Pip: Welcome to New Mexico Conservative News — where sometimes the most expensive thing a city commission can do is hold a meeting nobody's allowed to watch.

Mara: Chris Edwards, journalist, author, and publisher, has been covering Alamogordo's city government closely, and this episode follows the story to its logical next stop: a district courtroom. Let's start with the lawsuit, the closed doors, and the half-million dollars behind them.

Open Government Lawsuit: Alamogordo's Closed-Door Crisis

Mara: The core question here is whether the Alamogordo City Commission used executive closed sessions not to receive legal advice — which the law permits — but to actually make policy decisions and reverse a unanimous public vote, which the law forbids.

Pip: The lawsuit lays out the timeline directly, and the petition's own language is worth hearing. The setup is a 7-to-0 vote on March 10 that never produced a contract offer. The petition states: "A unanimous public vote directing contract negotiations was never honored. Instead, the Commission used more than ten closed sessions over seven weeks to avoid offering a contract, then reversed the vote in secret and approved a payout of over $500,000 in total from taxpayer funds with no public debate or disclosure."

Mara: What that means in practice is that every dollar of a $485,000 settlement — confirmed from general fund financial records, not the city's self-insurance pool — changed hands without a single public word about the terms, the amount, or the reasoning.

Pip: And the closed-session count is striking. April 7: a special executive session, nothing disclosed on return. April 21: same. May 18 — thirteen days after the city formally acknowledged receiving a written OMA violation notice — another closed session. Still nothing. More than ten sessions on the same subject, zero public output.

Mara: The lawsuit argues that pattern is the violation itself. Under the New Mexico Open Meetings Act, commissioners may receive confidential legal advice in closed session. They may not use closed sessions to form policy. When ten-plus sessions produce a complete vote reversal with zero public deliberation, the petition asks the court to call those actions void.

Pip: There's also the question of whether the litigation exception was even valid. The city cited an EEOC administrative complaint as grounds for secrecy — but the lawsuit argues an EEOC proceeding isn't "pending litigation" in the legal sense, and more pointedly, that the commissioners whose conduct prompted the complaint cannot invoke it as a shield.

Mara: The commentary piece, "Public Business Belongs to the Public and We're Going to Court to Prove It," frames the stakes plainly: "The closed door doesn't care who's standing behind it. Once a community tolerates secrecy on one decision, it has invited it on every decision that follows."

Pip: Commissioner Warren Robinson's walkout from the April 28 session — and his public characterization of the process as "unethical" — is treated in both pieces not as political theater but as firsthand evidence from someone who was in the room.

Mara: On the cost side, the lawsuit notes that honoring the original 7-to-0 vote would have cost roughly $330,000 over a standard two-year contract. The settlement alone is $485,000, and when recruiting costs for a replacement are added, the total likely exceeds $880,000 — money the posts note could have funded miles of city road repairs.

Pip: The lawsuit also seeks to block a potential appointment of former city manager Robert Stockwell — who was previously fired by Alamogordo in 1997 and whose 2016 rehire proposal was rejected — without any public process or disclosed contract terms.

Mara: Two binding New Mexico cases anchor the legal argument: Weinstein, which held that OMA notice failures can void a settlement action even when real litigation existed, and Las Cruces Sun-News, which established that settlement agreements with public entities are public records that confidentiality clauses cannot override.

Pip: The city received formal OMA compliance training on March 24 — two weeks after the unanimous vote — and the lawsuit treats that timing as evidence of willfulness, not accident.

Mara: The Emergency TRO motion was pending as of the filing date, with a ruling expected before Thursday's scheduled session. If no TRO issues and the commission votes anyway, that vote becomes the subject of a supplemental filing.

Pip: Transparency law exists precisely for moments like this — when the gap between what a government does in public and what it decides in private becomes wide enough to drive a half-million-dollar settlement through.

Mara: The court's response to the TRO motion will tell us a lot about how New Mexico's open-government framework holds up under pressure. More to come as this case develops.