Turtleback Mountain Golf & Resort has its way with Elephant Butte and Truth or Consequences in annexation action

Local elected officials and government staff and the electorate have historically been pro-business and anti-government–so much so that they believe whatever a developer tells them and that they have the public’s best interests at heart. 

Candidates campaign on bringing tourism and business to the area and the imminent economic boom Copper Flat Mine and Spaceport’s space tourism flights will bring, although the latter has been trying to open for about 16 years and Virgin Galactic’s 200,000 visitors a year are still a mirage after 20 years. The mine will leave behind a forever toxic pit, hurt prior well owners and it will take the Rio Grande 100 years to recover, but hey, a few locals may be employed for its 12 or so years of operation–if the Australian owners don’t bring in their own people and put an RV workers camp on site, short-circuiting any trickle down. The Spaceport is still in the red and local and state governments have paid hundreds of millions of dollars so far to get it off the ground and continue to pay tens of millions a dollars a year with no end in sight, but hey, it’s gonna be great. 

Rinse and repeat when a developer comes to the area. Remember Turtleback Mountain Resort’s CEO Jack Whitt and Hot Springs Land Development’s CEO Greg Neal? The first went into receivership. The second divvied up and then auctioned off its land a year and a half ago but titles still had not been transferred when last I checked because subdivision formalizing the lot boundaries was yet to be done. 

I’m not blaming the developers or the multi-millionaire businessmen. They’re just doing their jobs. It’s local governments’ job to look after the people’s interests, not theirs.

This latest annexation by petition by Turtleback Mountain Golf & Resort is so like the Hot Springs Land Development annexation around 2007 that resulted in no trickle down. 

Similarly, no neutral research, evidence gathering, reporting or communication with the public was done by Truth or Consequences’ elected officials or staff, essentially and particularly around how services, such as water, wastewater, solid waste, electric, police and fire were to be delivered to the area. Elephant Butte wasn’t invited to the table, even though much of the land to be annexed was contiguous with their city boundary and there are extra-territorial zoning laws that allow cities to insert themselves in land-use changes within three miles of their borders. 

Getting water and wastewater to HSLD’s seven square miles around the T or C airport was the issue that plagued its 18-year effort to develop the land. About 10 years ago HSLD was desperate to be de-annexed from T or C city limits and into Elephant Butte, but no such de-annexation law was or is on the books, and legislators wouldn’t carry a bill to make it so. If Elephant Butte and T or C and HSLD had cooperated on delivering water and wastewater and other services, and if they had gotten buy-in from the public, the failure of HSLD and a lot of costly litigation could have been avoided. 

Now we have Turtleback Mountain Golf & Resort wanting to de-annex about 63 acres from within T or C that they own as well as 5.8 acres of land they gave to Elephant Butte a few years ago on which the wastewater treatment plant is sited. Only they are skipping the de-annexation part and going straight to petitioning the City of Elephant Butte to annex the 68.7 acres into its city. 

The de-annexation part? Last month, at the Dec. 17 Truth or Consequences city commission meeting, City Manager Gary Whitehead said Elephant Butte wanted its WWTP inside its own boundaries as well as about 20 acres of surrounding privately owned land. (See: https://sierracountycitizen.org/who-knew-elephant-buttes-wastewater-treatment-plant-is-in-truth-or-consequences/ )

Whitehead and Mayor Rolf Hechler and the resolution on the agenda giving the city’s assent to the annexation alluded to but did not spell out that T or C and Elephant Butte would cooperate, in general, in providing wastewater and solid waste services. 

No map of the proposed area to be annexed was in the T or C city packet. No research or presentation on how Elephant Butte’s wastewater treatment plant got built in T or C, legal analysis on how two cities’ boundaries were to be changed were given. Whitehead indicated it would be up to Elephant Butte to work out the legal issues, mentioning a joint powers agreement might be the legal instrument. 

No public comment, no city commission discussion, the resolution was rubber stamped in short order. 

I saw the legal ad in the Sentinel’s Dec. 18 issue and became alarmed. It said Integrated Environmental Services and Two Cities–not the City of Elephant Butte–were asking to be annexed into Elephant Butte. Remembering HSLD, I feared the people’s interests, particularly related to skyrocketing wastewater and solid waste service fees, would again not be represented or even brought up. The City of Elephant Butte would hold a public hearing on Jan. 7 to consider the annexation ordinance, the ad said. 

Just as with HSLD, neither T or C nor Elephant Butte did any research, leaving it up to the developer to decide and present what was going to happen, rubber stamping what was put before them. 

I tried to get Elephant Butte City Manager Janet Porter Carrejo to remove the annexation item from the Jan. 7 agenda, but she refused. 

I pointed out that the city packet, including documents related to the annexation, were not made available to the public, making the public hearing on the annexation ordinance performative and fake. Porter Carrejo insisted it wouldn’t be a fake public hearing, not addressing the fact that an uninformed public can’t meaningfully participate. On with the show.

