Herrera outlines city's debt
New city manager gives first — and last — interview

Field Engineer for Souder, Miller, and Associates, Ralph Ohm, explains how the new Belt Press filters out water from the sludge on Wednesday evening at the Gallup Waste Water Treatment Plant. After the sludge is filtered out and dried it can be used as fertilizer. City bonds are paying for the improvements at the Gallup Waster Water Treatment Plant. [Photo by Matt Hinshaw/Independent]

By Zsombor Peter
Staff writer

The Gallup Aquatic Center is one of the projects paid for by the milliions of dollars worth of bonds sold by the last city administration. The new administration has been disputing the exact figure and impact of those bonds. [Photo by Matt Hinshaw/Independent]

GALLUP — City Manager Gerald Herrera granted his first, and possibly last, interview with the Independent Wednesday morning after more than a month in office.

Except for a brief exchange with The Herald immediately after securing his new job from the City Council July 13, Herrera has held to a complete blackout of all media contact. But the press-shy city manager, who hasn’t broken his silence even to explain it, finally spared the paper a quick 15 minutes.

Herrera agreed that the city manager has a responsibility to share information with the public so long as it’s “pertinent to the city,” but thought news releases could do the job. Interviews are another matter. Herrera said he was wary of granting one-on-one meetings with reporters because of the “negativity” they report. Bad news, he said, was a good reason not to talk.

Herrera took particular issue with the way the Independent runs its corrections, on an inside page the way most newspapers do. But if the newspaper prints a mistake on page one, he suggested, why not print the correction on the same page? Herrera doesn’t find the exchange fair.

Others say Herrera hasn’t been fair talking about how much money the city owes. During his few minutes with The Herald, he said he’d just inherited $84 million worth of public debt from the last administration. But according to former Administrative Services Director Larry Binkley, the last administration passed on less than $50 million. Even with interest, he added, the total should come in under $80 million.

Herrera did not return the Independent’s calls during days before the newspaper published a story about the disputed figure Aug. 7. RFB Financial Markets’ Paul Cassidy, the city’s expert on bonds, said someone at City Hall denied him permission to speak with the Independent for the story and that all questions would have to be referred to the city manager. Cassidy declined to say who gave him the message.

Wednesday morning, Herrera said it wasn’t him and didn’t know who gave the gag order either. He was sticking to the $84 million, though, a combination, he said, of the city’s bonds and loans — with interest — at the end of 2006. But by the time he quoted the figure, in July, the city had already paid off several million.

Herrera said he found no fault with the projects the last administration had gone into debt for, everything from the High Desert trails to the downtown plaza to basic road and waterline repairs. The problem, he said, was that they left little money for the new administration to start its own projects. According to Herrera, the last administration used up 90 percent of its bonding capacity.

“The debt was taken all out in one shot,” he said.

His goal, Herrera said, was “to get the city back on track.”

By that, Herrera said he meant making sure the city kept up with its collections to pay the debt off. The last administration made sure that all the cuts and rate increases were in place before it left to let future administrations do just that. All the city has to do now is make sure those cuts and rates stay in place.

Herrera said he’d also spent the last five-plus weeks renegotiating union contracts, handling grievance proceedings, moving the city’s water well projects forward, and generally coming up to speed on city affairs.

Before the Independent could ask about his reasons for firing Police Chief Sylvester Stanley recently, though, Herrera glanced at his watch, said the paper’s 15 minutes were up, and walked off.

Before ending the interview, Herrera said his first interview with the paper could be his last.

After a modest search for candidates, Mendoza and one of the four City Councilors interviewed three of the eight candidates who qualified. In Councilman Pat Butler’s absence, the rest of the council unanimously settled on Herrera, a personal friend of Mendoza’s who supported his campaign for mayor a few months prior. Two of the other candidates who qualified, who both had more government experience than Herrera, have filed complaints with the New Mexico Human Rights Division, claiming they never had a chance. A spokesman for the Labor Department said the claims were still under investigation.