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ALBUQUERQUE — After a heated debate, Albuquerque’s City Council decided last night to hire an outside attorney to possibly take Mayor Martin Chavez to court over the city’s Capital Improvement Program (CIP).
“This isn’t the first fight over different perceptions we’ve had about what the charter says,” Councilor Brad Winter told NMI before the meeting, “but I believe it’s the first time we’ve felt it necessary to hire an attorney to look at what the charter means.”
The conflict is over which program should go to voters in October as bond measures — the original version that Chavez sent to the council in January or the one the City Council adopted on April 6 after making a number of changes.
The bond measures approve funding for things like parks, roads and city facilities.
The dispute started when City Attorney Bob White — who is appointed by the mayor — sent the council a letter on April 14 saying it passed its revised CIP too late. The city charter says councilors must “act” within 60 days of receiving the plan from the mayor, and, he opined, since the council missed that deadline the mayor’s original plan is automatically in effect by law.
But councilors say the charter gives them clear authority to pass the plan, and that the 60-day provision requires taking some form of action on the CIP, like working on it in committee, not actually passing it within that time limit.
The city charter process requires the mayor to either sign or veto the CIP sent to him by the council. If he doesn’t do that within ten days, then the bill automatically takes effect. Which means, from the perspective of the councilors, the CIP they passed in April is currently in effect by law since the mayor didn’t veto it.
City Clerk Randy Autio hasn’t made a move to enact either CIP, taking a wait-and-see approach.
The plan passed by the council eliminated some of the mayor’s priorities, like a swimming lagoon for Tingley Beach and an $8 million appropriation for an unidentified soccer complex that Chavez later said would be built on land donated by SunCal Corporation on the far West Side of the city.
The council’s CIP also increased the amount of money allocated for a different soccer complex long planned for Ventana Ranch but reduced the overall amount of the budget from $160 million to $155 million.
According to councilors, Chavez isn’t currently pushing for inclusion of his proposed soccer complex or the Tingley Beach project. Instead, he’s proposed a few other projects be added to the CIP the council passed, to bring the total back up to $160 million.
At the meeting last night, councilors said they were willing to consider Chavez’s amendments.
“All the administration has to do is send down amendments, and we will consider them,” Cadigan said.
“I agree,” Benton said, “and all the councilors I’ve spoken to are amenable to considering amendments.”
But, the councilors said, they’ll only consider the changes in the context of the city charter-defined process, which means they’ll consider the amendments to the CIP passed in April.
The current disagreement, Councilor Debbie O’Malley told the Independent, is partly due to the city attorney not adequately representing the council’s interests.
The city attorney is supposed to represent both the mayor and the council, O’Malley said, and for that reason she and other councilors question why he didn’t speak up much earlier in the CIP process.
“When we said early on that we were going to defer the CIP until April, if he thought there was a problem, he should have spoken up then, rather than wait until after the fact. He’s supposed to be keeping an eye out for problems throughout the process,” O’Malley said.
At the meeting last night, Cadigan asked White if it was “incumbent” upon him to advise the council against going past 60 days, especially considering that Councilor Sally Mayer had asked one of White’s assistant attorneys if it would be an issue.
“It probably would have been in everybody’s best interest,” White replied.
“Earlier that day I received a call asking if it was going to be an issue, and I said no,” he explained in response to Cadigan’s continued questions. “I said I didn’t know if the administration would make it an issue.”
White further explained that it “would have been preferable” to have told councilors they were about to miss an important deadline.
O’Malley told NMI before the meeting that the “interesting little mess” created by the challenge to the council’s CIP has also put another mayoral appointment square in the middle — City Clerk Randy Autio.
“We say our bill is in place. The mayor says, no its not, mine is,” she explained. “The clerk is in the middle because he’s the one who has to enact the CIP and send it back to us as ballot provisions. Regardless, the council can amend the ballot items, but he’s still caught in the middle.”
White confirmed for the councilors that it’s within their authority to amend whatever ballot measures the clerk sends them, and that the only recourse the mayor would have would be to veto that outcome. So in some ways, this dispute is a moot point, since councilors have final authority over what goes on the ballot.
But to most of the councilors last night, the dispute over the CIP is the final straw in a string of disputes with the mayor over how to interpret the charter.
When Ed Adams, the city’s chief administrative officer and another Chavez appointment, said the mayor would be happy to sit down with councilors and work out a compromise, Winter bluntly said he didn’t believe it.
“With all due respect, it’s the mayor’s way or the highway, so I don’t believe what your saying is true,” Winter said. “Basically we’ve had the same issue for eight years. It’s time to draw a line in the sand. This is the best CIP I’ve seen since I’ve been on the council, but because the mayor doesn’t like it … he pulls these shenanigans.”
One of the dissenting councilors, Don Harris, urged the council to not take the matter to court because the public doesn’t like it, and the council has “its own power” as a way to deal with it.
“We have our own power, and should exercise it quietly,” Harris said. “We should offer amendments to the city charter looking at the independence of the city clerk and attorney.”
But most of the councilors were dead set on the measure.
“The important thing is that we as a governing body need to stand up for ourselves,” O’Malley said. “If we don’t, it’s just continually one thing after another. And we’re undermined. … I want our mayor to take our authority and our job seriously.”
The council ultimately voted 6 to 2 to hire an attorney to prepare a court challenge of White’s ruling. The dissenters were Councilors Don Harris and Ken Sanchez, with Sally Mayer absent.
