Since I posted the article on the proposed name change for Carson, I’ve been contacted by a Carson Community association board member in a comment on the article and have heard from other Carson residents on social media. One claimed to not have been notified by the CCA of either the name change effort or the CCA board election that elected Daniel Beartrack. I checked my own emails and I did receive an email from CCA on July 6th about the July 25th meeting and election so at least some notification was given out but I’m not a voting member of the CCA and there does seem to be a lack of transparency on the part of the current leadership of the CCA and it’s obvious that not everyone in Carson is on board with the name change which doesn’t surprise me at all.
The way the name change has been handled has not been transparent at all. I first heard about it from a Facebook post from someone who is not from the local community at all and the petition is targeted at the Taos community as a whole to get signatures from people who have no connection to Carson or other communities in the Carson area who will not be affected in any way by the name change. That in itself is fundamentally wrong, only the people who actually are residents of the 87517 zip code should be considered valid signers of the petition. It should have been brought up at a CCA meeting and voted on by Carson residents first before anything went out to the general public in Taos. And there’s also the problem that the CCA only represents the historical town of Carson and only its residents may join the CCA and vote at its meetings while anyone who lives in the 87517 zip code is considered legally a resident of Carson by the county, state and federal governments.
There also seems to be a fundamental misunderstanding of the process involved in changing the name of Carson by its proponents. The CCA is a community and neighborhood association. It has no power in itself to change the name of the community it represents. All it can do is pass a resolution that recommends the name change and pass that resolution onto the governing body that has jurisdiction over local place names. That would be the Taos County government at minimum and possibly the state government as well. Due to the extensive repercussions of this proposed name change, it is not a trivial matter. It would oblige all residents of zip code 87517 to get new IDs with the new name and possibly force them to have other legal documents updated as well along with their Carson addresses wherever they used them. All signage and maps currently using the name Carson would have to be replaced and updated. Such a process would require full public hearings and be open to public comment by all parties affected which would include all residents of zip code 87517 and other parties affected like NMDOT which would have to replace all road signs with Carson on them. My personal experience with getting a rural address here and seeing how long it’s taken for that address to get into all the address databases out there shows me how long it could take for a new address to propagate. I still get rejected now and then on online address forms for an invalid address years after I got my rural address from the county.
We in Tres Orejas took a good look at the Carson Community Association and how it operates when we restarted our own neighborhood association. We studied its bylaws and incorporated some of its provisions into our own bylaws. On the level of community to community, we wish the CCA nothing but the best and hope that this gets resolved amicably. I looked at the CCA corporate registration last Saturday and noticed that their status was “revoked” because they hadn’t filed their annual corporate report. I pointed that out online and when I checked today, I saw that the report was filed on Saturday and the president of CCA is listed as Robin Keith, not Daniel Beartrack. I’m not sure what that means or who’s in charge of CCA at the moment.
As a final note, I’ve made several comments that it would be far easier to change the Carson that Carson refers to than change the name itself. I propose Rachel Carson, the pioneering environmentalist who wrote the book “Silent Spring” in the early 1960s which resulted in the banning of the insecticide DDT. That might also work for the Carson National Forest since the National Park Service already honors Rachel Carson. Honestly, in over 30 years of living out here, I’ve never associated the name Carson with Kit Carson until now. If there was a big sign by Carson post office about Rachel Carson, nobody would be the wiser and naturally assume the town was named after her.