Vote to remove Airport Advisory Board member sent to AG’s office

Master plan discussion postponed

The Taos Regional Airport Advisory Board discussed at its regular meeting Thursday night (Sept. 15) whether a 2-2-vote by the Town of Taos Council to remove board member Daniel Weeks could be decided by a split vote cast by Taos

Mayor Pascual Maestas. The matter will now be sent to the New Mexico Attorney General’s Office to decide the validity of the decision.

Mayor Maestas cast the vote at the town council meeting Tuesday night (Sept. 13) after consulting with Chris Stachura, the town’s legal counsel. But since the Airport Advisory Board ordinance states that removing a member requires a three-quarters vote by the town council, the board questioned the validity of the mayor’s vote. Stachura said the state legal authority would be the best source to decide the matter.

The mayor and the two other councilors — Marietta Fambro and Nathaniel Evans, who voted to remove Weeks from the Airport Advisory Board — said that Weeks had continued to discuss leases for hangar space with the public after being advised not to do so, and that hangar leases fell outside of the scope of the board since they are managed by the Town of Taos administration.

Maestas said that Weeks had a conflict of interest as a registered pilot interested in — and talking with the public about — leasing hangar space. Maestas also said Weeks ran the risk of a “rolling quorum,” which is when a majority of members speak on a topic without the legally-required advance public notice.

Weeks has also been outspoken in his criticisms of the proposed Airport Master Plan, which includes a broad outline of how the small regional airport may be improved or expanded in coming years.

Weeks still appeared for Thursday’s meeting, but abstained from voting on any agenda items. During the public comment portion of the meeting, he denied having any conflict of interest. “There was a claim of conflict of interest for me to have been on the hangar waitlist at the airport. I have been off that list for a couple of months since the mayor threatened to take me off the Airport Advisory Board,” he said. “But I continued to talk about an issue that is related to the master plan, which is the deficiency of the master plan to identify hangars that are privately owned.”

“There was a vote at the council meeting whether to keep me on the Airport Advisory Board, and something happened that nobody really understands,” Weeks continued. “I believed the motion was not approved, and I was to retain my position on the airport advisory board,” he added, noting that the ordinance requiring a three-quarters vote. “With two council members voting yes and two voting no, that did not exceed the required three-quarter vote of a quorum of the duly-elected town council.”

Stachura explained the town had interpreted the vote differently, taking into account other statutes. “The ordinance requires a 75-percent vote for removal,” Stachura clarified. “One of the things that complicates the issue is there are also state statutes and previous opinions, and their effect on this ordinance has been questioned. So that’s why we’re relying on the Attorney General to clarify their position.”

Airport Advisory Board Chairman Al Rapp questioned Stachura’s reasoning. “It troubles me that there’s another set of criteria, possibly, to remove a member that we weren’t aware of when we started to serve the Town of Taos,” said Rapp, who also questioned the legality of moving forward without Weeks, the only certified pilot on the board. “The ordinance requires that we have a certified pilot on our board. If you remove the certified pilot, everything that we could be doing today could be void and null if the town perceived it that way.”

Weeks and Rapp both suggested the meeting be postponed until the public comments could be disseminated to the board in a seamless way. Weeks explained he had been locked out of his town email account, which he said contained data he had planned to reference on the Airport Master Plan proposal. “I woke up this morning, and the work that I have done to contribute to this study at this meeting tonight is gone,” he said in reference to losing his email access. “I did a significant amount of statistical analysis.”

Along with the lack of Week’s data, the board only had two physical copies of a document containing more than 300 comments submitted by the public regarding the proposed master plan. Rapp said sharing two binders among the five members would be tedious.

Overall, Rapp said it was hard for him to want to continue the meeting “until we get clarification on the present situation from the attorney general.”

A special meeting will be held on Thursday (Sept. 22), where the board will also hear plans about airport terminal designs, but discussion about the Airport Master Plan has been postponed to Oct. 20.