Stockwell’s $180,000 Contract Surfaces on the Consent Agenda — After Sitting at City Hall Since June 12, 2026

ALAMOGORDO, N.M. — A proposed employment contract that would make Robert Stockwell the City of Alamogordo’s next City Manager — at a $180,000 salary, with six months’ severance and an immediate, pre-earned PTO payout — has been placed on the consent agenda for Tuesday’s City Commission meeting, a section of the agenda normally reserved for routine items that don’t require debate.

The contract has reportedly been sitting at City Hall since June 12, 2026— three days before the Commission’s June 15 special meeting, where commissioners voted 5-2 in open session to hire Stockwell following a closed-door executive session interview. That sequence raises an obvious question for residents, and is yet another potential Open Meetings Act violation, if the agreement was substantially ready before the public vote to hire him, how much of this decision was actually made in public?

Neither the City nor the Commission has released any record of how Stockwell’s name came forward for consideration in the first place. No resume submission, application, or recruitment timeline tied to this round of hiring has been disclosed. Stockwell told KALHRadio.org in a recent interview that he was recruited beginning in July 2025 — nearly a year before this month’s vote.

A sworn statement filed June 17, 2026 by former Mayor Susan Payne directly disputes that account that he was officially recruited by the city via standard practices.

Payne, who served on the Commission from March 2016 through the end of 2025 and as Mayor from January 2022 to December 31, 2025, states that the Commission’s search for a permanent city manager began “sometime in early 2025,” and that as Mayor she was responsible for running every public meeting and executive session, including coordinating with Human Resources on next steps in the interview process. She states plainly: “At no time during this process was there ever discussion of hiring Robert Stockwell as our city manager, nor did we ever review a resume or job application from him.

As for Stockwell’s claim that his recruitment began in July 2025, Payne states that if he was communicating with anyone about the job at that time, “it was done without the knowledge or consensus of the full commission.

If that contact involved a sitting commissioner acting alone, without disclosure to the full body, that is the kind of conduct the pending lawsuit characterizes as a potential “rolling quorum” — a series of one-on-one or small-group conversations among commissioners that collectively add up to a majority discussing public business outside of a noticed public meeting. The City has not addressed Stockwell’s recruitment timeline publicly.

What a Consent Agenda Is Supposed to Be For

Under standard municipal practice — and reflected in past Alamogordo agendas — the consent agenda is for items the Commission can approve in a single motion without individual discussion: meeting minutes, routine grant acceptances, standard resolutions, board appointments. Any commissioner or member of the public can ask that an item be “pulled” and moved to the regular agenda for separate debate, but the default assumption is that nothing on the consent agenda is controversial enough to need it.

A multi-year employment contract for the City’s top administrator — carrying a six-figure salary, a guaranteed severance package, and benefit terms no other city employee receives — does not fit that description by any normal definition. Hiring and compensating a city manager is one of the most consequential personnel decisions a commission makes. Critics argue it belongs on the regular agenda, in open debate, where commissioners explain their votes and residents can respond before, not after, the contract is finalized.

The Draft Minutes: A Process With No Public Discussion

Draft minutes from the June 15 special meeting obtained by this newspaper show Mayor Pro Tem Joshua Rardin stating that the closed session was limited to “the City Manager recruitment and the City Manager hiring,” and that an interview was conducted with Stockwell. Commissioner Baxter Pattillo then moved to hire Stockwell as City Manager; Commissioner Hernandez seconded. The motion passed 5-2, with Mayor Sharon McDonald and Commissioner Warren Robinson voting no.

The minutes record Mayor McDonald asking to make a statement after the vote: she said she objected “to the process and the lack of transparency,” adding she had “no problem with the candidate, just with the process.” No discussion preceded the vote, and the minutes show no opportunity for public comment before the Commission moved to adjourn at 11:45 a.m.

Three Officials, One Common Thread: It’s the Process, Not the Person

Three current and former elected officials have gone on record — one on the floor in open session, two in notarized sworn statements filed with the court — making a similar distinction: their objection is not to who has been hired, but to how.

Mayor Sharon McDonald already drew that same line on the floor immediately after the June 15 vote, objecting to the process itself rather than to Stockwell as a candidate.

Former Mayor Susan Payne gives the most detailed account yet of how Stockwell’s candidacy was — and was not — handled by the body she chaired through the end of 2025. In her June 17 sworn statement, Payne repeats that no Commission-directed search ever produced Stockwell as a candidate, and adds a second, related claim: she says that based on an email she received from a different applicant — one already interviewed in the first round of the search — it is “widely believed” that a commissioner had directly or indirectly communicated with that applicant in an effort to persuade the Commission to hire him. She states the applicant’s email used language “almost verbatim” of comments she herself had made in executive session describing what she would expect to hear from an interested candidate in follow-up interviews — meaning, in her account, that something said behind closed doors appears to have reached an outside applicant by some channel other than the Commission itself.

Commissioner Warren Robinson has now put a sworn statement of his own into the court record — not about the Stockwell hire directly, but about a closed-door decision by the same four-commissioner majority seven weeks earlier that critics say followed an identical pattern: a public vote used to ratify a decision already made behind closed doors.

Robinson’s statement, filed in Chris Edwards et al. v. Alamogordo City Commission (Case No. D-1215-CV-2026-00514, Twelfth Judicial District Court), recounts the Commission’s unanimous 7-0 public vote on March 10, 2026, to begin contract negotiations with then-Acting City Manager Dr. Stephanie Hernandez — a vote he seconded and describes as “a binding public directive.” He states that in the weeks that followed, no contract was ever offered to Hernandez, and that he came to believe a majority of commissioners “had no genuine intention of honoring that vote.”

