A year ago, a series of embarrassing scandals involving sex, lies and videotape made the New Mexico border town of Sunland Park the target of plenty of jokes, but there isn’t much for state taxpayers to laugh about as the bill for monitoring the border town’s finances pile up.
On the one-year anniversary of the announcement [...]

New Mexico state auditor Hector Balderas says fraud is so severe in the border town of Sunland Park that the state should take over and run things for now and New Mexico’s secretary for the Department of Finance and Administration has suspended two Sunland Park employees, charging them with mismanagement of public funds.
Late Monday afternoon [...]

And the charges just keep on comin’ for Sunland Park’s Daniel Salinas. The count is now up to 33.
The man who used to be the mayor pro tem of the New Mexico border town and actually won election to the mayor’s office in March but was denied taking office due to extortion, bribery and election [...]

Some 10 days after being selected as the mayor of Sunland Park, 24-year-old Javier Perea stepped down — for now — from the position on Friday (April 27) after the office of Attorney General Gary King declared that the border town’s city council violated the state’s Open Meetings Act when it selected Perea.
Back on April [...]

Sunland Park’s new, 24-year-old mayor took the oath of office today (April 23).
But this is Sunland Park so nothing goes smoothly.
It turns out that the city council may have violated the state’s Open Meetings Act when it selected young Mr. Javier Perea to take over the mayoral duties in the troubled border town.
From the Albuquerque [...]

On Wednesday afternoon, Javier Perea was a 24-year-old graduate of New Mexico State with a major in business administration who used to sell diamonds in a mall.
On Wednesday evening (April 18), Perea squeezed into a packed meeting at the senior center in Sunland Park and made a pitch to members of the city council: Hire [...]

It’s official: The situation in Sunland Park has gotten crazier than the last two seasons of “Lost.”
On Friday (April 6), Daniel Salinas was arrested again, this time charged with 18 new felony charges, including receiving and soliciting illegal kickbacks, fraud and ethics violations.
Salinas is the man who:
*as the border town’s mayor pro tem got drunk [...]

The state Supreme Court weighed in on one of the weirdest political stories in the country on Tuesday (April 3), ruling that the man who was recently elected mayor of the troubled border town of Sunland Park still cannot be sworn into office because he’s facing charges of extortion and bribery.
In a 3-0 decision, the [...]

Sunland Park may be taking New Mexico to a place state government has never gone before … and that’s not a good thing.
On Monday afternoon (March 19), Gov. Susana Martinez and State Auditor Hector Balderas held a joint news conference outside the governor’s office to announce that the border town and its dysfunctional city government [...]

One of the weirdest elections in the country was held in the little border town of Sunland Park on Tuesday (March 6) as a mayoral candidate who is facing charges of extortion defeated a rival who received a lapdance from a topless woman in his campaign office days before voters went to the polls.
Mayor pro [...]