I am writing today to announce the closure of the New Mexico Independent. After three and a half years of operation in New Mexico, the board of the American Independent News Network, has decided to shift publication of its news…
While environmental activists played their part yesterday during demonstrations at the capitol building, going so far as to dress up as solar panels and to sing the tune of “You Are My Sunshine,” their counterparts, the anti-cap-and-trade contingency who has…
Roughly one quarter of University of New Mexico students are unimpressed with the state’s flagship public school, according to a survey that questioned college students about their higher education experiences.
In Sunday’s Albuquerque Journal, pollster Brian Sanderoff neatly summed up the yin-yang challenge facing Mayor Martin Chavez as he seeks an unprecedented third consecutive term as mayor, his fourth term overall.
“As the years pass on incumbency, you make a lot of friends,” Sanderoff said, “and a lot of enemies.”
“That’s just a natural part of politics,” he added.
On the one hand, you have the many admirers who agree with the mayor’s policies — like expanding the police — or an aggressive leadership style unafraid to ruffle feathers. On the other, there are the many detractors who say the mayor has mostly expanded the ranks of his political appointees or too often promoted new development over the city’s best interests.
That raw political calculus will yield an answer come Oct. 6.
Last week saw Chavez preparing for his Sunday announcement and fellow candidates Richard Romero sending out statements — on reinstating term limits for future Albuquerque mayors as well as noting a significant public corruption sentencing — and R.J. Berry vacationing with family in the Ozarks.
In an e-mail to the Independent, Berry campaign manager Dana Feldman explained that the vacation was “a trip that was planned months before he announced he was running for mayor.”
Berry will be the featured guest on this week’s New Mexico In Focus — and Chavez has also been invited to sit for an interview, although the time and date hasn’t yet been confirmed. This past weekend, Romero was the featured guest.
“I believe that we need new leadership in this city,” Romero began. “We need a leader that can work with other people.”
(Watch the full 10-minute interview at left.)
Romero, a former public high school principal, went on to pledge that if elected mayor he’d ferret out “wasteful spending and cronyism [and] patronage that has really, really been running rampant in this administration.”
Romero, who served as a state senator for 12 years, charged that exempt political appointees by Chavez has ballooned under his tenure — from 34 such employees under Chavez’s predecessor former Mayor Jim Baca in 2001 to over 100 today.
Another telling quote from Romero: “If you look at the mayor, he walks around with three body guards walking into the Artichoke Cafe,” Romero said, referring to the popular downtown Albuquerque restaurant. “That is wasteful spending.”
Romero additionally faulted Chavez’s recent proposal to add 100 officers to the Albuquerque Police Department for failing to spell out how to pay for it, saying the incumbent “basically is buying support by not looking at the budget critically.”
He also alleged that too many officers aren’t patrolling the streets.
Eight years ago we had 900 police men and women, and we had more than half of them on the street. We now have 1,100, and about 42 percent of them are on the street. Also, something that’s significant, eight years ago, our budget for public safety was one-third of the total budget, it’s now over half.
The sum total is plenty of fodder for the mayor’s race going forward, less than three months until Election Day.
Also on this past weekend’s New Mexico In Focus, the Albuquerque Journal’s City Hall beat reporter, Dan McKay, and ex-Albuquerque City Councilor Hess Yntema shared their analysis.
McKay, like in his Sunday Journal story mentioned above, called the mayor’s race up until now “pretty quiet.”
Meanwhile, Yntema, a maverick two-term Republican councilor, described the pressure being applied on Chavez from Romero and Berry as “a sandwich” — squeezed from both the left and right.
Check out that interview below.
