[Editor's Note: This is part 5 of the Grant County Commission January 7, 2025 work session and Jan. 9, 2025 regular meetings. This continues the work session review of the regular meeting agenda and begins with elected officials reports at the regular meeting.]

By Mary Alice Murphy

Newly elected Clerk Connie Holguin said she had no report at the Grant County Commission Jan. 9, 2025 regular meeting, but she wanted to welcome the newly elected commissioners.

Assessor Misty Trujillo reported that at the end of December of each year, they mail out business, personal, property and livestock forms for owners to disclose. Any business owner has to disclose all of their business equipment within the business, and it does have to go into the tax rolls. This is on a yearly basis, also with the livestock as well. "Every year, everybody has to submit their livestock account, letting us know the number of horses, cows, goats, what they have. The deadline for these applications to come into our office is the end of February, and after February, a 5% penalty will be applied to the accounts if the information is not received. Every year we get a 65 and older valuation freeze for all property owners that are 65 and older. And what this is is this is an exemption to freeze their value on their property. In order it to freeze, you have to apply for it for three years in a row. You have to, if you miss the year, your value can increase, and then you have to start all over again. The state increased it to $42,900. It has to be your primary residence, and you have to show proof, you have to show your ID, you have to show that you're 65 and you also have to provide us your income for the year. So because we're in 2025 you have to submit your 2024 income to us, and your total income has to be the $42,009 or below in order to qualify for this exemption. If a husband and wife both work, both their incomes have to be included. If you have five people listed on your property, you must include everyone's income. What our office controls is valuation only. There's also a head of household exemption and a veteran's exemption."

With no questions for her, the next report came from Sheriff Raul Villanueva. He, too welcomed the new commissioners. He reported the sheriff's office was dispatched to 5409 calls for service and had self-initiated calls of 14,018 which is an increase of 12% from the year before, and dispatch calls were down 12% from 6087. "We had 96 transports throughout the year, which are round trips throughout the state and other states in the US, taking prisoners and picking up prisoners in different locations. For the civil process division only, we totaled 55,582 miles that they did during that year. We did serve a total of 3256 documents in our civil process division, which includes subpoenas, writs, restitution. So they were fairly busy. We did investigate 35 burglaries, which is down 14% from the year before, in which we had 40. We did investigate 192 domestic violence cases, which is down 14% from the year before. We had a73 larcenies, which is down 12% from the year before. We did have 37 stolen motor vehicles, which was up one from the year before. We had five suicides, which was up one from the year before. We did investigate 35 unattended deaths, which is down from the year before at 41. We had 16 missing persons. As far as animal complaints, we had a total of 481 calls for service, which is down from the year before, of 642 which is a 33% reduction. I did do a little bit of research with my ACOs. I had an ACO (animal control officer) that worked for five months, and then she was promoted to a different position. So I hired a new ACO. So between both of them, they had issued 62 citations in the county. And we did impound 137 animals into our shelter. Out of that, there were different calls that they were responding to, a lot of calls of mainly dogs running loose, barking dogs. I have one ACO that covers all of Grant County. So this ACO is in Mimbres and then clear throughout the municipalities. We have been requested by municipalities to assist them as well with our ACO, because they don't have an ACO. So our ACO has helped out quite a bit with that. So I give them a lot of credit for what they do. In regards to my patrol division, we had a total of 3425 call or traffic stops, which is an increase from the year before, of 2493. We did 533 welfare checks, which is down from the previous year of 722 and I'll just go into a little bit. A welfare check is, when people call and they want us to check on family members, children, elderly that possibly haven't been heard from. So we get a lot of those calls, and the deputies respond just to do the welfare of the individuals or whatever is called in. So a lot that keeps us busy as well."

