Public feuds leave mayor fighting for her political life
Audit compounds issues facing Gurulé-Giron amid battles with police chief, city councilors
LAS VEGAS, N.M. — Tonita Gurulé-Giron, the first female mayor of Las Vegas, has not had an easy time in her first 1½ years in office.
Since winning a squeaker of a race in March 2016 — she took the runoff election by 23 votes — Gurulé-Giron has faced and overcome two badly organized recall campaigns. She’s battled with her own police chief and City Council over spending and ethics. Now she faces a special audit by the state over alleged conflicts of interest and purchasing irregularities.
The 60-year-old mayor, who’s not yet halfway through her term, says the audit will silence her critics and allow her to govern without constantly fighting for her political life. In turn, those who say Gurulé-Giron is unfit to lead the city believe the audit might turn up particulars that could shake up the administration.
Las Vegas, a town of about 13,000 people, has long held a reputation for political wheeling and dealing. But it’s hard to remember any mayor facing so much controversy so soon and from so many sides.
Critics of Gurulé-Giron say she’s vindictive. The mayor says some of her opponents lie about her in hopes of pushing her out.
But, Gurulé-Giron says, she hopes her problems will blow over. She says she’s confident the Office of the State Auditor will clear her administration of any financial wrongdoing.
“We’re going to be fine,” she told The New Mexican last week when asked about the audit. “I know it will be a clean audit.”
The audit is just one controversy for Gurulé-Giron.
Las Vegas police Chief Juan Montaño this year has filed letters of intent to sue her. He claimed in June that the mayor has created a hostile work environment and retaliated against him for performing his duties. His filing said she was “arbitrary and capricious [in] use of governmental authority intended to cause harm to Chief Montaño in retaliation for having previously spoken out on issues of public concern.”
Montaño in August filed a supplemental claim that the mayor’s administration retaliated against him by issuing a directive saying police officers “would be limited in their off-duty hours, and would not be able to engage in personal pursuits to include the coaching of high school athletics.”
Also in August, City Manager Richard Trujillo sent a memo to city department heads saying that “any contact with journalists or other media representatives must be referred to our public information officer, Lee Einer.” About a month later, Trujillo sent a longer memo, explaining the policy was to “ensure an effective and coordinated response” to questions.
Last month, the City Council voted 3-1 to ask State Auditor Tim Keller to look into the city’s finances. Keller confirmed his office will investigate “conflicts of interest with a city vendor, contracting without seeking competitive prices, and budget adjustments without the approval of the Las Vegas City Council.”
Keller, in a news release, said, “We are going to look into concerns about whether the city of Las Vegas has followed the rules when it comes to purchasing. Competitive bidding and other practices are designed to safeguard tax dollars from patronage, fraud and abuse.”
Three days after the council’s vote, Keller’s staff wrote to Gurulé-Giron after receiving “multiple complaints” that her administration had ordered certain documents to be destroyed.
Gurulé-Giron is a product of the town where she’s riled many. She graduated from West Las Vegas High School and received a bachelor’s degree and master’s in business administration from another hometown school, New Mexico Highlands University. A retired state employee with experience working for the state Department of Finance and Administration, she was elected to the Las Vegas City Council in 2010.
She first ran for mayor in 2012 but lost to incumbent Alfonso Ortiz in a runoff election.
Gurulé-Giron prevailed in the mayoral election in March 2016. She has been controversial since the very beginning of her term. By October 2016, one of her former campaign workers had started a recall campaign against her. It fizzled for lack of petition signatures. A subsequent recall effort in May also stalled because organizers couldn’t get the 900-plus signatures needed to get the question on the ballot.
She blames the recall drives and some of her other problems on City Councilor Barbara Perea Casey, perhaps her most vocal critic.
“Councilor Casey and her husband took the lead in the recall efforts. It’s all political. It has nothing to do with ethical conduct of the administration,” Gurulé-Giron said. “Councilor Casey just wants to be mayor and wants to get me out of the way.”
Casey — who grew up in Las Vegas and served in the state Legislature for 10 years when she lived in Roswell — denies this. “I was asked to sign the [recall] petition but I didn’t,” she said. “I supported the mayor when she ran for the office.”
Casey also said she’s not maneuvering to be mayor.
But both Casey and Councilor Vince Howell said Gurulé-Giron mistreats them.
“She screamed at me,” Casey said, referring to a meeting when the audit request was approved. “She said I was disgraceful, a big disgrace to my people. Three officers escorted me to my car.”
“I feel at times I get disrespected,” Howell said.
But Howell’s relationship with Gurulé-Giron may not be the rockiest in Las Vegas government. The mayor and her police chief have not spoken to each other in months.
Gurulé-Giron acknowledged that in an interview last week. She said that after Montaño filed his attempt to sue her in June, her lawyer advised her not to talk with him.
Some familiar with the situation say the two haven’t spoken since February, when police issued four tickets to Gurulé-Giron’s son for traffic violations. But the mayor says neither that incident nor an earlier arrest of her daughter has shaded her dealings with the chief.
Montaño said his lawyer had advised him not to talk to a reporter about his intentions to sue the city. He also cited Trujillo’s memo forbidding contact with reporters by city employees without approval of the city manager. But in recent weeks, he’s said that his problems with the mayor began late last year, when one of his officers arrested Gurulé-Giron’s daughter on suspicion of drunken driving.
