No Decision Made, as Discussion Gets Tabled Until the Sept. 23 Meeting
The City of Española has been without a city manager for 111 days, but that could change next week.
Mayor John Ramon Vigil nominated former Rio Arriba County Health and Human Services director Lauren Reichelt as city manager during a special city council meeting on Monday. A vote on her appointment did not occur and instead, the city council tabled discussion of her nomination until its next regular meeting on Sept. 23.
“Every ship needs a captain, even for the last few miles,” Reichelt wrote in response to questions sent by the Rio Grande SUN regarding her nomination. “I have been happily retired since October. I love my community and if I can be of service, using my experience to guide the ship into port, then I would like to do so.”
The city manager position is appointed by the mayor and approved by council. Whoever takes the job will do so knowing it could be short-lived, as Vigil’s term ends next year and he has not announced whether he will seek re-election.
Vigil introduced Reichelt by highlighting her 35 year-long history of volunteerism, community activism and work with health and human services.
She began her address to council by sharing some of her history.
Her career in Rio Arriba County started in the early 1990s when she began volunteering to fundraise for a public playground. Originally, she was looking for somewhere that her own young daughter could play, but it turned into much more.
This led to the creation of Vanessa’s Hideaway at Valdez Park, which was named after Vanessa Valerio, who was killed in 1993 when someone broke into her home to steal her diabetic syringes.
The county then hired Reichelt and she became director of its Health and Human Services Department. She stayed until 2022. She recently retired as the Environmental Health Division director from the New Mexico Environment Department, where she oversaw a staff of about 200 people across 22 field offices.
She highlighted her work creating programs and tactics to address substance abuse and addiction during her 28 years with Rio Arriba county, including some of her creative approaches to funding, community health programs and work with law enforcement.
This included, she said, bringing Naloxone to the county and training officers from multiple departments on how to use it, convincing them to join the Rio Arriba Community Health Council and providing officer resources for Post Traumatic Stress Disorder and crisis intervention training.
Challenge
District 4 City Councilor Samuel LeDoux asked Reichelt about her political activism and posts on Facebook, specifically those about law enforcement.
“I know that you said that you’ve done a lot of great work with the police, but I am concerned about some of the rhetoric that you have posted over the last five years regarding the police,” he said.
In September 2020, LeDoux said, Reichelt posted regarding the infiltration of white supremacists in police departments across the country. He also highlighted her work with organizations like Indivisible New Mexico, Indivisible Española, and Black Lives Matter and their calls to defund the police.
“You’ve also just recently indicated as recently as April, that you felt that some of our federal law enforcement officers were ‘Brown Shirts,’ referencing, you know, soldiers in the Nazi regime,” LeDoux said.
In her response, Reichelt said she completely disagreed with LeDoux and that she has never personally called for the defunding of law enforcement. She also said that she does not consider Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents police officers.
“Our police department, I’m very proud of it,” she said. “It is well run, it is made up of officers who have taken the time to train themselves and to learn how to interact with the public properly. I cannot imagine any Española police officer, say, going to Lowe’s or the Farmers Market and looking for people who look like they’re Mexican and showing up in masks with all kinds of guns and refusing to identify themselves and putting people in vehicles.”
LeDoux also said many members of council want to move forward with “policies that would be pro trying to get our crime under control,” and not criminal justice reform.
“I’m a guy that looks at results, and the results are that our overdoses have not decreased, our results are that crime has increased and so has homelessness,” LeDoux said. “We have gotten worse pretty much every single year in every one of these categories, and, you know, I’m not sure that the direction that the county has chosen, or that the city has chosen, is effective and is working, and appointing a city manager that wants to advocate polices that would continue down this road is troubling.”
Reichelt used statistics in her response to LeDoux.
“In terms of the overdose rate, when I ran the Rio Arriba Department of Health and Human Services, we actually did reduce the death rate by 30%, after that fentanyl came in, and that’s another issue, and also I wasn’t there,” she said.
Reichelt also cited statistics from her work with pregnant women and said that 90% of the women they worked with gave birth without any kind of illicit substance in their bloodstreams and were able to keep their children.
“I strongly disagree that the only way to deal with substance abuse and mental illness issues is through law enforcement and jail,” she said.
Transparency
The discussion about Reichelt’s nomination occurred publicly and not in a closed executive session portion of the meeting.
“I am also really glad that we’re doing this publicly because if I’m chosen to be the city manager, I’m working for the people of Española,” she said during the meeting. “I believe in complete transparency where it’s possible.”
Vigil said he would prefer a closed meeting but respected Reichelt’s desire to hold the conversation publicly. District 4 City Councilor Justin Salazar-Torrez also asked City Attorney Frank Coppler how they could move the conversation to executive session.
Coppler said that they could put an executive session item on the agenda for the Sept. 23 meeting.
While LeDoux voted in favor of tabling any discussion and action regarding Reichelt’s employment, earlier in the meeting, he encouraged everyone to move forward.
“We need to start thinking long-term and we need to start doing it now,” he said. “And having meetings about meetings about ourselves, I feel is just becoming a distraction, and I really hope that after tonight, with some clarity about leadership decisions, we can really look toward the future, instead of the soap opera that appears to be behind this every single week.”
The vote to table the discussion passed 5-2, with District 1 City Councilor Pedro Valdez and District 2 Coucilor Nanette Rodriguez voting against it. Former mayor pro tem Peggy Sue Martinez did not attend the meeting.
Mayor Pro Tem
While the council skipped the city manager vote, they did elect a new mayor pro tem.
LeDoux nominated Salazar-Torrez for the role, which passed in a 5-2 vote.
District 1 Councilor Aaron Salazar voted against Salazar-Torrez, Rodriguez abstained from voting.