Placitas residents finally see end to contested flood-control tax

Placitas property owners are finally getting relief from a flood-control tax that kept showing up on bills even after the debt behind it was paid off. Residents now say the disputed collections may have overcharged them by $600,000 to $900,000, and Mike Neas has filed a formal complaint with the New Mexico Finance Authority to push for an end to any further billing and to seek repayment.

The fight goes back to 2011, when the Eastern Sandoval Citizens Association says Placitas residents discovered the community had been placed inside the Eastern Sandoval County Arroyo Flood Control Authority’s taxing base on misleading information. That same year, HB306 removed Placitas from ESCAFCA’s taxing authority, and residents say the deal was simple: they would pay only their share of the authority’s existing debt until it was retired. ESCA says that debt was officially paid off in 2022, yet ESCAFCA charges still appeared on Placitas tax bills in 2023, 2024 and 2025.

The dispute has sharpened over what those later collections were actually funding. New Mexico law still allows ESCAFCA to levy ad valorem taxes, but Section 72-20-22 distinguishes between regular levies and taxes used to pay authority debt. ESCA argues the post-payoff charges were not legitimate because Placitas was no longer responsible for that bond. One ESCA document says Placitas residents paid about $6 million while included in the district and then paid about $900,000 more than they owed. In a February 2026 update, George Franzen estimated the overcharge at $600,000 to $900,000.

Local officials have acknowledged how tangled the problem became. Sandoval County Commissioner Katherine Bruch, whose District 1 includes Placitas, has said the law did not clearly spell out what should happen after the debt was retired. County Manager Wayne Johnson has said the episode exposed a flaw in the state’s property-tax collections process. At a December 15, 2025 meeting, county officials said they lacked authority to resolve the issue, while George Hypolite of the New Mexico Department of Finance and Administration said only ESCAFCA could request a rate alteration.

What residents appear to have won so far is an end to the collection itself, not a guaranteed refund. ESCA says county staff were instructed to file a civil case to stop ESCAFCA from taxing Placitas residents in 2026 for a bond that had already been paid off. Neas said his goal remains to prevent any further excess taxation in Placitas and get overpayments returned to property owners, but the fight now turns to whether the money can be clawed back and whether other taxpayers could be trapped by similar special-district errors.