Villanueva said he had a lot of statistics on cases, but not wanting to go through over all of them, he said he would give a copy of the report to the commissioner. He did say that his department had a total of 509 arrests, which was up 21 percent from the prior year wit 401. "I still haven't put that report together, but we have a grant through the D.A.'s office that we are currently working on with serving warrants that are outstanding, warrants that have been in the files for a while. We do quite a bit of service, and not just for Grant County itself. We do have a lot of requests from municipalities covering their jurisdictions I'll go into, like Hurley. Hurley finally hired a Chief. They didn't have a law enforcement officer for a while. So now they have one that they have fortunately working, but a lot of our calls go to Hurley. We've been covering a lot of calls in Bayard and in Santa Clara. They do have staffing, but sometimes they don't have people on shift. I want to thank my staff for what they do day in and day out, because they don't just cover the jurisdiction that we have, but also we have a lot of area that we cover. Hachita is ours, which is south of I 10. I don't have a resident deputy out there, but we do provide as much service as we can to those residents down there utilizing Stonegarden funding, which is grant funding that the federal government gives us."

District 4 Commissioner Eddie Flores asked the sheriff how many of the calls answered had been DWIs.

Villanueva replied that he did not have that statistic, but said they had increased within the past few months.

Flores also asked what a self-initiated call consisted of.

The sheriff replied that self-initiated calls are any calls that the deputies are out just doing routine patrol. They call out anything that they encounter, such as traffic stops are self initiated. "They are pretty much anything that they are not dispatched to,. Anything they do on their own is a self initiated.We do get a lot of requests for frequent patrols in certain areas. So when they get out there, they'll call out that they're at that area, and that shows that they're actually in those areas doing their their duties.:

"What I was talking about are my constituent out in Cliff, Gila the outlying areas, the rural areas," Flores said. "I know you have a county resident in Mimbres and Cliff, however, they don't work 24 hours a day, seven days a week. What type of community policing method are you using in those areas to ensure that those citizens know that the sheriff's department is out there? Is there some sort of a schedule? Is there some sort of organizational chart? What are you doing to provide that service to them?"

Villanueva said that the shift commanders are directed to when the resident definitely is not on service, he can send somebody out while there's no coverage and to patrol those areas and be as visible as possible."I feel that we need to have two in each area so we can try and get as much coverage as we can out there. My goal is to try and work with you guys to see if we can budget to get another resident deputy in each area to provide much more coverage."

"We talked about this at our work session, and I was hoping you would stay, because public perception is a big deal," Flores said. "When the public sees four deputies in town the entire time, or three or four deputies show up at the gas station to fill up, then they follow each other somewhere else. I mean, who is supervising these deputies to say, hey, maybe somebody should go to Cliff or somewhere else. If you break down the number of calls per year, you're looking at 15 per day you would take and maybe the self initiated calls are within those calls. I don't know, but it's just nine traffic stops per day. I think we need to get somebody out there, because I understand response time. However, you can't really plan where the response time is going to occur. If you have a deputy out in Mule Creek patrol visiting a ranch or two, and then you get a call of a burglary in Cliff, your response time is going to be much quicker from that Mule Creek to Cliff than it would be from Arenas Valley to Cliff. And I'm not telling you something that you don't already know, but there always seems to be a lot of deputies, always together at different locations. Sheriff, and you mentioned 35% in burglaries. Do you know what the solvability rate for your department is at this time?"

Villanueva didn't have the number but said he would get it to the commissioners.

Flores continued by saying he thinks part of community policing is communicating. "I think if the deputy goes to a call and says: 'This is what I'm going to do. I'm going to follow up with you. I will check pawn shops. I will talk to Silver City and State Police to see if they are having similar cases. I have a radio, too, so I hear when you are called out to the Mining District. I know you have no choice, because when they call an officer and they don't answer, then dispatch calls a deputy, and you have to go handle that call, but that increases the wait time for an officer to get out there. And these municipalities are getting funds from the state to provide a service to their municipality, and it's not occurring for whatever reason, and I want to come up with a solution. I suggest an MOU with these municipalities to start getting some of the law enforcement protection fund money into the sheriff's department. You're providing this service, but you're taking from county service. I am talking from my own experience. We are a self sustaining police department at Western and I'm very proud to say that we don't want to pass somebody on to another agency when they call us, because they call us. They want results, and I'm very proud of my staff, because, as you know, everyone there is retired, they've dealt with everything from homicides to a simple larceny, and they can take the report and the investigation and they get a follow up, they get a result. And I think that's just lacking sometimes in some of these little departments, because they don't have an officer on call, and you have that burden of taking it, but hopefully we can get that number and at some point in the near future, come up with an MOU to get that law enforcement Protection Fund to give to you for units, equipment, anything that you may need to enhance your patrols."

