Commissioner James Paxon (1, 16:00) explained the 10/25/22 special meeting was convened at 6 pm to allow residents and officials unavailable during the county’s regular 10 am meeting to attend. The intent of the meeting was to address the flood situation and things going on. “We are looking for positives”, Paxon continued, “what can be done going forward to benefit the citizens of Sierra county”.
The recorded meeting, divided into 3 segments is available on facebook. Segments and times are given for those who wish to hear the discussions directly. The links for the segments are: Segment 1 , Segment 2, and Segment 3
Public needs, county assistance
Public comment (1, 20:00) included a member of the New Mexico state police who wanted to learn more about the situation in the county. Representatives from the Sierra Soil and Water Conservation district made themselves available to the commission to provide information during the meeting if needed. They also reminded the board of commission of the importance of creek bottom lands in the agricultural economy of the county.
Sierra county residents Willard Hall, Austin and Melissa Rivera, Sid Savage, and Brandon May described their individual flooding issues, frustration with lack of information, and requests for “permanent fixes” to “long term issues” that have to be addressed with every significant rainfall.
Lack of information for property owners was an issue almost all residents brought up. Hall described how he had heard talk at the county fair about how the county and flood commission would not do anything in the creeks only “later on see dozers in the creek”. May told the commission he had called everyone he thought could help but “everyone had an excuse”.
Emergency services administrator Ryan Williams has been working to help Sierra county residents more efficiently find help for their flood related issues by putting together a Disaster Resource Guide. “It’s like shooting a shotgun in the dark. There are agencies all over the place but you need to find the right one” is how Williams described the difficulties flood victims have in finding the right organization to help them recover. Williams, with the help of the Department of Homeland Security and Emergency Management, designed the guide after hosting a round table with relief organizations and attending a virtual meeting with Senator Ben Ray Lujuan and other county emergency managers.
Williams’ guide is designed to help property owners find resources for assistance with their personal flooding issues. The “document is focused on assisting our residents and pointing them in the right direction so they don’t expend their time contacting the wrong agency. Individuals are suffering from different types of flood damages and agencies will assist with only specific items due to their organizational background”, Williams explained to this Citizen writer via email. Some agencies help with livestock, others with acequias, others with debris, etc. With the guide, the owner can assess the type of damage on their property and find an agency most likely to be able to help if the owner is “eligible”.
In the meantime, local government has been working “aggressively” to open county roads. Billy Neeley, road director, provided a work update on the road leading into San Miguel (1, 41:30). They’ve been out there about three weeks, he said, with a little over a mile of road rebuilt. Additional road repairs require the flow to slow down so vehicles can access the area. Williams also remarked that larger equipment was needed to make repairs.
Michael Hutchins (44:15), ranger with the Black Range district of the Gila National Forest echoed Neeley’s description of trying to work in areas where the land is soaked and unable to support the heavy equipment need to bring in supplies. “Thirty-six miles of boundary fences” need to be replaced but they are unable to transport the supplies to where they are needed. Commissioner Paxon thanked Hutchins for working with permittees who have been unable to contain their livestock while the fences are down.
Hutchins also expressed exasperation with people who have been ignoring signs warning against travel in the area. They have put up signs that are 2 by 3 foot and even 3 by 4 foot and people drive past them. “One person was stuck out there for nine days”, he said. We need people “to have patience” and “wait it out” until it dries.
County needs, state assistance
County commissioner Travis Day asked Williams to explain how the county’s emergency declaration results in the governor assigning $750,000 and how the county can “get that money on the ground”.
Williams explained that after the county declared states of emergency, first for fires then for flooding, the county had to meet a threshold of money spent in dealing with the emergency situations. The amount of money counties with declarations have to spend before getting assistance is per capita based. In the case of Sierra county, the amount was $47,000. Sierra county and two others (Grant and Hidalgo) met their thresholds and qualify for $750,000 appropriations from the state.
“They will assist the county with roads, public infrastructure, things like that”, Williams elaborated, “it is not an open checkbook”. The appropriation allows the state to bring in more equipment to help deal with the situation, “it allows more resources to come in” to the county. The state sends in the resources that are needed and deducts the cost of those items from the $750,000 fund.
“Those resources are only to be used on county lands”, Williams continued. “There is some confusion with private property owners who think they can say their road is damaged, I want you to come in and fix it”. The county is not allowed to work on private property even if the property owner is concerned about emergency vehicle access.
Additional discussions made it clear that residents were not the only ones confused about what help is available; they were joined by the county government. For example, state Representative Rebecca Dow discussed the two emergency declarations in the county, one for the fire and one for the flood, each with $750,000 in assistance. Commissioner Paxon stated that his understanding was the emergency fire declaration was “for fire only” and did not include flood, “we can not use those monies for flood”. However, he admitted there is some confusion that attorney Pato may need to clarify. Dow agreed saying the representative from homeland security had told her the funds from the first declaration could be used where fire scars cause flooding.
State legislators Senator Crystal Diamond and Representative Rebecca Dow both offered their assistance as did Jay Armijo from the South Central Council of Governments who said he is working on a list of funding opportunities.
Flood commissioner Jones speaks to finances and priorities
A theme that flood commissioner Sandy Jones (2, 4:10) returned to throughout the evening was the costs for dealing with flood related issues and the price Sierra county residents pay for those same issues. “I always hope I can get the government I’m paying for”, Jones said in attribution to humorist Will Rogers.