Not surprisingly there was no public input during the hearing besides my own. 

I was only partially prepared, having scrounged to get what few annexation documents there were from a confidential source on Monday, Jan. 5. My requests for the annexation documents, starting Dec. 18, 2025, were ignored by the Elephant Butte City Clerk, Lindsay Cobleigh. 

On Jan. 5 I noticed the city website states that any packet documents must be requested via a formal Inspection of Public Records Act submission to Lindsey Cobleigh, making it official policy to keep the public uninformed.  

Considering that the agenda didn’t come out until nearly 5 p.m. on Friday, Jan. 2, one would not know what documents to request until then, and even if you sent your IPRA in Friday evening, Cobleigh wouldn’t see it until Monday. If she fulfilled the request immediately, one would have about 50 hours (with no sleep) before the public hearing. Or worse, Cobleigh would be well within the law to wait 15 days to respond to the IPRA. Even then she could reject the request as too vague or claim she needed more time to gather the documents. She could also assess a fee and insist on prepayment from the requestor. 

During public comment at the beginning of the Jan. 7 city council meeting, Johanna Tighe, head of the local Republican Party, also pointed out that the meeting packet was not available to the public, and asked that it be made available, “so we can know what’s going on.” Zero response from elected officials or city staff–on with the fake public hearing. 

The packet documents I scrounged may not be complete, but they included a 2022 special warranty deed in which Turtleback Mountain Partners LLC of Greenwood Village, Colorado, and Turtleback Development Corporation, also of Colorado, give ownership of nearly 1,050 acres to Integrated Environmental Services QOZB [qualified opportunity zone business], a New York company located in Staten Island, for $100 and “other good and valuable considerations.” 

Another packet document is a petition, a request that Elephant Butte annex 68.7 acres into its city. The annexation request is signed by the two private property owners of about 63 acres: “David Berman, Integrated Environmental Services QOZB LLC, 87.88 percent ownership of property request for annexation” and “David Berman, Two Cities LLC,  It’s from David Berman, 3.65 percent ownership of property request for annexation.” That comes to 91.53 percent ownership of the 68.701 acres requested to be annexed. Turtleback Mountain Golf & Resort is owned by Berman via these and maybe other LLCs. 

The other 5.8 acres are owned by the City of Elephant Butte. Turtleback Mountain Partners–the one that went into receivership–at some point gave Elephant Butte the land, as I related in the above-linked article. 

There is no reference to the 5.8 acres owned by the city in the petition from Berman. The main impetus for T or C agreeing not to stand in the way of this switch in the cities’ boundaries was acceding to Elephant Butte’s reasonable desire to have its sewer plant on its city land. But the petition states the reason for the request is to get services–water, wastewater, solid waste, police and fire–and to include this land into the already approved Planned Unit Development zone Elephant Butte passed in 2024 and 2025. Looks like Elephant Butte exercised its extra-territorial zoning authority on T or C land without its knowledge. 

In trying to prepare for the Jan. 7 meeting, I looked up annexation law. There are three methods. One relates to historical neighborhoods, which is not pertinent. The petition method is a means by which a majority of private land owners can request they be annexed into a city’s limits–state laws 3-7-17, which is the method used by Turtleback Mountain Golf & Resort. The third is the arbitration method, 3-7-5 through 3-7-10, which is what cities must use if the city initiates the annexation action. 

The arbitration method requires a special election be held by the city, e.g., Elephant Butte, to elect six people to a seven-member arbitration board. Three of the board members must be land owners and electors within the annexation territory, three must be land owners and electors within the City of Elephant Butte and the remaining member must be chosen by the six board members and be a landowner and elector in Sierra County. 

The board would investigate the city’s ability to provide water, wastewater, solid waste and other services to the annexation territory and in what time frame and if the annexation would be beneficial to the people to extend these services to the area. A majority of the arbitration board must be in favor of annexation, otherwise the city must wait two years before trying again. 

I asked Elephant Butte City Manager Janet Porter Carrejo on Jan. 5 why this arbitration method was not being used for the annexation, especially since it was presented as a city-to-city agreement to T or C, as reflected in the resolution the T or C city commission approved on Dec. 17. Carrejo had no answer. I asked Carrejo and at the mic at the Jan. 7 meeting for Elephant Butte’s legal analysis or research or possible authorization for city land being annexed by private-land-owner petition. How can the city petition itself? No answer. 

The common man or woman, the little guy, will be exploited when plutocrats are in power. 

Prime example: In 2012 the City of T or C decided that it must have a solid waste transfer station, an idea fomented and pushed into being by  then City Manager Juan Fuentes with very little cost analysis or research or public involvement. Williamsburg and T or C residential and commercial polycart customers–the only aspect of the city service that is in the black, will have paid $1.635 million by 2026 for the building and initial equipment. 

Polycart customers are captive payers, required by local ordinance to use T or C’s trash service or have their water, sewer and electric services cut off. Their fees have gone up 5 percent every year since the facility was built, finally being frozen at the highest rate I found in New Mexico in a cost comparison at about $36 a month for weekly pick up of a 96-gallon polycart. 