Villanueva said he just wanted to reiterate, in regards to investigations that his criminal division does that his expectation of these deputies and investigators is to be in contact with the community. In any cases that they get, they are expected to let that complainant or victim know what the status of their case is, and they are directed to keep a log of every time they make contact with them in regards to their case. "They're aware that we do care about their cases, and that we are diligently working their cases, and they are part of our duty, that we will continue to provide the best service to them that we can so that is out there, and I do have an open door policy where any citizen can come in or call on me, and we will look into something that they are not happy with, or even compliments. You know, I get a lot of compliments from the community in regards to the staff and what they're doing."

District 1 Commissioner and Chair Chris Ponce said he wanted to make a comment on the ACO (animal control officer). "Other municipalities know that we cover them with the ACO. I used to meet frequently with the municipal mayors and talk to them and offer our assistance and support for their projects. Our Grant County citizens know that we have a Sheriff's Department, and they expect deputies wherever they are, whether it is Cliff, Gila, Hachita, Lake Roberts, Mimbres, White Signal. I think it is time that the residents get on their mayors to provide the services that they deserve, such as law enforcement, EMS, whatever it may be."

"But where does it come to where we put our foot down as a commission and say, 'You know what? You have a budget, you have a law enforcement agency to do what you know they need to do'. I don't know how the calls have come down, or if they've gone up in the other municipalities, I like Commissioner Flores' idea. I never thought of it is looking at their law enforcement protection plan money, because if we are covering this do we send them a bill? You know they have projects that they want to get done. They can get them done because they're saving money. We're not. You know, our jail alone when everybody decided to go to filing in magistrate court, our budget, I think alone on our jails, we lost money. What's our budget for the jail? County Manager? $4 million? We used to get help from these municipalities to house their inmates, which was helping us a little bit. So they all decided to start filing magistrate charges. The state gives us, I think I heard, $65,000 for the whole year of us transporting housing state inmates, and I'm going to stop here, because I can go all day on this. Where do we put our foot down? Or does it take me or somebody, to sit down with these mayors and tell them? You know what this is enough, you know, as a mayor, as a chair, as a Board of Commissioners, you have a responsibility to your communities. Grant County is a big area, 600 and some miles of roads. Isn't that somewhere in there? 687. That's a lot for Grant County Sheriff's Department to cover. That's a lot for a road department to cover. Now, we're covering their communities, and I'm going to leave it at that, but it seems every time we go down this path, it's a rabbit hole, because at the end of the day, we're going to continue to provide these services and our budgets, your budget gets depleted. So maybe it's time that we just figure something for certain and go that route, and by all means, I mean, continue to provide the services, because the citizens are not the ones that should pay for our deficiencies. But yet, I think that it should be up to our Board of Commissioners, our county manager and our attorney to say, you know, this is what we need to do. And I like your idea on that. I don't even know if it can be done. If it can be done, maybe that's what we need to do. And you know what, if everybody wants to blame me and the mayors and the other municipalities and blame me for them losing money. That's fine. I can live with that. But the biggest thing is our citizens need the best services that they can get, and they shouldn't just rely on Grant County to give them those services. And I'll let my rant go."

Villanueva asked to rebut the comment from Flores about the deputies spending time together." I do understand officer safety. However, what I really don't understand is your comment that this whole crew that are working together spend a lot of time together.

Flores replied: "It's okay for them all to go to a hot call, because this may be the last time they see each other. We all took that risk when we got sworn in. When four of them go on a hot call down Hudson Street, running code, and then within 10 minutes later, all four of them come back through Hudson Street, not running code. Did anybody take a report? Were they assisting? Obviously, no report was taken for a 10 minute call, and that happened this last weekend, and a lot of times."

