Welcome to Rio Arriba County.
Here is a recipe for getting fired as county manager by newly elected county commissioners Alex Naranjo and Brandon Bustos, who three weeks ago chose to end Lucia Sanchez’s job as county manager even though she’d barely worked for them.
Directions: put all of these in a bowl, mix thoroughly, and improve efficiency in county government and, oh, by the way, create a financial budget surplus in a county facing a deficit.
Ingredients: Hired on July 1, 2021, Sanchez found the county facing a $2.5 million deficit.
When she departed after summarily being fired at a meeting where the public was not allowed to speak by Chairman Naranjo, she left the county with a projected surplus of $16 million.
Some of her other ingredients in the recipe to lose her job included:
– $2.3 million from Partnership Projects for Progress
– $12 million from the Local Assistance and Tribal Constituency Fund, half of which came in December of 2022 and the remainder to follow.
– $1 million from COPS Award
– $1 million for Electric Car Charging Station Award
– $1 million EDA Grant
– $538,607 Community Development Block Grant
Those are some of the dollars raised.
Then we add these to the bowl:
– Re-establishment of line-item budgeting
– Helping provide wage increase of $4,160 annually for all county employees
– Revising the County’s Comprehensive Plan
– Obtaining funding and beginning the County’s Hazard Mitigation Plan
– Re-establishment of the Planning and Zoning Committee
– Updating and revision of the County’s Infrastructure and Capital Improvement Plan
-Initiating the Lodger’s Tax Assessment and Review and increasing the lodger’s tax for a 20 per cent revenue increase
Adding to these ingredients in the recipe, if you were Sanchez, you worked side-by-side with county workers picking up roadside trash on a county-wide push for roadside beautification on Rio Arriba County’s roads and highways.
And you traveled over 35,000 miles in your truck working within the county on various projects.
You did all this in a year and one-half and were awarded a raise at the end of 2022 by the county commissioners you served. You received a satisfactory performance review only to have the two new commissioners pull the rug out from under you in February 2023.
Then the two new members of the county commission decided to return to old-style Rio Arriba County politics and remove you from your job without justification or warning.
The recipe for success and for improving county government operations and accountability, and for creating a budget surplus from a deficit, apparently was not suited to their tastes. So they fired the chef.
The dough did not rise. The cake fell flat. Bitter tastes abounded.
Shameful.