purejuice

Socorro (pop. 8,879) is a 16th century town founded by the conquistadores at the north end of the jornada del muerto. It is by the Rio Grande, and the Indians who used to live there offered them succour, food and water.

Its 16th century suburb, across highway 81, is San Antonio, a tiny farm town whose population is "hard to pin down." It is the town nearest the White Sands Missile Range -- about 12 miles -- where the first atomic bomb was exploded. It's where you stay on the one day of the year when ground zero is open to the public. It's the place where no one was told that the bomb was going to be set off. Windows were broken, clouds of radioactivity engulfed San Antonio, but no one was evacuated. Its other claim to fame is the green chili cheeseburger at the Buckhorn, which beat down Bobby Flay's p***y version -- pickled red onions? mi culo -- on Bobby Flay's own TV throwdown.

Co-Op Trustees Get Run Over

By Thomas J. Cole

SOCORRO — The national anthem was sung, the Pledge of Allegiance recited and a prayer said. Then the bloodbath began Saturday evening at the annual meeting of the members/customers of Socorro Electric Cooperative.

The members overwhelmingly approved several co-op reforms, including reducing the number of co-op trustees, imposing term limits on trustees, slashing compensation for trustees and ensuring that trustee meetings and co-op records are open to the public.

It was a stunning rebuke of those in control of the co-op’s Board of Trustees, which had resorted to a series of dirty tricks over the past year in an attempt to defeat the reforms. Paul Bustamante, who succeeded his father as a trustee and serves as president of the board, didn’t even stick around for the end of the meeting and the giveaway of door prizes. “Congratulations. You got us defeated,” the ever-gracious trustee Milton Ulibarri said to me and another reporter as the meeting wound down. The reform movement began two years ago when I reported that the coop spent more on compensation for its trustees than any of the other 17 electric co-ops in New Mexico.

The trustees were able to keep the reforms from being considered at last year’s annual meeting of members. When they couldn’t keep them from being voted on this year, the trustees proposed alternatives, delayed voting until after 7 p.m., announced voting would be by shows of hands and that votes would be counted by appointed judges, and said debate would be permitted.

If the trustees’ plan was to use the alternatives to dilute support for the reforms and thin the ranks of reformers by dragging the voting well into the night, the strategy failed miserably.

More than 600 co-op members jammed the city’s Finley Gym for the meeting, and it was clear from the start that most came for one reason — to vote on the reforms — and they weren’t interested in delay or any other shenanigans. They demanded the guest speaker be dumped to save time, and he was.

The first vote was on reducing the number of trustees from 11. The reformers had proposed five trustees. The trustees had muddied the waters by proposing a board of nine or seven.

The outcome: 388 votes to reduce the number of trustees to five, compared with 124 votes to keep it at 11. There were fewer than 25 votes for the alternatives of nine and seven trustees.

Up next was a vote on limiting trustees to two consecutive four-year terms. The vote was 411 for and 117 against.

At that point, it became clear to members and trustees that there was no need to count votes on the other reforms. A simple show of hands would do.

“I could sense people were angry. They were fed up,” said Charlie Wagner, a trustee who helped lead the reform movement.

The members voted to cap cooperative-paid compensation and expenses for trustees at $10,000 each annually. The board president gets an extra $5,000.

Last year, compensation and expenses averaged more than $41,000 per trustee, with one trustee pocketing more than $60,000.

Members also voted to amend the co-op by-laws to guarantee open trustee meetings and records.

Because it’s a co-op, Socorro Electric is owned by the people it serves and is supposed to be democratically governed.

“You had your democracy in action,” co-op attorney Dennis Francish, who presided over the annual members meeting, said at the end of the voting.

UpFront is a daily front-page news and opinion column. Thom Cole can be reached in Santa Fe at (505) 992-6280 or at tcole@abqjournal. com.

The inherited caudilloship, the generations of corruption, the wage like four times the state average, the staff twice what is needed, the kleptocratic dirty tricks, all this can only be described as Torquemada Baroque.

Poder al pueblo.