1 week Ago
It's much too early to be sure, but the new regents of scandal-ridden Western New Mexico University seem committed to serving the public. The previous board of regents served the university's president, Joseph Shepard, paying him $1.9 million in return for his resignation.
Led by Mary Hotvedt and Lyndon Haviland, the old regents were careful not to mention Shepard's bloated severance pay during the public meeting in which they unanimously approved his resignation. In addition, the previous board gave Shepard a full professorship and a salary of at least $200,000 a year to teach two online business classes per semester. He would be the highest-paid faculty member at Western.
Shepard's teaching duties are to begin this year, after a paid sabbatical. Western's timid faculty finally began to speak up after Shepard's professorship became public knowledge. The former regents would have faced an angry campus had they defied the governor and remained in power.
Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham in March appointed four new regents to Western's board, leaving one seat vacant. They met for the first time this week in a session that was anything but business as usual.
Something as mundane as approving the minutes of the old board's final meetings brought a clarification from John Wertheim, a new regent from Albuquerque. "I want to make it clear to everybody that when you approve minutes, you're just approving what happened at the meeting. You're not legally agreeing with what happened," Wertheim said.
In a follow-up interview, Wertheim told me he wanted to explain "an arcane point of parliamentary procedure" to make sure the public understands what occurred. "The new board has not ratified the severance package Shepard received." State Attorney General Raúl Torrez has sued Shepard and the former regents in hopes of recovering the $1.
9 million payout. Torrez said Western was mismanaged and tarred by "greed and self-dealing and arrogance." The new regents might become defendants in the attorney general's ongoing lawsuit, as the former members are powerless.
Distancing the new board from the old panel's deal with Shepard was smart politics by Wertheim. Better yet, he meant every word. Lujan Grisham appointed all five of the previous regents.
She called for their resignations on Dec. 31, a week and a half after they approved the balloon payment to Shepard, plus the professorship. Steve Neville, a mild-mannered, straight-shooting former state senator, presides over Western's new board.
During their Senate confirmation hearings, Neville and the other three regents endorsed State Auditor Joseph Maestas' authorization of a forensic audit of Western. Maestas' investigators had already found more than $360,000 in expenditures that violated university policies. The auditor criticized Western's old board, Shepard and Shepard's wife, Valerie Plame, for failing to uphold their financial responsibilities.
Plame, an author and former Democratic candidate for Congress, was not a state employee. She nonetheless received a state credit card from Western. Shepard blamed a former regent, Jerry Walz, for issuing the credit card to Plame, whom Shepard called the first lady of the university.
The forensic audit will investigate potential fraud, waste and abuse, including any violations of criminal statutes regarding purchases and travel by the university's leadership. That includes Shepard, Plame, the board of regents and Western's vice presidents, according to Kelley Riddle, Western's vice president of business. Jaramillo Accounting Group of Albuquerque was hired to do the forensic audit.
As the regents met, Jaramillo staffers were busy with field work on the Western campus, Riddle said. The audit will cover eight years, 2017-24. Jaramillo's deadline to submit the audit to Maestas' agency is June 30.
Neville said the new regents supported a forensic audit to splash sunlight on a university beset by scandals for the last 18 months. The regents' plan is "to again give some contentment, I guess, to the public that the university is going to be well-cared for and there's nothing irregular. We want to make sure that's the case," Neville said.
He was in Mexico, fishing on the ocean, when Lujan Grisham called to offer him the regent seat. "I'll confess, I'm an Aggie, three times over," Neville, a 74-year-old Republican, said of his fervor for New Mexico State University. But, he said, he couldn't say no to the Democratic governor.
Neville knows Western well from his 20 years in the state Senate. He said he admired the institution, and he appreciated Western's working relationship with San Juan College in his hometown of Farmington. "It was an easy decision on my part," Neville said.
The hard work just started. Wertheim, Neville and fellow regents Keana Huerta and Dean Reed are beginning their search for an interim president and a full-fledged successor to Shepard, who was in power for 13 years. Provost Jack Crocker became acting president after Shepard's resignation took effect Jan.
15. Four of the five former regents had acceded to the governor's request to step down, leaving the board with no quorum and no power. The old guard is gone.
The damage it did should not be forgotten. Ringside Seat is an opinion column about people, politics and news. Contact Milan Simonich at msimonich@sfnewmexican.
com or 505-986-3080..
