Santa Fe residents file complaint, threaten suit over midtown campus project secrecy

By Danielle Prokop dprokop@sfnewmexican.com May 4, 2020 Updated 6 hrs ago

A group of Santa Fe residents have filed a complaint with the New Mexico Attorney General’s Office accusing the city of violating the state’s open meetings law in its process of selecting a developer for the midtown campus.

“We didn’t need to see names, we didn’t need to see bottom lines,” retired schoolteacher María Bautista said in an interview Monday. “We wanted to see ideas, and they locked us out.”

Bautista announced the complaint in a Facebook post Monday, hours before the City Council was set to take a big step forward in what is expected to be a yearslong, massive redevelopment of the city-owned property on St. Michael’s Drive.

In a virtual public meeting Monday evening that drew comments from dozens of people, the council voted to hire Dallas-based KDC Real Estate Development & Investments/Cienda Partners as the master developer of the former college.

Bautista said she filed the complaint in a joint effort with Miguel Chavez, a former city councilor and county commissioner; former employees of the shuttered college; and other residents of the surrounding neighborhood.

She and her attorney, A. Blair Dunn, also expect to file a lawsuit against the city, asking a judge to order officials to roll back any actions on the project until they gather more public input on its scope and developer, she said.

Matt Baca, a spokesman for Attorney General Hector Balderas, confirmed the office had received the complaint.

Bautista sent an email to the city last week expressing her concerns.

City Attorney Erin McSherry responded, saying the City Council has taken no votes behind closed doors and that all discussions on the midtown project followed the open meetings law.

“Procurement Code requires that discussion of competitive sealed proposals, such as those submitted regarding the Midtown Property, occur during executive session, so that other competing proposers do not have access to their competition’s proposal during the negotiation process,” McSherry wrote.

Bautista still believes some decisions were made in closed-door meetings.

She noted the city had narrowed its list of possible developers to two finalists from 21 contenders between November and Monday.

“What they’ve missed is they can’t have these closed-door meetings to whittle down the developers,” Dunn said.

Webber said in teleconference Monday he was unaware a complaint had been filed with the Attorney General’s Office.

But Webber defended the selection process for the master developer when asked if he thought there was enough community engagement to meet the public’s expectations. He acknowledged there was “enormous appetite for engagement” in what he called a landmark, once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.

“I think that the process the city embarked on, which is essentially an RFP process — a request for proposal process — is not a process that is involving public participation,” he said.

“It’s not a political process any more than any other contract the city lets is a political process.”