Treasurer has issues with bond attorney
By Eric Maddy
The SCORE
A dispute between the Sandoval county treasurer's office and the outside bond attorney the county uses surfaced Thurday night, catching many commissioners off guard and delaying the regularly-scheduled commission meeting 15 minutes.
Under questioning from commissioner Dave Bency, treasurer Lorraine Dominguez admidded she had been unable to get the level of cooperation she expected with Hughes and Strumor LTD, which handles the legal work when the county sells or creates bonds to obtain funding. Dominguez said documents she is required to sign to authorize bonds were often not delivered in a timely fashion for her to review, and on one recent occasion paperwork was delivered to her at the Albuquerque airport for immediate approval just as she was perparing to leave town.
County manager Debbie Hays and commissioners Jack Thomas and Don Leonard expressed surprise at the problem, which came up as commission sat as the Board of Finance is it does regularly on a quarterly basis. Those meetings are traditionally scheduled for 30 minutes before a regular county commission meeting and usually are simple reports from the treasurer's office or other agencies the county uses for investments, bonds and other financial matters.
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