Robinson states that during the April 28 executive session that preceded the 4-3 vote to instead settle with and remove Hernandez, it became apparent to him that the outcome had been “preplanned” before the session began. He says he told the group he would not take part in their “underhanded maneuverings” and walked out of the closed session before it concluded, afterward publicly calling the proceedings unethical. He states the session “was not a genuine deliberation on the noticed topics” and was inconsistent with the transparency the Open Meetings Act requires.

Robinson’s account concerns the Hernandez matter, not Stockwell’s hiring — but it was submitted in support of the same lawsuit alleging a broader pattern of predetermined, closed-door personnel decisions by this Commission.

Taken together with McDonald’s and Payne’s statements above, the record now includes two notarized filings suggesting this Commission’s closed sessions have not always stayed closed, and that public votes have, at least once before, ratified outcomes already settled in private.

Inside the Stockwell Contract

The eight-page agreement — available here — includes:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1zqPB9ocFGWUFGnB_Hpjk7uVEUAXrAFl4/view?usp=drivesdk

• Salary: $180,000 annually, with Stockwell serving as an at-will employee beginning July 1, 2026.

• Vehicle allowance: $500 per month, paid through payroll, for city-related travel within Otero County, plus mileage reimbursement for travel outside the county. Residents are raising questions about whether this allowance comes on top of a vehicle the City may already provide the City Manager’s office — a detail the contract itself does not address and the City has not clarified.

• PTO credited on day one: Stockwell is credited with 180 hours of paid time off “which may be utilized immediately,” effective before he begins accruing PTO at the normal rate of 22.5 days per year. Every other city employee earns PTO over time; under this contract, Stockwell starts with a full year’s worth banked before his first day on the job. At his $180,000 salary, that 180-hour credit computes to roughly $15,500 in immediate cash-equivalent value.

• Severance if terminated: If the Commission terminates him for reasons other than cause, Stockwell receives six months’ salary (roughly $90,000), 60 days of continued health, dental and life insurance, and payout of any accrued PTO — which, if the 180 hours credited at hiring remain unused, would add the roughly $15,500 noted above, bringing the total to more than $105,000 plus benefits.

• If he quits: Voluntary resignation forfeits the severance pay outlined above regardless of notice given. However, the contract’s PTO-forfeiture clause applies only to employees who fail to give four weeks’ written notice before leaving. Read literally, that means Stockwell could give notice on his very first day and still retain the right to cash out the 180 hours credited to him that same day — without ever having earned it through service.

The Hernandez Comparison

Stockwell receives a contract within 1 week of  commission action. Hernandez never received a contract for review even after the 7 to 0 vote to offer her one. Stockwell contract being offered within a week adds further credibility to the lawsuit assertion by Edwards that the commission had no intention to honor the 7 to 0 vote and supported by Robinsons sworn notarized statement. 

The contract’s $180,000 salary sits above the $150,000–$175,000 range the City advertised during its most recent national search, and above figures discussed for Acting City Manager Dr. Stephanie Hernandez, who spent more than two years running the City on an interim basis before the Commission voted 7-0 in March to begin contract negotiations with her — only to reverse course weeks later in a 4-3 vote that ended her tenure through a settlement tied to an EEOC complaint she had filed.

Commissioner Rardin a key player in the hang of 4 commissioners opposed to Dr Hernandez was among those who, during that process, pushed back on compensation figures discussed for Hernandez. Stockwell, by contrast, is being offered $180,000 without having gone through a public application process in this round at all.

A Lawsuit Already Underway

Tuesday’s vote will not end the legal scrutiny the Commission is already facing. The commission faces multiple AG Citizen Filed Complaints, State Ethics Commission Complaints and Edwards lawsuit that alleges a pattern of closed-door decision-making by the Commission on personnel matters, including rolling-quorum concerns, and seeks court oversight of how the Commission uses executive sessions going forward. Sworn statements from both Commissioner Robinson and former Mayor Payne have now been filed in support of that case. According to people familiar with the litigation, it continues regardless of whether the Stockwell contract is ratified Tuesday — meaning the City could be defending its process in court even as it finalizes the hire.

Some critics go further, arguing that placing the already-finalized contract on a public consent agenda now does not cure a decision they say was effectively made in private weeks earlier — the same timeline question raised at the top of this story.

The City has not addressed that argument directly, and a court and possibly the AG and State Ethics Commission reviews — not this newspaper — will ultimately decide whether the process violated the Open Meetings Act.

What Happens Next

Tuesday’s regular City Commission meeting includes a public comment period, individuals wishing to speak must sign up prior to 6:30 pm.

Residents are entitled to ask that the Stockwell contract be pulled from the consent agenda for a full, public discussion. The full agenda packet for Tuesday’s meeting — including the Stockwell contract as a consent item — is posted on the City’s public CivicClerk portal: alamogordonm.portal.civicclerk.com/event/3094/overview.

Anyone with questions about how the City arrived at this contract — and at this price — has the chance to raise them in person before commissioners vote.

Sources for this article: the Stockwell employment agreement and the City’s posted Tuesday agenda packet (City of Alamogordo CivicClerk portal, linked above); draft minutes of the June 15, 2026 special meeting; and the sworn, notarized statements of Commissioner Warren Robinson and former Mayor Susan Payne, both filed with the Twelfth Judicial District Court in Case No. D-1215-CV-2026-00514, Chris Edwards et al. v. Alamogordo City Commission. The recruitment-timeline claim attributed to Robert Stockwell comes from his interview with KALHRadio.org.

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