Last Call
Supporters harrassed as alcohol ban nears vote

Lindsay Mapes, the secretary/treasurer of the Gallup Alcohol Action Team, puts a door hanger on a home near Helena Drive early Sunday morning. The group distributed nearly 3,000 door hangers in Gallup over the weekend in an effort to rally votes for the no-alcohol-sales-before-noon referendum. Mapes and others in the group have been the targets of harassing phone calls because of their roles in the organization. [Photo by Matt Hinshaw/Independent]

By Zsombor Peter
Staff Writer

GALLUP — Being associated with the Gallup Alcohol Action Team is costing some volunteers more than just their time and effort, it seems. It's also costing at least a few of them the trouble of putting up with some rather nasty messages.

The Action Team wants Gallup's voters to ban all alcohol sales before noon, and collected by mid-January the 553 signatures the City Council needed to call a referendum. It's been urging residents to vote "yes" come March 28 election day ever since.

There's been plenty of opposition to the proposal from the start, though it did not coalesce until recently, when the Gallup Hospitality Association, a group of representatives of the local food, restaurant and liquor industries, issued its first news release. After months of speculation, it finally sued the city March 9, claiming the referendum was illegal. Even then, the public debate remained civil, if contentious.

Then came Friday morning. Lindsay Mapes, the Action Team's secretary, was on KXTC to drum up support for the pre-noon ban during the last few days of the campaign. When she got home that afternoon, she found her answering machine filled with half-a-dozen rude, obscene and anonymous messages. The first message was left at 8:58 a.m., Mapes said. She had been on the air at 8:55 a.m. Another half-dozen messages arrived the next day.

Mapes tried to trace the calls to no avail and filed a few police reports, but hasn't heard back.

She's not sure if the callers who spoke a few simply hung up were male or female. If she had to guess, she'd say they were female.

"They were screaming; so it was hard to tell," said Mapes. "One was in Spanish; they were cussing at me in Spanish."

She can't be unequivocally sure the calls had anything to do with her visible roll in the Action Team, since none of them made any specific reference to alcohol or the referendum. But she finds the timing awfully suspicious. She said the callers also sounded as if they'd already put back a few.

Then there was the incident on Christmas Eve, when vandals broke the windows of her car, dented the body, and urinated on the outside, doing some $2,000 worth of damage in all.

Whoever did it forgot to leave a calling card, but they also forgot tellingly to take anything from inside the car, including her compact discs and compact disk player. All the other vehicles in the packed parking lot were left alone.

At first, Mapes brushed it off as a random case of vandalism.

"But now that the phone calls happened," she said, "now some people say there's no doubt in their minds that it's linked to my involvement in the referendum."

Mapes is not the only Action Team volunteer who's been harassed. Barbara Quiones, the group's president, said she received a barrage of text messages on her cell phone one Sunday in September, not long after the group had announced its plans.

"Some of them were threatening, and some of them were just nasty," she said.

Unlike the calls to Mapes, the text messages were more specific, Quiones said, "back off, mind your P's and Q's ... you'll-be-sorry kind of stuff."

She filed a police report, but hasn't heard back either.

Quiones said she traced the messages and found three numbers for The Independent and two for City Hall. She believes someone was playing with the system.

Undeterred, Mapes, Quiones and the rest of the Action Team are moving forward with their campaign. They put up the last of 6,000 door hangers urging voters to approve the ban Sunday morning. Today, they'll be calling the 500-plus registered Gallup voters who signed their petition, reminding them to make it to the polls by Tuesday evening.

Their efforts could be for naught if McKinley County District Court Judge Joseph Rich nullifies the City Council resolution that called for the referendum.

The Hospitality Association is claiming the New Mexico Liquor Control Act prohibits cities from setting their own hours for liquor sales on a citywide basis. City Attorney George Kozeliski believes it's allowed.

No other New Mexico community has ever tried to set its own hours. By some interpretations the act only allows cities to ban Sunday sales by the drink or package Gallup voters have done both or to make the community completely dry. Otherwise, it allows licensed dealers to begin selling alcohol on most days of the year by 7 a.m.