Timberon Water District in Freefall: Two Board Resignations, a Records Office in Turmoil, and a Community That’s Had Enough

TIMBERON, N.M. — In the span of six weeks, the Timberon Water and Sanitation District has lost its board chairman, its vice chair, and — in a departure the district itself called sudden — the records custodian whose combative handling of public-records requests had already become a story of its own. Board Chairman Otis Price announced his resignation effective August 1, 2026. Vice Chair Caleb Flora resigned June 17. And records custodian Leo McAtee, who weeks earlier had told a reporter requesting public documents that he had “other work to do than play street lawyer” and stood by his description of a routine records request as a “scheme,” left the district so abruptly that General Manager Wendy Case spent, in her words, “the bigger part of the day” trying to determine which public-records requests remained unanswered.

Individually, any one of these departures might be unremarkable turnover at a small rural utility. Together, arriving as the district faces its most sustained public scrutiny in years, they read as something closer to an institution buckling under pressure it has spent months failing to relieve.

Three Departures, One Pattern

The district announced Price’s resignation through board secretary Nanette Cameron Thorell on the community’s Facebook page — a channel the district’s own board secretary has acknowledged rarely carries TWSD announcements at all. The notice was terse: Price was stepping down effective August 1, the board had roughly 30 days to appoint a replacement, and residents interested in “giving back to Timberon” were invited to apply. It was a near carbon copy, down to the wording, of the notice posted six weeks earlier announcing Flora’s departure.

McAtee’s exit followed a different, more contentious arc. In the week before he left, he was the subject of direct, on-the-record reporting over his handling of a records request tied to the district’s golf course lease and its ongoing boil-water advisories — a request he initially extended under the state’s “excessively burdensome” provision, then followed with correspondence that abandoned the language of records law almost entirely. He told the requesting reporter he saw “no requirement to trickle you out bits and parts of data,” suggested the reporter “should have been a responsible adult” and filed the request in smaller pieces, and reaffirmed that he considered “scheme” the most accurate word for what had been asked of him. Weeks later, Case’s email to the same reporter explaining McAtee’s departure noted staff were still trying to reconstruct which of his open requests had been answered and which hadn’t — meaning the hostility documented in his final weeks on the job outlasted his tenure, in the form of an unresolved backlog someone else now has to sort out.

A Board Already Running Thin

The math is not abstract. With both the chairman and vice chair seats vacant simultaneously, TWSD is operating on a reduced board at the exact moment New Mexico law puts a clock on how long that can continue. Under NMSA 1978 §73-21-13, a water and sanitation district board vacancy left unfilled after 30 days causes the district court with jurisdiction — Otero County District Court — to fill the seat itself. Two vacancies inside six weeks leaves the district with limited room before that deadline starts converting board appointments into court appointments.

Applicants for Price’s seat must be taxpaying electors residing within TWSD’s boundaries, with letters of interest due to the district office or by email to the board secretary by August 6. The remaining board is expected to fill the seat by majority vote at a public meeting — assuming it can convene a quorum willing to do the work, something recent meeting minutes suggest has not always been guaranteed.

A Community Past the Point of Patience

The public reaction to Price’s resignation notice, posted to the community Facebook page, was not sympathetic. Beneath the district’s formal announcement, community members responded with open sarcasm about the appointment process itself — mocking commentary questioning whether any appointment would meaningfully change how the district is run, and openly skeptical references to informal community factions perceived as controlling board decisions. This outlet is not republishing the specific names or labels used in those comments, since they amount to unverified, personal characterizations of private residents rather than reported fact — but the tenor of the response is itself notable: a community that has stopped treating board turnover as routine news and started treating it as further evidence of dysfunction.

That reaction doesn’t come from nowhere. It lands after a summer in which TWSD issued three precautionary boil-water advisories in five weeks; after the New Mexico Environment Department found the district failed to notify its own customers of a drinking-water violation for at least three months; after board records showed a 10-year lease of the district-owned golf course to a private operator for $1 a month, with no appraisal or competitive bid on record; after the community pool was shut for the season for lack of funds; and after the board began moving toward foreclosure on more than 200 delinquent ratepayer accounts even as its own infrastructure plan concedes the water system itself needs to be rebuilt. A state Public Regulation Commissioner has already floated stripping the board of control entirely through receivership — not a new idea for this district, which was placed under a court-ordered receivership once before, around 2008.

Pressure From Every Direction

What distinguishes this moment from earlier rough patches in TWSD’s history is the number of fronts converging on the board at once. The PRC has an open billing-audit docket it says the district still hasn’t proven it completed. A separate PRC complaint questions the legality of the district’s core non-water revenue source. The state Department of Justice found the board repeatedly violated the Open Meetings Act, with compliance deadlines that have now passed without documented proof of completion. NMED has the district on its public enforcement watch list. And an independent local news outlet has spent weeks publishing detailed, document-backed reporting on the golf course lease, the hidden violation, and the district’s own records office — reporting that, by its own account, prompted the burdensome-request fight with McAtee in the first place.

Board members resigning under that kind of sustained, simultaneous pressure — regulatory, legal, financial, and now openly public — is not something this article can attribute to any single cause, and neither Price, Flora, nor McAtee has publicly stated a reason for leaving beyond the brief notices the district itself posted. But the confluence is hard to ignore: a board losing members and a records office losing its custodian at precisely the moment the district’s failures have become the subject of sustained outside documentation, rather than something residents were left to describe secondhand.

What Comes Next

The immediate question is procedural: can a board now missing two of its usual leadership seats find replacements before the statutory clock hands that decision to a judge. The larger question is whether new appointees — chosen, per the district’s own posted criteria, from whichever residents step forward — can do anything the outgoing board could not: produce a credible infrastructure repair timeline, answer direct questions about tank levels and advisory status without deflecting to bulk records dumps, and rebuild a level of public trust that, on the evidence of this summer alone, has substantially eroded.

Note: This article draws on TWSD’s public notices, correspondence reviewed in connection with ongoing coverage of the district, and prior reporting on the district’s regulatory and governance matters. It does not attribute any individual’s resignation to a specific cause beyond what has been publicly stated, and it does not repeat unverified personal characterizations of private individuals made in public comments. It is a factual summary as a part of our ongoing investigative series. 

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