At 11:00 a.m. today, the City of Grants will swear in newly elected council members -including, in District 1, Dolores P. Vallejos.
She will raise her hand. She will take an oath. And unless something drastic changes between now and then, she will enter office under a legal shadow that the city has tried — and failed — to outrun.
This is not a personal attack on Vallejos. It is a direct indictment of the process that brought her, and this city, to this moment.
The Charter of the City of Grants is not decoration. It is not optional. It is the governing document — the municipal constitution — and it binds the city council just as the U.S. Constitution binds Congress. And yet, again and again, we’ve watched elected officials in this city treat the Charter like a loose suggestion.
And today, they will cross another line.
The council will seat a candidate whose residency is still in dispute, whose dual office holding remains legally unresolved, and whose qualification was never adjudicated in public — because a hearing was quietly deleted from the agenda two weeks ago by a 3–1 vote. And they will do it after the city attorney announced his resignation from the dais — with no written letter, no transition plan, and no clear legal analysis.
The public will get smiles. Photos. A ceremony.
What we will not get is legitimacy.
A Charter in Name Only
This is not about one person. It is about a pattern of collapse — a slow erosion of constitutional governance at the local level, visible in ordinance numbers and meeting minutes and quietly manipulated deadlines.
Let’s start with the facts.
The Charter of Grants requires councilors to reside in the district they represent – not just at the time of filing, but throughout their term (§2.02(B)). If that qualification is ever lost, the office is automatically forfeited (§2.05). And the Charter gives the council power to hold hearings, subpoena evidence, and judge qualifications (§2.07).
That process to judge qualifications was supposed to happen on December 17. The council struck it from the agenda before it even began.
Instead of due process, we got silence.
Instead of a public record, we got resignation.
Instead of transparency, we get ceremony.
Former mayor Martin W. “Modey” Hicks filed a verified petition in district court on December 30 because of the city’s inaction.
The case number is D1333-CV-2025-00354. It challenges the use of New Mexico’s seven-day deadline for candidate challenges to block enforcement of the Grants Charter. He is asking the court to rule – in plain terms – that residency is not a one-time checkbox. It is a continuing obligation.
He’s right.
You cannot claim to be a home-rule municipality and then use state-level procedural traps to disable your own constitution. It’s lazy. And it treats the city as a weaker entity than it is.
Vallejos changed her voter registration address to her mother’s Del Norte home on July 28, 2025, only a few months before filing, and said it was for “medical caregiving,” not politics. The city never reviewed whether that met the Charter. The hearing was removed. No finding was made.
The council will swear her in anyway.
And even if that issue were resolved, a second Charter violation is waiting in plain sight.
Vallejos is currently serving as the Cibola County Assessor, and intends to remain in that county office through 2026. The Charter is explicit: “No elected officer of the city shall hold any other elected public office during the term for which the official was elected,” unless state law authorizes it (§8.02(A)).
This didn’t start with Councilor-Elect Vallejos. And it won’t end there.
In March 2023, the Grants City Council passed an ordinance moving the local election from March to November without a Charter amendment, and without a vote of the people. The Grants City Charter explicitly sets election timing.
Any alteration to the charter, whether a comma or single letter must not be done without the voice of the people. Council went ahead and made adjustments to it regardless, in one of the most important parts of the charter – Elections!
Even before that, term limits set in our charter were undermined by reinterpretation of state laws and rules. During COVID, Charter procedures were rewritten by resolution. And now, residency and eligibility are being decided by omission.
The law does not
work this way.
You cannot substitute convenience for consent. You cannot hide behind procedural deadlines to avoid substantive judgment.
You cannot swear in candidates without confirming they meet the rules we all agreed to.
At some point, the word for this is not “process failure.”
It’s illegitimacy. This lawsuit will go forward. Maybe a judge will act. Maybe not. But make no mistake: what happens at 11:00 a.m. today will set a precedent.
Either the Charter governs, or it doesn’t.
Either qualifications matter, or they don’t.
Either voters get the government they were promised, or they get whatever slips through the cracks.