"And because you said this, a lot of officers will initiate their own hot call, Villanueva said. "And I'll give you an example, if there's a an accident, the first thing they're gonna say, if there's an accident without injuries, the first thing the deputies are going to say, are the vehicles still in the roadway? When they say yes, then to them, that constitutes a hot call, because they run code for for me, that doesn't not constitute a hot call because there are no injuries."

Flores concurred, "Yeah, people are going to say there's vehicles in the roadway and that can cause another accident, but we can't foresee the future, and the liability situation that the county is going to incur is that, why were you running code to an accident without injuries? I'm just saying what my constituents have told me when I went door to door. And I owe it to them to bring it up to you, and I want to assure you, and I'll give you a chance to rebut everything I said, but I want to assure you that we as a commission are here to give you the tools that you need. That's why I want to get that law enforcement protection money to help you do your job more efficiently."

Villanueva said the generation of law enforcement nowadays compared to "when we first started, is so much different, and that's something that we have to try and work with. And I do give a lot of direction on what happens out there, as a matter of fact, any complaints that come in, I look at them diligently. When I came back, I made it a goal to implement a GPS program into our units to try and bring down a lot of this behavior as far as the way they drive, but my main focus on it was to ensure the safety of these deputies, because they respond to certain areas that have no radio service, they have no telephone service, and if they get sent somewhere and or they're actually out there just patrolling, and I'll use Cliff, Gila and Mimbres as examples. There's a lot of dead spots out there in regards to communication. So if I have them out there patrolling, at least with this GPS, being as it's satellite, it'll allow us to locate them in case we can't get a hold of them. But it also helps in deterring the driving habits, because when I do get complaints on their speeding or the way they're driving, I can pull up that GPS and say, no that's not what happened. That's accountability. I committed to accountability and transparency to my constituents when I decided to run again for office. And that has been happening, and that will continue to happen, and that's why I say any resident that has any concerns, I am open to visit with them and hear them out and try and provide the best response to them and the service that I can for them. I do ask you as commission, whatever support that you guys can provide to the sheriff's office is greatly appreciated. I'm open to to suggestions from you all as well. You can bring me concerns of suggestions, ideas. I do ask the support from you when I do have a need. It's not a want, because I rarely come to the manager for wants. I come to her for needs that we need in our office. And in regards to our rural areas, they do deserve the coverage. I was fortunate, to at least bring some back. I know it's not enough, but my goal is to work with you guys to see if we can budget to bring more back. I think that would be ideal, but I do appreciate your comments and your suggestions, but any any assistance that you guys can provide, I will easily and gladly take it."

District 2 Commissioner Eloy Medina noted that it was a hot topic in the community. "I'm a Bayard councilman, and I want you to know that there are some some plans in action right now that we're working on. I had the ability to sit down with the mayor and the police administration, and there's been very strict direction given for police protection. In Bayard, it's going to change. So Sheriff, you can keep an eye on that, and data that can come back to me or the mayor Ojinaga to keep us aware of how calls are being handled and so forth. That's going to help us in that meeting. So I've asked the mayor, if we can meet with the three mayors and the fire chiefs and the police chiefs, and figure out how either MOUs need to be established to the municipalities to help each other out, and take some of the burden off the Sheriff Department. So it is in the works."

He commended Flores for the idea, because he hadn't thought of it either. "If I hear anything, I'll make everybody aware of it as I hear it. That is some important information to pass on. On another note, I got the opportunity to see one of your resident deputies in a different role serving this community, not just as an officer, but as a spiritual leader at a funeral service," he said to Villanueva.

The sheriff said he was really proud of Tom's amazing job honoring Mr. Britton.

The next article will continue with a review of the regular meeting agenda and actions taken at the Thursday meeting.

To read the previous articles, please visit https://www.grantcountybeat.com/news/news-articles/grant-county-commission-holds-first-work-session-of-2025-010725-part-1 ; https://www.grantcountybeat.com/news/news-articles/grant-county-commission-work-session-010725-part-2; https://www.grantcountybeat.com/news/news-articles/grant-county-commission-work-session-010725-part-3 ; and https://www.grantcountybeat.com/news/news-articles/grant-county-commission-work-session-010725-and-regular-meeting-010925-part-4