Milan trustees to meet again on Thursday

By Jim Maniaci
Cibola County Bureau

MILAN — The new Village Board of Trustees will hold their first special meeting at 6:30 p.m. Thursday, Mayor Tom Ortega announced at Thursday's regular meeting.

He also emphasized the regular meetings will be held at 6:30 p.m. on the third Thursday of each month a practice which contrasts with neighboring Grants, which floats its regular monthly city council meeting among the various Mondays each month.

Ortega commented, "This will be so the public knows when we have our meetings."

He said the village's contract attorney, Steven Chavez, had resigned. The mayor added that on Monday he expected to have a new lawyer lined up. Ortega also said this coming Thursday's short agenda would include picking a mayor pro tem and that he will have a large number of appointments for the board to ratify to re-activate a long list of boards and commissions.

Currently the only active village advisory panel is the Planning-Zoning Commission.

Thursday night the board of trustees agreed to return to the commission five matters submitted for ratification after immediate past acting code enforcement officer, Police Chief Jerry Stephens, and new code enforcement officer, Natalie Chadborn, brought out problems with the current code having many holes.

That was the problem with four of the five matters.

The fifth matter was the request by Ronnie Cash of C&E Concrete for both a replat and rezoning of 14 residentially zoned lots on the south side of Uranium Avenue at the east end of the village. Public notices had not been done, as required. The company wants to install an asphalt batch plant on the land it owns, of which the north half, between Uranium Avenue and Route 66, is already zoned industrial.

Returned were a conditional use permits for James Mercer for 1620 Prewitt St. and Thomas Sheets for 607 Russell Ave. both in the light commercial (C-1) zone, and Phillip Vigil for 510 San Jose Ave. and Jessica Salazar for 720 Laurie Lee Ct. both in the single family conventional (R-1) zone.

Stephens said the homes should have received variances instead of conditional use permits. Chadborn added that the village can't enforce the variance provision of the code because the federal Fair Housing Act forbids such a restriction. The village can regulate such things as the size of the home on the lot, the age of the structure (forbidding older homes from being brought in) and the requiring of anchoring.

Ortega kept insisting the matter not be tabled, but Mayor Pro Tem Vivian Brumbelow convinced Trustees Manuel Molina, Ellen Baca and George Knotts to return the matters to the commission to be straightened out. The mayor kept lamenting that approvals couldn't be given.

The commission at least two members were in the standing-room-only, audience has worked for more than a year on a complete updating and overhaul of the zoning code and is about ready to submit it to the trustees.

Trustees also heard Village Manager Carlos Montoya announce department heads chose Esther Barnes, who handles fiscal matters in the administrative office, as the March employee of the month. She has been with the village about five months.

The board also approved paying February's bills, received the February municipal court income-expense report, heard reports from Barbara Russell of the North West New Mexico Council of Governments and COG Director Patty Lundstrom, who represents part of Cibola County in the New Mexico House of Representatives. Lundstrom presented a long list of bills, commenting specifically on her payday loan limitation bill which did not pass.

— To contact reporter Jim Maniaci in Grants, please telephone 285-6184 or (505) 870-7775 (cellular).