Fiesta Council official files complaint
Group president claims school board did not follow Open Meetings Act; board president says charge false
The president of the Santa Fe Fiesta Council said Monday she expects a response by mid-November to a complaint she filed with the Attorney General’s Office alleging an Aug. 7 meeting of the Santa Fe school board violated the state Open Meetings Act.
The board voted during the meeting to limit Fiesta Council visits to public schools, despite opposition from some Fiesta Council supporters.
Among other complaints, the grievance filed by Melissa Mascarenas claims the meeting agenda was not available 72 hours in advance as required by the state law and that the agenda did not “include a list of specific items the public body intended to discuss or transact at the meeting or the items listed and acted upon were not listed with reasonable specificity.”
The complaint also says: “It seems the board met in a closed door session to discuss the issue of removing Fiesta Council from the school visitation.”
Board president Steven Carrillo said Monday the allegations are “completely false. We’ve complied with everything as we are supposed to do regarding the Open Meetings Act. The meeting was posted when it was supposed to be.”
Carrillo also said the board did not meet in closed session that evening to discuss the Fiesta Council issue. The one item on the executive session agenda that night involved pending litigation, and he said the board did not stray from that discussion behind closed doors.
Mascarenas said Monday she filed the complaint in mid-August because she felt the board did not give sufficient notice on an important issue and because Fiesta Council representatives
in particular were not invited to any discussion of the issue or to the Aug. 7 meeting itself.
However, Carrillo said board members worked to ensure the public knew about the meeting because “this was too big of an issue to not put out there in advance.” He noted that he talked to the Santa Fe New Mexican for a story that ran in advance of the meeting.
He also said the agenda made it clear that the board would discuss and possibly act on the district’s Equity and Diversity Council’s recommendations regarding the Fiesta Council presence in the schools.
Mascarenas said that while she has no proof that board members discussed the issue beforehand, “based on the way they presented the issue that night it seems that everybody knew how they were going to vote.”
Mascaranes said the Attorney General’s Office told her the school district has 90 days to respond to the complaint.
District spokesman Jeff Gephart said the district is reviewing the complaint and will respond within the allotted period.
Nearly 40 people spoke at the Aug. 7 meeting as the board considered voting to limit Fiesta Council visits to classes that study New Mexico history in the fourth, seventh and ninth grades. The vast majority asked the board to reject or table the measure.
After some three hours of sometimes heated discussion and testimony, the five-member board voted 4-1 to adopt the measure while continuing a policy of allowing students who do not wish to attend those Fiestathemed events to opt out. Only board member Rudy Garcia voted against the change.
The board’s August vote followed a series of events that called into question the message that Fiesta de Santa Fe organizers were sending when they hosted an annual re-enactment of conquistador Don Diego de Vargas’ re-entry into Santa Fe in 1692, years after Spanish colonists were driven out during the 1680 Pueblo Revolt. Critics argued that the reconquest was anything but peaceful, as depicted in the re-enactment, which they called an insult to Native people.
That event’s sponsor, the Caballeros de Vargas, had already announced over the summer that it planned to “retire” the annual re-enactment, known as the Entrada, and replace it with another event.