Governing in the Dark: What Bell, California and New Mexico’s Own Scandals Teach Alamogordo About Open Government

As the Alamogordo City Commission faces Open Meetings Act litigation and mounting public scrutiny over its city commissioner’s behaviors, the history of small-city government failures — from Los Angeles County to the New Mexico borderland — offers a road map of warning signs, remedies and consequences. Story inspired by a government ethics class discussion being conducted by former Alamogordo Mayor Susan Payne.

By Chris Edwards | 2nd Life Media – Alamogordo Town News

ALAMOGORDO, N.M. — July 2026

When a city government makes its most consequential decisions somewhere other than the public meeting room, history suggests the public eventually finds out — and that what follows depends less on the officials involved than on the persistence of the citizens, journalists and courts watching them.

Alamogordo now finds itself in a moment familiar to students of local government failure. The City Commission is a defendant in litigation alleging violations of the New Mexico Open Meetings Act and the Inspection of Public Records Act arising from its handling of the city manager position. A commissioner has publicly acknowledged personal contact with the eventual appointee outside any public process. A completed employment contract appeared on a meeting agenda all the while many in the public believe an outcome was predetermined without public participation. And records requests probing how those decisions were made have been met with denials the litigation contends were categorical and procedurally defective.

None of that, standing alone, makes Alamogordo the next Bell, California — and it is important to say plainly that no one in Alamogordo city government has been charged with, or accused in court of, any crime.

Bell’s officials went to prison for adjudicated criminal conduct; the Alamogordo matters are civil allegations of sunshine-law violations that the city disputes and that remain pending before the 12th Judicial District Court. But the comparison is instructive for a different reason: Bell, and New Mexico’s own cautionary tales in Sunland Park and Española, show what happens to small cities when the machinery of open government breaks down — and what it has historically taken to fix it.

“Corruption on steroids”: the anatomy of Bell

In 2010, the Los Angeles Times revealed that Bell, a working-class city of roughly 35,000 people in Los Angeles County, was paying City Manager Robert Rizzo total annual compensation of approximately $1.5 million, while part-time council members drew salaries near $100,000 a year — figures wildly out of line with comparable cities. The Los Angeles County district attorney at the time famously described the scheme as “corruption on steroids.” Rizzo was ultimately sentenced to 12 years in prison; his assistant received a lengthy sentence as well, and council members pleaded no contest to criminal charges and paid restitution.

The salaries made headlines. But post-mortems of the scandal — including a detailed review by the Center for the Advancement of Public Integrity at Columbia Law School — concluded the salaries were a symptom. The underlying disease was structural: because virtually all of Bell’s top officials were implicated, the city’s limited internal checks failed, and because Bell had no meaningful transparency or oversight mechanisms, no one outside a small circle of decision-makers had the ability, or the duty, to ensure the city was governed with integrity. The same review warned that this is not a Bell problem but a small-city problem: municipalities of that size everywhere rely on county, state and federal oversight that is, in practice, inadequate.

Three facts about Bell deserve particular attention in any city under transparency scrutiny.

First, no oversight system caught it. Bell’s inflated salaries were reported to California’s state pension system for years without a single red flag. State auditors did not find the scheme. County government did not find it. It was uncovered by two newspaper reporters working from public records — after five years of wrongdoing. The lesson repeated in nearly every academic review of the scandal is that in small cities, investigative journalism and citizen records requests are not a supplement to official oversight; they are frequently the only oversight that functions.

Second, the corruption ran through the city manager’s office. The decision of who runs a city’s administration, on what contract terms, and answerable to whom, is the single most consequential act a small-city governing body performs. In Bell, that process was captured — compensation decisions were concealed through deceptive ordinances and non-public approvals. Reviews of the scandal consistently identify opaque personnel and contract processes as the environment in which everything else grew.

Third, the fix began with a recall, not a lawsuit. By early 2011, Bell voters had recalled the previous council and elected a slate of first-time officeholders — described in later retrospectives as “political amateurs” — who inherited a hollowed-out government, vacant leadership positions and a deeply distrustful public. Structural reform followed the electoral reset: ethics codes, conflict-of-interest disclosure requirements, budget workshops open to residents, and a public transparency portal. The sequencing matters. Exposure built the factual record; the recall provided democratic legitimacy; reform institutionalized the change.

New Mexico’s own cautionary tales

New Mexico does not need to borrow all its lessons from California. The state’s modern history contains at least two instructive examples — one of what happens when documented sunshine-law violations go unpunished, and one of how citizen enforcement works today.

Sunland Park: the cost of consequence-free violations. In 2003, then-State Auditor Domingo Martinez issued a report on the border city of Sunland Park documenting fiscal mismanagement and violations of the Open Meetings Act, the state procurement code and nepotism laws — findings so severe the auditor recommended suspending elected officials and placing the city under state control. No such consequences followed. Contemporary reporting described a city hall culture of backroom deals in which officials, in the words of one New Mexico political columnist, “faced no consequences” for intentional Open Meetings Act violations. Less than a decade later, in 2012, Sunland Park imploded in one of the state’s most notorious municipal scandals, with criminal charges filed against the former mayor pro tem, the city manager and nine others. Observers at the time drew a straight line between the two episodes: the 2003 audit findings and the later criminal conduct were, in the assessment of the reporting, “very much the same” issues — grown unchecked because the first round of documented violations produced no enforcement.

