Aguilar voters keep familiar leadership amid water crisis, scrutiny

Aguilar voters kept familiar leadership in place even as the town’s water crisis, financial scrutiny and unresolved oversight questions continued to shape daily government in Las Animas County. In the April 7 mail-ballot election, residents chose continuity over a reset, leaving the same small circle of decision-makers to steer a town still trying to stabilize its drinking-water system and its public records.

That vote mattered because Aguilar has not escaped the pressures that built over several years. Familiar names, including Ruth Stodghill, Gerald McDaniel and Encinias, stayed at the center of town politics, a signal that many voters preferred institutional memory to a wholesale turnover while the town’s $5.7 million augmentation reservoir project remained unfinished. In a town this small, where there are few spare hands and even fewer chances to rebuild administrative capacity from scratch, keeping experienced leaders in place looked to many like the safest way to keep the lights on and the paperwork moving.

But continuity has not erased the problems that brought Aguilar to this point. On October 7, 2025, the Colorado Bureau of Investigation said former Town Administrator, Clerk and Treasurer Tyra Marie Avila faced felony theft, cybercrime, embezzlement, forgery and fraud-by-check charges after investigators alleged that more than $26,000 in public money intended for the water project was diverted to personal bank accounts. Investigators said the funds were commingled with the town’s general fund and used for unauthorized personal transactions and other town expenses. Avila had served in the post for 17 years before resigning in September 2024.

The town also remained under regulatory strain. The Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment issued an enforcement order in May 2023 tied to Aguilar’s drinking-water system after a 2022 sanitation survey cited structural damage to the primary storage tank and failures in monitoring and reporting procedures. The town later missed quarterly progress-report deadlines in late 2023 and early 2024 before filing overdue reports and a compliance action plan in April 2024. By 2025, state inspectors were again reporting new damage and continuing compliance problems at the aging tank.

Aguilar later set up a separate account for the water project that could be accessed only by the current mayor and a USDA official, a sign of how much caution now surrounds every dollar tied to the reservoir work. That arrangement, and the election result that preserved familiar leadership, show what voters appear willing to tolerate: a slow, uneasy march through water repairs, audit questions and outside oversight if it means the town avoids deeper disruption.

The next benchmark is clear. Residents should be watching for clean accounting on the project, on-time reporting to regulators, no new findings at the storage tank and visible progress toward finishing the reservoir without another round of allegations. In Aguilar, stability now has to prove it can deliver results.