Other customers, those driving up to the weigh station, have a choice whether to use it. The weigh-station tipping fee was set at $55 a ton when the facility opened–a few dollars above the city’s cost to have its trash picked up and transported to the South Central Solid Waste Authority. The tipping fee was frozen there until the city passed a rate change in 2025 gradually increasing it over the next five years, still leaving this part of the operation in the red and subsidized by polycart fees.  

Fuentes, in 2012, tried to get local governments to cooperate and share the costs of the transfer station and solid waste services. Elephant Butte said no and Sierra County said no. 

Elephant Butte passed an ordinance similar to T or C’s and Williamsburg’s, but instead of making residents use T or C, they must use the private business Elephant Butte chooses.  That vendor is currently Sierra Sanitation and the charge is nearly $36 a month for weekly pickup of a 96-gallon polycart. 

If the local governments had cooperated in applying for a landfill license or even a construction and demolition landfill license or in purchasing the building and equipment and paying for operations and maintenance, locals undoubtedly would have a cheaper rate. 

T or C should at least restrict use of the transfer station to Williamsburg and T or C residents so the polycart captive payers are only subsidizing the weigh station customers within these cities’ limits. But no, T or C’s ambition, as expressed in the resolution passed Dec. 17 and during budget and capital project planning sessions last spring and summer, is to continue expanding its service to Elephant Butte and Sierra County, including the 500-home development on the books at Turtleback Mountain Golf & Resorts.

Historically T or C has shown it thinks of its citizens as exploitable captive payers and itself as a business–a business with no need to analyze costs or put money back into the business, as its 80 years of neglect of its water and wastewater and 60 years of neglect of its electric utilities show. The breakdown and crisis repairs of those systems is costing T or C, Williamsburg and state taxpayers millions of dollars. T or C’s solid waste system is only 13 years old, but it’s been run with the same disregard for the little guy. 

Whitehead told T or C city commissioners that cooperating on the annexation of Elephant Butte’s wastewater treatment plant may be repaid in the future. In five years or so T or C is going to have to replace the vacuum sewer system on Riverside Drive and it would save millions in lift-station costs if the sewer pipes could be directed downhill into the Elephant Butte plant nearby. 

The 500-home Turtleback Golf & Resort development may take up the remaining capacity in the Elephant Butte wastewater treatment plant, or even exceed the plant’s capacity before T or C’s request is made to use it. The most recent NPDES permit for the plant is 2023 and shows capacity is at .6 million gallons a day to serve a population of 1,435 residents, with no plans for construction. The thing is, the plant, let alone its capacity, was only briefly mentioned. 

Elephant Butte’s staff presentation consisted of its attorney, Ben Young, stating the two private owners (Integrated Environmental Services and Two Cities) submitted a petition at a date he couldn’t name, under state law 3-7-17, and the city had 30 days to approve or disapprove an ordinance that accepts or rejects the annexation. 

But the law https://nmonesource.com/nmos/nmsa/en/item/4362/index.do?iframe=true# does not give a 30-day deadline for the ordinance, only for filing the ordinance, if it is passed, with the county clerk. 

But everyone evidently believed there was such a deadline, the petition perfectly timed to ensure it straddled new and inexperienced board members being seated after Jan. 1, exacerbated by the public and city officials being absent or inattentive during holiday closures over Thanksgiving, Christmas and New Year’s. 

Young admitted that including the 5.8 acre city-owned wastewater treatment plant property in the petition’s annexation request added a wrinkle, but didn’t elaborate. Then he turned the staff presentation over to Turtleback Mountain Golf & Resort’s engineer, Sam Senn, who by definition represents the company’s interests, not the people’s. 

Senn appeared to do less research than I did. He claimed the Elephant Butte wastewater treatment plant was built in 2013. That is the earliest NPDES permit I could find on the plant, but the New Mexico State Auditor’s yearly audit reports for Elephant Butte available online date back to 2008 and show it was partially built and operating and charging customers that year and had received a state grant for $4.26 million and a federal grant for about $210,000 to continue construction. Amazingly the city council accepted the 2013 date with no demur, although Kim Skinner was and has been a city council member as early as 2008 and probably earlier. 

To explain how the plant was built on T or C territory, Senn said, “that’s just the way they divided up land back then.” Like way back in 2013, when you claim the plant was built? 

I was the only person who spoke during the public hearing, and my questions about why only the petition method of annexation was considered instead of the much more community minded and democratic arbitration method and what legal authority said city land could be included in such a petition went utterly ignored. 

After I sat down it went immediately to a vote with zero city-council discussion and passed unanimously. 

How the Elephant Butte plant end up on T or C territory with no intergovernmental agreement record, with no purchase record by the City of Elephant Butte for the 5.8 acres, with no NPDES permit before 2013 is not surprising when government decisions are made behind closed doors by plutocrats and rubber stamped by adoring city councils.