It’s time for the Town of Taos to open its doors again to the public
For nearly a year now in the town of Taos, we’ve been able to walk into a restaurant and get something to eat. We can shop for a new pair of shoes or a piece of art. We can go into a barber shop or a salon and get a haircut. We can visit museums in the Taos Historic District. And, at the discretion of business owners, we can do all of these things without wearing a mask if we so choose, following Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham’s decision to lift the mask mandate last month.
But one thing we still can’t do — mask or no mask — is walk into the government offices of the Town of Taos on Camino de la Placita or attend a public meeting inperson at Town Hall on Civic Plaza Drive.
Just to be sure, we tried the front doors to the Town of Taos to find them still locked during normal business hours on Monday (March 28). That was after we moved around the metal barricades that stand in front of them, the ones that bear weather-beaten signs urging that whatever a local resident or visitor came there to do in-person instead be done remotely. It’s as if no one gave the Town the memo: The pandemic — while not over by any means — no longer poses anywhere near the risk it once did in 2020 or for much of 2021. Pretty much everyone else in town has found a way to conduct business inperson again in a safe manner, and it’s well past time for our town officials to do the same.
Even during the most dangerous days of the pandemic, our office here at the Taos News remained open to the public because the public is who we’re here to serve. We took precautions, equipping ourselves and our visitors with all the pandemic accoutrements we’ve all become intimately familiar with in the last two years. We made it through just fine. Some of the people who came to see us asked about these very issues: Why is the town not open? Why are business owners not
able to renew their licenses in-person? Why are public officials and key town employees working behind locked doors or from their homes when I’m back at work? Why can’t I attend a town council meeting in-person?
By our estimation, the town’s management just doesn’t have an excuse for this policy any more — if it ever did.
Beyond the inconvenience locking their doors causes the people who put them in office (or put the people in office who hired or appointed them to their positions), maintaining a closed-door policy for so long is just a bad look for our town government. And we all know what the policy has really been about: convenience. Meetings with members of the public take time. They’re sometimes contentious. We know this at the Taos News, where we often drop what we’re doing on deadline to meet someone who wants to talk. That’s often difficult, but we do it because it’s part of the job.
Fortunately, Friday (April 1) will see an in-person town hall meeting for Pascual Maestas’ swearing in ceremony as the new mayor of Taos. Let’s hope this is the first of many more positive changes to come and a renewed effort by the Town of Taos to put the “public” back in public service.