A mill levy of 1.5 ($1.50 for every $1,000 of assessed value) for the flood commission is included in property taxes for all property in the county within five miles of a potential flood area. That includes every property except four on the west side of the continental divide according to assessor Michael Huston. Jones estimates that the annual cost to residents is “$40-$150 per year” which adds up to about $450,000 a year for the flood commission to use to lessen potential flood damage or repair existing damage.
Jones gave several examples of how far those funds can go. Starting with levees, which Jones said were installed years ago when he had previously served as flood commissioner. At that time it cost “three-quarters of a million dollars” to put in levees. “But they don’t last”, he added that several years later they were damaged and in “2013 a lot was lost”.
The levees are just “bandaids”, according to Jones. Indeed, he said he flew over every levee just a week before the rains began and “the previous maintenance was pretty good”, and they looked to be in pretty decent shape. But the results of subsequent rains attested to the ineffectiveness of the levees to the large loads put on them.
Likewise, Jones had previously modeled Palomas Canyon for more permanent fixes to flooding issues. He estimated the costs at that time to be “north of $18 million” and now the cost would “probably be closer to $40 million”. With the amount of tax money collected, it’s “unreasonable” to think about permanent fixes. “It’s going to take a congressional earmark to ever do any major flood control in the rural parts of the county”.
Jones continued his lecture on the painful realities of economics by explaining that it is cheaper for the government to buy property, condemn it and move residents out rather than pay for flood control. The federal government or any “fiscal conservative” is going to look at the cost to benefit ratio. If it is going to “spend $10 million to protect property, that property had better be worth at least $10 million”.
Five local contractors have been working in Palomas Canyon between the Bureau of Reclamation land and Interstate 25, the area of the county Jones deemed had the greatest number of houses at risk. The contractors started work on “Friday afternoon, were out there at 6 a.m. on Saturday morning” and continued work until Tuesday when they were about to run out of the $50,000 in funds initially requested. The county board of commission later ratified an emergency procurement to continue the work. Jones estimated “a couple $100,000 more” would be needed for fixes in Palomas Canyon.
After the work in Palomas Canyon is finished, there are some “requests from Paxon to help out in San Miguel” where Neeley’s road department has been working to open the road. “We will see if we can help”, said Jones, “the fastest resource comes out of the flood commission office because it has the money”, about $1.8 million as stated during this meeting.
Jones would not commit to where work would proceed after that. He had heard a lot of bad reports from the Monticello area but had not yet been out to make an assessment. A request from a resident of the Animas Creek area was not given a start date but a promise was made to get out there “at some point”, maybe in the spring.
Jones’ priorities for work in the county will first be to identify and fund repairs in locations that have the potential of loss of life. The second priority would be houses and third would be farmland.
Jones also plans to talk with Truth or Consequences city manager, Bruce Swingle, about projects in municipal areas. “The community needs to understand that 80% of the taxes come from municipalities… part of the statute says that we expend the money where the tax is generated”. Jones said that it is hard to justify in the long run spending 100% of the monies in rural areas given the statute requirements. Jones did admit that projects in the municipalities would have to “go on the back burner” until the immediate flooding issues in the county were addressed.
A member of the Las Palomas community ditch association later questioned using 80% of the flood commission funds in the municipal areas where those monies are collected. “It doesn’t mean they [the towns] don’t get a lot from ranchers and farmers…they bring value to the county as a whole”. Jones’ agreed but added “the stark reality is the numbers are the numbers”.
Jones had two suggestions for rural residents to get more projects done in their areas. The first, which Jones did not advocate, was to “petition to raise the flood commission mill levy to 5” as a way to raise more funds for the flood commission.
The second suggestion Jones had was for residents to form their own watershed districts. “They’ve been very successful in other areas”, he said and used Palomas as an example for how a watershed district might work. You would form a tax district, elect your own board, set your own tax rate to generate money to work on watershed projects. “What that money is best for is to leverage for federal funds”, Jones continued, that is how to make the money be effective because “you will never tax yourselves to do those kind of things”.
Sierra to collaborate with other counties for opioid study and remediation
County manager Amber Vaughn (3, 7:22) introduced the agreement between Sierra county and six other counties to pool their share of money from the state’s settlement against pharmaceutical companies. The collaborative will fund a study that will allow them to develop and implement a sustainable opioid remediation project in their counties. According to Vaughn, the first year of the joint project will have $896,000 ($159,000 is Sierra county’s share) to begin their work. Valencia county will serve as the fiscal agent for the group which will be governed by a board with members from each county.
The state will be receiving over $195 million from the settlement, 55% of that money, about $170 million, will be shared between local governments. Attorney Dave Pato, who has been working to build this collaboration, told the commission that he has had conversations with former Secretary of Health, Kathy Kunkel who thinks that the collaboration will allow the group to tap in to the state’s share of the settlement money. The group will first “identify gaps in opioid treatment”, said Pato. He has identified a contractor to assist that work.
Sheriff’s office to receive $131,250 appropriation
During the commission’s October 17 regular meeting an appropriation from the state was tabled for lack of guidelines on how the funds could be used. Sheriff Hamilton’s preference was to use the funds for retention of officers but it was not clear if that was allowed.
The state had since issued a new letter saying the funds could be spent in accordance with House Bill 68 which permits use of the funds for retention rather than hiring when a new position was not needed. Although specific guidelines for using the funds were still not available, the Sheriff requested the commission accept the appropriation.
The commission also signed a joint powers agreement with the Village of Williamsburg and the Sheriff’s office. The village will transfer its annual law enforcement protection fund, $45,000, to the sheriff’s budget and in exchange the sheriff will provide law enforcement for the village.
Correction
In an earlier version, it was incorrectly stated that the Army Corp of Engineers assisted Williams in designing the Disaster Resource Guide.