Española: the modern citizen-enforcement model. In 2025, an Española resident filed repeated Open Meetings Act complaints with the New Mexico Department of Justice’s Government Counsel and Accountability Division over defective meeting notice and agenda practices, forcing the city to respond formally and exposing internal disputes among the mayor, council and clerk’s office over who was responsible for compliance. The episode illustrates the enforcement architecture New Mexico has built: the attorney general and district attorneys hold primary authority to sue over OMA violations, but private citizens may also sue after written notice to the public body, and the DOJ’s complaint process gives residents a no-cost avenue that frequently results in corrective action without litigation.

The rising price of stonewalling

If the Open Meetings Act cases teach how machines operate, the Inspection of Public Records Act cases teach what noncompliance costs — and in New Mexico, the price has been climbing.

IPRA’s enforcement provision is mandatory, not discretionary: under NMSA 1978, Section 14-2-12(D), a court “shall” award damages, costs and reasonable attorney fees to any requester who prevails in an enforcement action. The state Supreme Court has repeatedly reinforced that IPRA’s exceptions are to be construed narrowly and that the burden of justifying secrecy rests on the government, not the requester.

The consequences are not theoretical. By 2023, the city of Albuquerque had paid more than $1 million settling IPRA lawsuits, according to television news reporting at the time, much of it tied to delayed or withheld police records. In 2025, the University of New Mexico paid a $195,000 settlement — roughly $65,000 to the requester and more than $130,000 in attorney fees — to a student journalist whose records request its officials had denied. That case carried an additional lesson: during litigation, previously undisclosed internal emails surfaced showing university lawyers had advised continuing to withhold the records until a court forced their release. The court sanctioned the university. A “withhold until sued” strategy, the case demonstrated, is not merely expensive; courts are increasingly prepared to treat it as bad faith.

For a city the size of Alamogordo, the arithmetic is straightforward. Every records denial that fails in court is paid for by the same taxpayers the denial kept in the dark — twice: once in the records fight, and once in the erosion of trust that follows.

What the public record shows in Alamogordo

The events that placed Alamogordo’s commission under scrutiny are, in their essential outline, matters of official public record — votes taken, agendas posted, and statements made in open session.

On March 10, 2026, the commission voted 7-0 to direct negotiation of a city manager contract with then-Acting City Manager Dr. Stephanie Hernandez. On April 28, 2026, the commission reversed course on a 4-3 vote, accepting a settlement agreement with Hernandez; the terms were not deliberated in open session, and the settlement’s terms were not disclosed to the public at the time of the vote and still have not been via the commission itself. On June 23, 2026, the commission appointed Robert Stockwell as city manager, with a completed, pre-drafted employment contract appearing in the agenda packet before any disclosure of him being and applicant and prior to his interview via executive session which also failed to disclose and interview would occur. Commissioner Rardin publicly acknowledged personal contact with Stockwell prior to the appointment as far back as July of 2025 without disclosure to the full commission. In his own words, “to figure a way to get us out of this mess.” Note the mess was of Rardin’s own making,claimed former Mayor Susan Payne, in a June 23rd, 2026disclosure during public comments. She disclosed that an independent investigation by an outside party had taken place. Rardin then claimed, “no, no the investigation will never be released.” A statement of fact is Rardin, has no legal authority to prevent the release of the documents that investigated him and the commissions actions related to an alleged tainted city manager hiring process.

Those events around the city manager search are now the subject of Edwards v. Alamogordo City Commission, No. D-1215-CV-2026-00514, ongoing in the 12th Judicial District Court before Judge Lori L. Gibson Willard. The petition alleges the commission violated the Open Meetings Act in its city manager decisions and violated IPRA in its handling of related records requests — including a June 13 categorical denial that, according to the court filings, was signed only “by Staff” rather than by a designated records custodian as the statute requires. The city has moved to dismiss and disputes the claims; the case is ongoing with motions and counter motions being filed, and the court has yet ruled on the merits. A separate IPRA request, submitted June 23, seeks the independent investigative report commissioned by the city into the 2025 city manager recruitment; the statutory deadline for the city’s response falls on July 8, 2026. Stay tuned.

Readers should draw their own conclusions as more details become available to the public. What the historical record supplies is context for evaluating them.

Lesson one: insider political machines run on process, not theft

Bell required actual embezzlement to collapse. Most entrenched small-town political operations never steal a dollar the way Rizzo did. They operate instead in the softer currency, of insider political process: outcomes arranged before the meeting, serial one-on-one contacts that assemble a decision outside any quorum, personnel choices and staged votes presented to the public as accomplished facts, and reflexive denials and outrage at being questioned when citizens ask for the paper trail.