Officer Conrad Mares pulled over Victoria Gurulé-Giron, then 23, on Nov. 11 after he saw her driving across a center line. A breath test showed her blood-alcohol level was more than twice the legal limit. Police arrested her on charges of aggravated drunken driving, careless driving, having an open container of alcohol, having no valid driver’s license and possession of less than an ounce of marijuana.
Her lawyer later argued that a police video did not show her vehicle crossing the center line, so the officer did not have reasonable suspicion to stop her. Magistrate Judge Christian Montaño on April 4 granted her motion to suppress evidence. The district attorney dismissed the case later that month.
Gurulé-Giron said her daughter’s arrest didn’t harm her relationship with the chief. She said she was the one who suggested to then-Mayor Ortiz that he promote Montaño to chief.
“I never asked for any favors for my daughter,” she said. “I’m not like that.”
Chief Montaño’s first filing to bring a lawsuit listed “funding issues” among his complaints against the mayor. And some in town believe that the bad feelings between the chief and the mayor led to a proposed $224,000 cut to the police department budget.
Citing flat revenues, the mayor’s administration wanted to cut 15 vacant staff positions from a city workforce of about 300. Four of those positions were in the police department. In July, the City Council rejected that budget.
A few days later, the council held another meeting in which many members of the public spoke in favor of restoring police funding. Councilors voted to restore funding for two of the police positions as well as two additional police cars.
Another beef Chief Montaño has with the administration was City Manager Trujillo’s statement in August that the chief had not followed city procedure in allowing high-ranking officers to work part time as coaches for school teams. Montaño is a wrestling coach at West Las Vegas High School, and Deputy Chief Ken Jenkins coaches girls basketball at Memorial Middle School in the East Las Vegas school district. Several other officers volunteer as coaches at various schools in Las Vegas, but Montaño and Jenkins are among a handful who are paid stipends.
Montaño and Jenkins said school sports — and high school coaches — were important to them as they were growing up.
“There are a lot of kids from dysfunctional families,” Montaño said. Sports can teach them discipline and other life lessons and change their attitudes toward police and the law, he said.
“I was one of those kids who was teetering,” said the chief, who grew up in Las Vegas. “When I wasn’t on speaking terms with my father, my wrestling coach took on the role of being my father. I saw the impact of what a coach had done for me, and I wanted to do the same for somebody else.”
Gurulé-Giron said the issue of coaching came up because her city manager realized that Chief Montaño, Jenkins and others had not followed city policy by getting permission from the city manager before accepting outside employment. “Richard [Trujillo] has not denied anyone who wants to coach,” she said.
On financial matters, Councilor Howell made the motion to ask the Office of State Auditor to conduct a special audit.
“I just want to find out what our specific financial situation is,” he said in an interview at the convenience store he owns. “We need to be transparent. There’s a lot of mistrust of the government in the community.”
Gurulé-Giron was dead set against the idea. “I have no idea what they’re looking for in this audit,” she said.
There are at least a couple of specific items that the auditor is expected to look at.
One is the city’s purchase of an asphalt zipper, a $260,000 paving machine that the city returned after workers reportedly said they weren’t comfortable using it.
Howell said he didn’t understand why the city staff didn’t receive training for the operation of the zipper from the manufacturer. And both he and Casey say they haven’t received straight answers when they asked what happened to the money that was spent on the machine.
The mayor said the money was transferred to a fund for improvements at the city recreation center. Councilors question why they weren’t consulted on that transfer.
Another issue is a $94,000 emergency contract to repair the floors at City Hall, damage which the administration says was caused by a leaking water fountain.
This contract went to a Las Vegas company called Gemini Construction. Gemini is owned by Marvin Salazar, who Gurulé-Giron said worked on her mayoral campaign. Gemini had installed the hardwood floors at City Hall in the spring of 2016, after Gurulé-Giron became mayor. The company was paid about $9,000 for that project.
The emergency contract involved replacing the floors in the offices of the mayor, the city manager, the city attorney and the city finance director.
Casey questions whether it was necessary to do all that work and whether the city showed favoritism in selecting Gemini. Gurulé-Giron said nothing was improper.
The mayor also criticized councilors for not agreeing to go into a closed-door session to discuss exactly what would be audited.
Casey and Howell said they find the administration’s explanation for why documents were destroyed soon after the council’s vote to seek an audit hard to believe.
Justine Freeman, a spokeswoman for the state auditor, said the Las Vegas city finance director “confirmed that they did shred certain documents but that they were duplicate copies of the [Fiscal Year 2015] audit report.
According to Freeman, the city said some of the rooms where duplicate copies were being stored had to be cleaned up because of a previous flood. “The city stated that they were not aware of any personnel documents being destroyed,” she said.
Freeman said Friday that bids for the special audit are due Nov. 6, and an auditing firm will be chosen Nov. 9.
Both sides say they hope the audit — which could throw water on many of the complaints against Gurulé-Giron or give her critics more ammunition — will put an end to the fighting.
“We need to work together to move the community forward, whether they like me or whether they don’t like me,” Gurulé-Giron said.
Howell agrees. “I would like to have resolution on all these issues.” But he said of the mayor, “She really needs to learn to pull us together to work for the community. But she’s divided us.”