Flubbed Trip Cost Taxpayers $2,375

LAS CRUCES — Former Sunland Park Mayor Martin Resendiz was largely absent from City Hall in his last months in office, following the embarrassing disclosure in August that he had signed nine contracts with a California design firm while drunk.

Instead, according to city expense reports and his own account, Resendiz spent many long hours on the road, trying to keep his hand in city business.

According to Resendiz, he drove twice to Dallas and back in November to meet with officials of the General Services Administration.

One week after one of those 1,260-mile road trips, he and his former executive assistant drove to Washington, D.C., and back, a nearly 4,000-mile drive that Resendiz admitted was botched.

The $2,375 trip was flubbed because, after a three-day drive to the nation’s capital, Resendiz said, he got lost in the city and missed his Dec. 1 appointment with New Mexico Rep. Steve Pearce to drum up support for Sunland Park’s longstanding effort to open a new border crossing to Ciudad Juárez, Mexico.

“It (Washington) is a big place,” Resendiz said last week, adding that he felt “horrible” about standing up the congressman. “It was very much a learning experience.”

Though the purpose of the trip was to drum up congressional support for the port of entry project, Resendiz said he did not schedule in advance meetings with any other members of the state’s delegation. Of that visit, Resendiz initially told the Journal: “We met with the staff for Pearce.”

A day later, Pearce’s spokeswoman said Resendiz had missed not only the scheduled appointment with Pearce, but a subsequent, unscheduled meeting with a staffer that was attended by Resendiz’s assistant, who had been fired the previous summer and had no official standing with the city.

Resendiz said he missed that brief meeting with the Pearce staffer because he had left in a fruitless attempt to set up a meeting with Texas Rep. Sylvestre Reyes, a Democrat from El Paso.

Resendiz was paid $4,641.70 for those three trips, with much of the price tag generated by mileage reimbursement at the rate of 44 cents per mile.

Asked if it would have been less costly and more efficient to simply book a flight to Washington, D.C., Resendiz said, “I don’t know if it would. … I couldn’t tell you. Possibly, possibly.”

State Auditor Hector Balderas has been conducting a special audit of Sunland Park’s finances as the city has been shaken by the arrest of mayor-elect Daniel Salinas, the city manager, and other city officials in connection with an extortion case and false voter registrations.

Balderas said Friday his staff is “aggressively examining” possible abuses of per diem payments for travel expenses.

Resendiz said his flubbed trip to Washington, D.C., actually cost him $600 of his own money and that he did not “make a penny” on the trip. After the three trips to Dallas and Washington, D.C., last November and December, Resendiz hastily planned another road trip to the nation’s capital, this time scheduled for early January.

The city paid Resendiz a total of $2,868 in two checks, dated Dec. 30, 2011, and Feb. 21, for the trip that, according to city records, included a side trip to Detroit.

Resendiz never made that journey and repaid the city the full $2,868 for the aborted trip on Feb. 29, four days after city manager Jaime Aguilera and Salinas were arrested.

Asked why he waited two months to repay the city for a trip he did not take, Resendiz said Thursday he had received Aguilera’s approval to hang on to the money in the hopes of rescheduling the trip at a later date, though he acknowledged he has no paperwork or written communication to document that understanding. He said he planned all along to repay the city before his term ended this month.

“He (Aguilera) said it’s fine if you take it (the trip) a little bit later on,” Resendiz said.

Resendiz said the purpose of the aborted January trip was to meet with a representative of the Detroit International Bridge Co., which manages a privately run bridge on the Michigan-Canada border. Resendiz said he had hoped to meet through the firm’s former lobbyist, Bobby Mills.

But Mills, reached by phone in New York City, said he was not contacted by Resendiz about any such meeting. Mills said he left Washington, D.C., for a job in New York on Dec. 30, the day Resendiz received the first of two checks for the trip.

“I didn’t have any meetings set up,” Mills said. “I don’t know what he (Resendiz) is talking about.”

On Dec. 30, three days before the planned start of the trip, Resendiz received a city check for $2,294, an amount expected to cover 80 percent of the trip’s cost, including $1,877 for mileage.

The calculation for mileage, Resendiz said, was the result of a misunderstanding that he planned to visit Detroit itself, rather than meet with officials of Detroit International in Washington.

While city expense forms Resendiz signed include hand-written notes indicating a side trip to Detroit, including hotel expenses for three nights there, Resendiz said the notes were absent from city paperwork when he signed it. He said the paperwork contained only the trip’s total cost, without any calculations showing how the sum was generated.

Asked if the trip to see Pearce was a waste of taxpayer money, Resendiz replied: “It could have been a lot more efficient.”
— This article appeared on page A1 of the Albuquerque Journal