Minority Mayor

Albuquerque’s new Republican mayor, Richard Berry, is a minority winner without much of a mandate or much of a stated program to implement—beyond the cliche of running government like a business. That’s really not a very good idea in a failed economy piled high with failed businesses.

So the minority mayor is something of a stealth mayor too. We really don’t know what we’eve gotten yet.

His minority status will make it hard for his ideas to get a hearing, when we hear them. Two Democrats won some 56 percent of the vote between them. Berry had 44 percent. This year only three candidates could get the 6,500 or so signatures necessary to get on the ballot, and raise the $19,000 in small contributions to qualify for public financing.

In the old days, signature requirements for mayor were very small, and the ballot tended to be full of candidates, including lovable crackpots. For years no one got 40 percent on the first ballot needed to win. A crowded field with a runoff between the top two vote getters guaranteed a majority mayor – even if the race was close, as it was in the first election in 1974 with 2000 votes separating winner Harry Kinney from city planner Herb Smith, or the election of 1993 when Martin Chavez beat former Governor Dave Cargo by 600 votes.

Mayor Berry is one down before he starts. He has the albatross of his party to contend with first. He and the Republican majority on the city Council can cram bad ideas down our throats, I suppose. But opposing coercion can be fierce in Albuquerque – witness the 25 year struggle over the Montaño Road bridge, with its encumbering baggage of ill-will and deep suspicion that Mayor Chavez could never lose after he finally rammed it through in his second term.

Many Democrats – long fed up the absolute intransigence of no-saying Republicans in Congress, their abusive and childish tactics, and their refusal to disavow their rabid radio hate jockeys who happily call Democrats Nazis and worse – won’t work with Republicans at all anymore. I don’t blame them.

Mayor Berry commendably did not descend to character assassination in this campaign. There was no out and out RNC slathering and snapping. Is it possible he’s a civilized Republican? Are there any left in Fox News wonderland and the Party of Limbaugh? Have local Republicans across the nation maintained their independence, unlike the Right Wing chorus of NO in the Congress?

Let’s for the moment say Berry is such a civilized gent.

The question then becomes is there enough serious thinking in the Republican arsenal of urban policies to allow him to remain loyal to the party and cope with the challenges that face him, and all the rest of us?

I’d have to say, I doubt it. If Berry is a booster, a sprawler, if he really thinks he can run City Hall “like a business,” if growth at any cost is his philosophy then we’re all in deep trouble.

This is a time for rethinking, not bulling ahead with old ideas that don’t fit the times.

Anyone who thinks the economy is on a sustained rebound doesn’t have much personal risk involved. Population growth, and geographical sprawling, won’t get us out of this mess – because they won’t happen, perhaps for years, and, by then, other painful realities will become very obvious.

Talking with many people around the city, it becomes clear that the housing industry is at a dead stop. No one is building. No one can. Credit is virtually a thing of the past. Consumer confidence is so far down, even now, that it’s barely half what it should be for retail to begin the slow job of repair. The Great Recession, as the AP calls it, has left residential contractors, and their myriad subcontractors and suppliers, jobless. Even big money, like oil and gas companies, have cut back on spending. Nothing’s moving but work on public buildings and government construction. And there’s not much of that. People I talk to say they have never experienced anything like it in their lifetimes. And they are not optimistic about it lifting anytime soon.

This is not a time to be planning for westward expansion, plotting a loop road to open up the Rio Puerco basin, not a time for Albuquerque to be buying into Sandoval County’s and Rio Rancho’s dreams of glory for a westside city on the hill.

Running the city like a business in the old sense of the cliche, and in this business climate, would mean running the city like a failed business – cutting jobs, scaling back services, tightening and tightening until nothing’s left, but refusing to change the failed products. Albuquerque mustn’t remain like the auto industry, flogging expensive, gas guzzling, extravagant plans to people who need the basics, and who might support genuine innovation – if it works for them.

This is a time to look at why the worn out old vision couldn’t sustain itself in hard times. Random, indiscriminate, mindless growth just won’t work when the economy has no margin for error.

But what will work? First off, the damages of the past have to be repaired. It’s folly to be planning for a resumption of the old status quo. It may come back for a year or two, and then strand us all again in even worse shape. Any investor knows now to keep heavy in cash, keep flexible, prepare for change, and be able to move fast when change comes. We can’t be building our municipal portfolio of plans and ideas hoping to resume what used to be. We have to prepare for a hard transition from the illusions of abundant water and fuel to a time of scarcity, conservation, holding on and making due until, and if, new technologies catch up with our predicament. Cities all over the world are starting to do this. The Berry Administration needs to too.

We need more innovation with mass transit, employing all kinds of buses already in the city. We need a clear, equitable approach to water conservation in the light of what seems to be a prolonged and potentially disastrous, global warming-caused drought in the West.

We need to recreate City Hall’s relationship with neighborhoods. Intelligent infill that doesn’t inflame opposition is the only way to get construction workers back to work.

The city needs to partner up with PNM on alternative energy, and do so aggressively. The Berry administration has to take the lead to press for adjudication of senior water rights in the Middle Rio Grande Valley and put an end to growth on the promise of water, rather than on the possession actual wet water.

Albuquerque needs to counterbalance the scavenging for agricultural water rights with a conservation plan that doesn’t attack farmers who are making a move to supply more of our basic food supply in an era of rising fuel prices and the inflation it causes in trucked in food.

The Berry Administration must focus on affordable housing, and the recognition of the world of financial hurt in which many of our residents suffer.

And Albuquerque needs to begin building the kind of trust it will take to have a new and productive relationship with Pueblo nations in our area, the holders of the most senior water rights in the state.

Please, let’s not run Albuquerque like a failed business and keep on doing the same old things until we’re utterly bankrupt.