That is precisely the conduct New Mexico’s sunshine laws were written to reach. The Open Meetings Act declares the formation of public policy to be public business, and it carries a remedy with real teeth: actions taken in violation of the act are invalid — void, not merely irregular. A vote that was decided in private and ratified in public is, under New Mexico law, no vote at all unless properly cured. The law treats the process violation as the substantive harm, because the framers of the act understood what Bell later proved: opacity in process is where everything worse incubates.

Lesson two: enforcement asymmetry is the entrenchedpolitical machine’s best friend

Sunland Park’s 2003 audit changed nothing because no one with enforcement power followed through. Bell ran for five years because no one looked. The common denominator in every successful reform story — Bell, the UNM records case, the DOJ’s citizen-complaint docket — is a persistent private actor(citizen or journalist) willing to carry the cost of enforcement when the state does not: a reporter, a resident, a nonprofit, a requester with a lawyer.

New Mexico’s Legislature anticipated that asymmetry. IPRA’s mandatory fee-shifting exists precisely so that a citizen of ordinary means can afford to make the government follow its own law, and so that noncompliance is never free for the public body that chooses it. The Open Meetings Act’s citizen-suit provision serves the same function. Those mechanisms only work, however, when someone uses them — which is why the health of open government in any given town tends to track the presence of people stubborn enough to file the request, document the denial and see the case through.

Lesson three: internal warnings are the most damning records

In Bell, the pension filings that should have triggered alarms sat unexamined for years. In the UNM case, the documents that transformed the litigation were internal emails showing officials knew their position was untenable and withheld the records anyway. The pattern is consistent across transparency cases nationally: when a public body’s own clerk, attorney, auditor or investigator has warned in writing that conduct violated the law, and the body proceeds regardless, the character of the case changes — legally, because knowledge converts negligence into willfulness, and publicly, because citizens forgive mistakes far more readily than they forgive concealment.

It is for this reason that the fate of internal reviews and investigative reports — whether they are produced, withheld, or acknowledged at all — so often becomes the central battleground in municipal transparency disputes. The report itself may matter less than what the fight over the report reveals about how a government treats bad news or the release of information to the public.

Lesson four: recall and litigation do different jobs

Bell’s recovery shows the division of labor clearly. Records requests and reporting built the factual record. Litigation and prosecution established accountability. But it was the recall — a democratic act by voters — that reset the government and gave reform legitimacy. New Mexico law provides its own recall mechanism for municipal officials, with its own demanding legal standards, and the state Supreme Court has recently clarified the elements required when malfeasance grounds rest on open-government violations.

Cities under scrutiny frequently characterize accountability efforts as political vendetta; Bell’s officials did, and so did Sunland Park’s. History’s answer is disciplined sequencing: documents first, facts verified against primary sources, methods disclosed, interests declared. The Los Angeles Times reporters who broke Bell were credible because the records did the talking. That standard — not the volume of the criticism, but the verifiability of it — is what separates accountability journalism from politics, and it is the standard this publication applies to its own work, including on stories in which its publisher is a participant.

The choice every small city faces

Bell rebuilt. A decade after the scandal, the city that had been a national synonym for municipal corruption was being cited by the local-government management profession as a turnaround story — open budgets, signed ethics codes, a council that had learned to do the public’s business in public. Sunland Park’s road was longer, because its first documented warnings were ignored for a decade.

That is, in the end, the lesson most relevant to Alamogordo in the summer of 2026. The question posed by open-government litigation is never only about the meetings and records at issue. It is about which of the two histories a city chooses to repeat: the one where documented process failures are treated as the warning they are, or the one where they are waited out until they become something worse. The Open Meetings Act and the Inspection of Public Records Act exist so that citizens do not have to wait to find out.

Sources and attribution

Bell, California: Los Angeles Times investigative reporting (2010) and subsequent coverage of criminal proceedings; Center for the Advancement of Public Integrity, Columbia Law School, “Rebuilding Bell, California: Review and Recommendations for Continued Improvement of Accountability, Oversight, and Transparency” (2015); Chapman University, “The City of Bell Scandal Revisited” conference materials (2015); International City/County Management Association case study, “Bell, California: Rebuilding the Public Trust.” Sunland Park: New Mexico State Auditor report (2003), as reported by NMPolitics.net (2012). Española: Rio Grande Sun reporting (August 2025). IPRA enforcement economics: KOB-TV reporting on City of Albuquerque IPRA settlements (2023); Santa Fe New Mexican timeline of the UNM public-records litigation and settlement (2025). Statutes and guidance: NMSA 1978, §§ 10-15-1 through 10-15-4 (Open Meetings Act); NMSA 1978, §§ 14-2-1 through 14-2-12 (Inspection of Public Records Act); New Mexico Department of Justice OMA and IPRA Compliance Guides. Alamogordo: City of Alamogordo commission agendas, minutes and official meeting recordings (March 10, April 28 and June 23, 2026); filings in Edwards v. Alamogordo City Commission, No. D-1215-CV-2026-00514, 12th Judicial District Court.

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