There were two legally mandated choices in front of the Las Cruces City Council coming into its historic special minimum wage meeting last Monday.
1. Pass the $10.10 minimum wage ordinance outlined in a referendum proposal that has far more signatures than needed to legally qualify for the ballot, and put it into law without general election approval.
2. Vote down the $10.10 minimum wage ordinance, which would then automatically put it on the general election ballot for voter approval.
Unhappy with its legal options, the council majority came up with a third approach that the word cynical doesn't begin to describe.
Vote yes on the $10.10 minimum wage to keep the popular proposal out of the hands of voters. Then use a flimsy legal excuse to come back and reduce the minimum wage within a matter of weeks.
The four council members who took this course of action irreparably broke the public trust, and may well have broken the law. Thousands of petition signers who met every requirement to put this measure to a public vote were deprived of their day at the ballot box. Meanwhile the council majority openly discussed its intention to quickly change the law they had just passed expressly to strip them of their vote.
The council majority's stunt would be termed a "sham" transaction in the business world - a fake transaction deliberately concocted to circumvent the law. In this case, the council passed a fake minimum wage law to avoid legal requirements for a referendum. In the business world these transactions are prosecuted as frauds. Whether the sham transaction argument holds legally in this case remains to be seen.
The shaky legal justification concocted by City Attorney Pete Connelly was that if the council passed the $10.10 law, it would conflict with the current $8.50 law and the council would be required to come back and reconcile the two. All precedent I am aware of says the newest law supersedes previous law.
No matter. If the council majority had any serious intention of enacting the $10.10 law, all they had to do was commit to adding a phrase stating that the $10.10 ordinance trumps prior ordinances. They did not.
I know each of the Las Cruces City Councilors and the Mayor fairly well. I know that they are well intentioned and have the best interests of our community at heart. But on the milestone issue of minimum wage, the majority made a mockery of public process. They acted in bad faith; subverted that most democratic of processes, the referendum; and could well have broken the law.
Here is my message to Mayor Miyagishima, Councilor Levatino, Councilor Smith, and Councilor Silva. You betrayed voters by pulling a questionable stunt to win your issue. In the process, you threw democracy under the bus.
If you respect voters, the democratic process, and the spirit as well as the letter of the law you will quickly replace your sham vote with a true up or down vote on the $10.10 minimum wage. Or you will make your sham ordinance legitimate by officially "reconciling" it to the terms of the referendum earned by petitioners. If you do not take either of these actions, do not bother to run for office again.
Steve Fischmann is a former New Mexico state Senator.