Mining for a Vote

Dozens of citizens voiced opposition to a proposal that would create a mining zone in a 50-acre site on La Bajada Mesa during an Aug. 12 meeting of the Santa Fe County Commission. Activists left the meeting disappointed, however, after the five county commissioners talked about the deal behind closed doors and then postponed a vote on whether to allow an Albuquerque company, Rockology LLC, to mine for basalt on the private land owned by Buena Vista Estates Inc. The commission’s decision to discuss the application during an executive session makes mine opponent Marianna Hatten—and plenty of others who were expecting a vote—wonder: “What are they discussing out of view of the public?” Hatten runs the nearby High Feather Ranch. What she calls the “oil and gas wars” and issues concerning her business have brought her to previous County Commission meetings. She found the commission’s decision to call an executive session odd, so she contacted the New Mexico Foundation for Open Government, a nonprofit that advocates for transparency in public business. “Is this really open and transparent? I have personally my doubts that it’s all open,” she says. “It’s certainly not transparent because I don’t know what goes on in these other meetings.”  Public bodies occasionally hold the secret meetings to discuss sensitive matters, such pending litigation or real estate deals. But a 2012 SFR investigation found that bodies like the Santa Fe City Council often abused that authority, using spurious justifications to hold executive sessions. In this case, the County Commission justified the executive session by claiming the application by Buena Vista Estates and Rockology to create the mining zone constitutes an “administrative adjudicatory proceeding.” Such proceedings are exempt from provisions of the Open Meetings Act, which defines such a decision as “a proceeding brought by or against a person before a public body in which individual legal rights, duties or privileges are required by law to be determined by the public body after an opportunity for a trial-type hearing.”...more