Taos mayor releases home rule candidate list
Town could adopt ranked-choice voting under home rule
Taos Mayor Pascualito Maestas took to Facebook last Thursday (Jan. 26) to publish his list of candidates for the town’s Home Rule Charter Commission, introducing a previously-lacking degree of transparency to his monthslong push to make Taos a home rule municipality.
Maestas faced criticism from town councilors and members of the public for not releasing the list sooner. And in response to a Jan. 11 Taos News Inspection of Public Records Act request, Maestas claimed that no such list existed.
In his Facebook post — in which he characterized the Taos News’ reporting on the home rule portion of Tuesday’s (Jan. 24) fractious town council meeting as “journalistic spin” — Maestas listed his handpicked candidates for the commission:
• Jake Caldwell, whom Maestas described as a “former town attorney and someone I highly respect that brings municipal government and legal experience;”
• Judy Torres, who, as executive director of the Taos Valley Acequia Association, has the “experience to ensure that agricultural lands and acequias are protected in the charter;”
• Chenoa Velarde, who, in addition to being student success specialist and student government staff advisor at UNM–Taos, is also a Taos Pueblo tribal member;
• Mary Lane Leslie, “a local attorney with an interest in home rule and state-level connections to ensure a strong charter;”
• Wanda Lucero, “a respected community business owner with government experience as a former school board member;”
• Victoria Santistevan, “a community educator and proponent of workforce training and skill development who will bring a perspective of economic development and diversification;”
• and Vince Bowers, an “attorney, rancher, and farmer with interest in and knowledge of home rule.”
As an “alternate,” Maestas chose Luis Reyes, longtime CEO of Kit Carson Electric Cooperative, who submitted his letter of interest on Jan. 25. Several more applications have been submitted by members of the public interested in serving on a home rule charter commission, according to the town’s record custodian.
The town will accept letters of interest for the commission seats until Feb. 9; the town council will reconvene to take up the appointments at its Feb. 24 meeting.
After about an hour of acrimonious debate last week, Maestas agreed to table the appointments process until Feb. 14, seemingly heeding councilors’ concerns about transparency. But then he reversed course and deployed a procedural maneuver to force the appointments to a vote.
After Maestas cast tie-breaking ‘yes’ votes to side with Ortega and Councilor Darien Fernandez to appoint Caldwell and Torres — overriding Fambro and Evans’ ‘no’ votes — Ortega hit “pause” on the process. Since no more appointments were possible without Ortega’s support, Maestas reversed course again and agreed to table “further appointments” until the next regular council meeting.
Maestas did not include a list of his candidates in the Jan. 24 meeting agenda, and no names or biographical materials were included in the meeting packet. In response to a Jan. 11 Inspection of Public Records Act request, the town’s records custodian told the Taos News, “In response to your request for public records, I was informed by Mayor Pascualito Maestas no such records exist.”
Maestas, who did not respond to an emailed list of questions from the Taos News, stated in his Facebook post that “I have been open with everyone that has asked regarding my desired appointments to the Home Rule Commission;” and he told Fambro during the Jan. 24 meeting that “we put the list forward six weeks ago.”
Elections and powers of the mayor
Charter municipalities have the ability to form a government outside the mayor-council-with-manager style under which Taos currently operates, something Maestas indicated was his motivation for pushing for home rule.
“My interest in home rule is the rebalance of power between mayor, council, and manager,” Maestas said in his Facebook post. “I don’t want to see power consolidated in any single position, especially an appointed (unelected) one. However, until the charter commission members have been appointed, we don’t know what the draft charter would entail.”
Political organizer and election reform activist Rick Lass, who assisted Santa Fe in making several amendments to its charter in the late 2000s and advocated for Las Cruces
to adopt ranked-choice voting, told the Taos News that, even given the strictures of state election law, home rule municipalities have the ability to improve how they conduct elections. Specifically, home rule municipalities — Santa Fe and Las Cruces are the only two in the state so far — can establish ranked choice voting, as well as allow voters to initiate referendums and recall elections.
“The mayor, city councilors and municipal judge shall be elected using a ranked choice — sometimes called instant runoff — voting system allowing voters to rank in order of their preference the candidates for each office appearing on the ballot,” according to the election code in Santa Fe’s charter. “If, after counting all voters’ first choice listed on their ballots for an office, no candidate receives a majority of votes cast, the candidate with the fewest votes shall be eliminated. Each ballot shall be tallied again for that office counting the vote from each ballot for the highest-ranked candidate who has not been eliminated. If still no candidate for that office receives a majority, the process shall be repeated until a candidate receives a majority of the votes for that office.”
“If Taos is doing a whole charter, they might as well include it in the charter,” Lass said, noting that home rule municipalities can also enact ranked-choice voting by ordinance. “Most people who’ve done it a couple of times say it’s no problem, and surveys done after elections show that they understood it and like it.”