Airport board still hitting turbulence
The three remaining members of the five-person Taos Regional Airport Advisory Board gathered for its first meeting of the year last Thursday (Feb. 16).
The advisory body was resurrected last April — after a threeyear hiatus during the Dan Barrone mayoral administration — and tasked largely with providing recommendations on the evolving Airport Master Plan.
The board also advises on airport rules and regulations, such as those affecting noise and pollution. The master plan is an important guiding document that will inform infrastructure development choices and help secure funding for the municipal facility over at least the next five years.
But at least a perceived lack of cooperation from the town, a steep learning curve for what is essentially a new board, and the firing of one its most qualified board members by Mayor Pascual Maestas last year has clipped the board’s wings.
Aviation Services Manager Kino Chavez didn’t appear at last week’s airport advisory board meeting, and Town Manager Andrew Gonzales and Mayor Maestas were absent. Since the town has been unable to identify a viable candidate to fill the role of airport manager, it was left to Francisco “French” Espinoza, the town’s director of public works, to represent the town and the airport.
“You’re gonna be the guy here, French, because no one’s here today,” Taos Regional Airport Advisory Board Chair Al Rapp said, as he looked out from the dais into an almost empty Town of Taos Council Chambers, where two members of the public and former airport advisory board member Daniel Weeks were seated.
Weeks was thrown off the airport advisory board in a
series of council actions last fall after Maestas claimed Weeks had exhibited a conflict of interest when he continued to discuss, in his capacity as an advisory board member, the issue of hangar space and lease availability at the airport. Private hangar leases have been allowed to lapse, and a large new hangar is slated to be built starting this year.
The first action against Weeks, at the town council’s Sept. 13 regular meeting, saw Maestas cast the deciding vote to remove the pilot. Maestas cast his vote despite a 2012 town ordinance that states that “any airport advisory board member appointed by the mayor and confirmed by the town council under the provisions of this chapter may be removed by a three-fourths vote of a quorum of the duly elected and qualified members of the town council.”
Maestas brought the issue back to a vote during the council’s next, Sept. 27 meeting, where he noted the many discrepancies in town code with regard to the town’s eight appointed committees and boards.
“It’s really only the airport advisory board that follows this 75-percent rule” by which three out of four councilors must vote to depose an airport advisory board member, Maestas argued at the time, going on to acknowledge that his tie-breaking council vote to depose Weeks “is kind of up in the air right now waiting for the attorney general to make a determination.”
“Who knows how long that is going to take,” Maestas said at the Sept. 27 meeting, after which the council ultimately voted 3-1 to remove Weeks.
A spokesperson for Attorney General Raul Torrez’s office said a search of complaints and requests for opinion submitted via the AG’s web portal didn’t turn up anything related to Weeks or the airport advisory board.
In October, the council repealed its airport advisory board ordinance and adopted a resolution that rewrote the rules so that “the airport advisory board members shall serve at the pleasure of the mayor, with the exception of the Taos Pueblo appointee who shall serve at the pleasure of the Taos Pueblo.”
At last week’s meeting, Rapp and board member April Mondragon held a lengthy discussion on the advisory board’s first action item, the passage of its annual Open Meetings Act resolution, which is required by state law and generally a pro-forma item on any public body’s new year to-do list.
After Rapp and Mondragon expressed distrust in the town, the OMA resolution was tabled after the board indicated it wanted clarity from the town regarding its official roles and responsibilities.
“When we formed as a board last April, we were given ordinance 12-12,” Rapp said, waving a copy of the original ordinance that established the airport advisory board. “We were given a document of roles and responsibilities, and we were given a copy of the Airport Master Plan. That was what we were tasked to do, and those were the rules we were tasked to abide by.
“I’d like a copy of this in the minutes, if this is still a valid document,” Rapp said. “Is it?”
“I think we’re working under the same document,” Espinoza responded.
After Mondragon made sure that the tail number of a particular aircraft was added to the record, the advisory board approved its only other action item, the minutes from its Dec. 15 meeting.
“Start date Dec. 1, tail number N14012,” Mondragon said. “For what purpose this was over three hours in our skies, with many calls I received from Taos Pueblo, so that needs to be added into our minutes; and I asked for that report and responsibility for airport management to track down what this was for, what they were doing.”
At Rapp’s request, Espinoza confirmed that the advisory board would like updates from the town on several matters: The confirmation of a new board member with pilot experience; the status of the board member from Taos Pueblo, which has mandated representation on the board; that a representative from the Federal Aviation Administration answer the board’s questions; that a representative from Holy Cross Medical Center provide information regarding the number of fixed-wing flights emanating from the Taos Municipal Airport, particularly at night; and an update on the Airport Master Plan; and the airport’s progress on a promised “noise and pollution” mitigation plan.
“The lion’s share of the comments from the community were relevant to noise and pollution, so if the town shows a willingness
to develop a noise mitigation plan, I think that would help,” Rapp said. “But we haven’t seen any movement on that.”
Andrea Terry, who lives off Tortuga Road southeast of the airport, gave the evening’s sole public comment.
“Airplanes are still flying over our houses, it’s kind of terrifying,” she said. “Night flights. Really hoping for a curfew after 10 p.m. and before 7 a.m.”
“I get calls with the same concerns you have,” Mondragon said, acknowledging that increased development is coming into conflict with fixed-wing medical transport flights, on which Holy Cross Medical Center has increasingly had to rely in lieu of ground transport in recent years, particularly for behavioral health patients.
Dr. Heather Marshall Vaskas, emergency medicine medical
director at Holy Cross, told the Taos News that the hospital is “sending fewer psychiatric patients at night by fixed wing,” but indicated that access to fixed-wing flights at night is critical.
“A 10 p.m. curfew is absolutely unacceptable in my opinion,” she said.
Out of 996 patients who were transferred last year, Holy Cross Emergency Department Director Donna Collins said 201 were transported between 8 p.m. and 7 a.m., 93 of which were on fixedwing flights out of the municipal airport. Fifty of those patients were psychiatric transfers.
Holy Cross Medical Center CEO James Kiser told the Taos News that, regardless of diagnosis, emergency medical transport flights can’t be scheduled.
“This is about saving lives,” he said.