Cantu’s Cesar Chavez/Yard Sale idea merits consideration at a budget commensurate with a first time project. Despite Councilor Hahn’s insinuations, she’s not part of the so-called “bros,” who currently run Town Hall, nor is she one of former Mayor Darren Cordova’s cronies. We don’t believe she should be subjected to ridicule and bullied by Barrone and Hahn or misleading headlines in The Taos News. (Andrew: They did this to Councilor Erlinda Gonzales, too!)

Where’s Tijerina and his axe handle when we need him?

Literary Lights

Steve Fox won “The NM Press Women Book” Second Place Award for Nonfiction books for adult readers in Biography and Autobiography for his Odyssey: Love and Terror in Greece, 1969 (Taos, Nighthawk Press, 2014). My former Horse Fly colleague’s book is a “rite of passage tale” that recaptures the synchronicity of love and politics in the 60s. While the protagonist begins his journey innocently enough in Texas, joins the Air Force and comes of age in Crete and Athens, he ultimately finds his way to adulthood in Santa Fe and Albuquerque.

Steve’s naïve adventures and the narration of chance and opportunity remind me of circumstances recaptured in my own Gringo Lessons. The details and styles differ but the arc of the story is similar to Joan Didion’s 1967 essay, “Goodbye to All That,” a short essay about her time in New York. Steve’s sweet character is far removed from Didion’s worldly lassitude or my own skeptical temperament. At one point, Didion asks, “was anyone ever so young?” Yes, we were. Mr. Fox has written a good story about being young.