Court date set in co-op case
The date for a status hearing in the case of Socorro Electric Cooperative’s lawsuit against its member-owners has been set. The hearing will be held at 3:30 p.m. on Tuesday, Dec. 14, at the 13th Judicial Courthouse in Los Lunas.
This will be the first time the case has come before a judge since the co-op filed a complaint asking for declaratory judgment and injunctive relief in June. The co-op filed the action against all of its approximately 13,000 member-owners in an effort to block three new bylaws adopted at the annual meeting in April. All three bylaws call for increased transparency with regard to how the co-op goes about its business and were passed by overwhelming margins.
The bylaws being challenged:
• Call for the board to voluntarily follow the Open Meetings Act and Inspection of Public Records Act;
• Allow members access to co-op books, records and audits, with the exception of records protected by the Privacy Act;
• Allow members and the press to attend co-op board meetings and that a portion of the meeting be set aside for public comment.
In addition, announcements of meetings are to be made in billing statements and advertised in local newspapers.
Though the co-op later filed papers to have the case dismissed, several people filed answers or countersuits against the co-op. Those will in some way need to be resolved before the case can be dropped.
All seven judges in the 13th district where the complaint was filed were either excused by parties involved in the case or recused themselves. With judges in the 7th Judicial Court District in Socorro potentially facing conflicts of interest — as some of them might be among the “unnamed member-owners” of the co-op and therefore defendants — the New Mexico Supreme Court appointed Judge Albert J. Mitchell Jr. of the 10th Judicial Court District in Mosquero to hear the case.
Mitchell said the status hearing is a first step in sorting out what has transpired in the past five months.
“Typically what will happen at a status hearing is we’ll find out what issues are still there, especially in a case with multiple parties,” he said. “The reason to have status hearing is to update parties on where we are and determine what is current. From there we can find out where we are and what direction we’ll go. If we can get everyone in the same place at the same time, we can move forward.”
Mitchell could give no timetable for what will happen next, but he said he didn’t want the case to drag on.
“I tend to move my docket aggressively. As an attorney, I felt bad when it took six or seven months to wait for a hearing,” said Mitchell, who became a district court judge in 2008 after practicing law in Quay County for 24 years. “I’m going to try to move this case along. There’s a saying, ‘Justice delayed is justice denied.’ I’ve always believed that. Waiting forever doesn’t help anyone.”
Mitchell said he’s cognisant that the longer a case is tied up in court, the higher the costs incurred, so he wanted to move things along to avoid running up expenses.
Sorting things out could take some time, however. Mitchell said he couldn’t recall being party to a case that involved so many people.
Another aspect of the case that will have to be addressed is a countersuit that requests class-action certification.
Charlie Wagner, a member of the co-op’s board of trustees who was a leader in the movement for reform, is named as a representative of the class of member-owners. The countersuit alleges his fellow trustees committed fraud, negligence and breach of fiduciary duty over a period of years.
Mitchell said he’s never dealt with a potential class-action lawsuit before.
Another matter that will be addressed is location. Co-op attorney Dennis Francish said at the time the lawsuit was filed that it was entered in district court in Los Lunas because some of the member-owners reside in Valencia County, but most of the judges there live outside the co-op’s service area, so they wouldn’t be faced with a conflict of interest.
However, only a small percentage of member-owners live in Valencia County, and several responses to the co-op’s lawsuit call for a change of venue to Socorro.
“There are a lot of procedural issues in this case that are real interesting,” Mitchell said. “That’s one of the first things we have to get sorted out.”
Contact T.S. Last