Some rank and file members of Local 624 may want to endorse Richard Romero for mayor,  but AFSCME leaders say the union’s endorsement of  incumbent mayor Martin Chavez is solid.

Romero released a statement this morning calling a press conference at which he and members of AFSCME Local 624 will announce that  ”…rank-and-file members of the largest city union—over 2500 members—is putting its support behind Richard Romero.”

But AFSCME political coordinator Josh Anderson says it’s “disingenuous” of Romero to announce an endorsement that he specifically sought but did not receive.

…It is disingenuous for Richard Romero to claim he has a union endorsement when he specifically sought, and did not receive, AFSCME’s endorsement.  Local 624 played a key role in endorsing Mayor Chavez this Spring, participating in creating the candidate questionnaire, attending the mayoral candidate forum, and voting to endorse the Mayor in AFSCME’s duly-sanctioned PEOPLE (political) committee deliberations.

Anderson also says Local 624 members are acting inappropriately:

The fact that some members of one local have chosen to claim that they speak for the union’s political program, when they are in fact opposing it is inappropriate and disappointing.

Other AFSCME leaders also say the claim by Local 624  members and Romero is wrong, and that the union will work to re-elect incumbent mayor Martin Chavez.

AFSCME Council 18 President Andrew Padilla:

AFSCME has one endorsement process for all of the locals in the city, and we have endorsed Mayor Chavez.  We stand fully behind that endorsement and will continue to work for his re-election.

Steve Griego, President of local 624:

We respect the right of our members to voice differing opinions as individuals, but the only official endorsement that has been made is for Martin Chavez.

ABQ mayoral hopefuls Richard Romero and R.J. Berry at their joint press conference yesterday

ALBUQUERQUE — Two of Albuquerque’s three ballot-qualified mayoral candidates called on incumbent Mayor Martin Chavez to refrain from appearing in any taxpayer-funded advertisements from now through the municipal election on October 6.

The request was issued at an unusual joint press conference Monday afternoon on Civic Plaza featuring candidates Richard “R.J.” Berry and Richard Romero. Both argued that ads featuring Chavez — an unannounced candidate for reelection — violate the spirit of the city’s new public financing system and its aim of leveling the campaign playing field among the candidates.

Meanwhile, at the City Council’s regularly scheduled meeting last night, a unanimous council voted to slash the city advertising budget — affecting ads that likely would have prominently featured the mayor.

Chavez, along with Berry, a tw0-term Republican state representative, and Romero, the former Democratic leader of the New Mexico Senate, have all received about $328,000 in public funds for their bids for mayor.

While Chavez has not formally declared his candidacy, he did sue to have the city’s mayoral term limits overturned, and his political organization collected sufficient petition signatures and small contributions to qualify for the ballot as well as public financing.

Berry and Romero argued at their joint press conference yesterday that it’s clear Chavez is a candidate even if he hasn’t announced, and that recent taxpayer-funded television ads featuring him amount to electioneering.

“These ads are thinly disguised campaign ads. The mayor already has more than $300,000 in the bank. … This is just a way for the mayor to use even more taxpayer money in an election year,” Berry said.

Romero described the ads as “double-dipping.”

“The mayor, through a series of TV ads, is using the city treasury to unfairly and unethically promote himself during an election year,” Romero added. “He’s qualified for public financing, but instead of announcing he’s a candidate and spending his campaign funds, he’s double-dipping on the backs of taxpayers.”

Deborah James, the mayor’s spokeswoman, disagreed. She told the Independent that for Chavez to adopt a prominent public profile is not out of the ordinary.

“For his entire career Mayor Chavez has been an outspoken leader,” James said. “All of a sudden there’s this suggestion that he’s being more vocal than normal, now. But that’s not true. All you have to do is look at his history, he’s been out front and center from well before.”

James said one of the ads in question, about dangers posed to children from Internet stalkers, is part of an initiative that started over a year ago when the city partnered with the FBI cybercrimes department to tackle the problem. The ad is part of a strategy to get the city’s message out, she said.

Berry countered that while cyberstalking is a serious problem, television ads featuring an all-but-announced candidate for office amount to manipulation. Other city officials could just as easily be featured in them, he added.

This is a screen capture from a taxpayer-funded ad featuring ABQ Mayor Martin Chavez

“The advertisements tackle the tough issue of Internet predators, an issue that we all should take action against,” Berry said. “Today I am asking that the city remove the mayor from the ads. He is manipulating this important issue and using taxpayer dollars to gain exposure in an election year.”

The allegation that Chavez is exploiting the city’s advertising budget for political gain has surfaced before. In 2005, he was criticized by his opponents for the striking similarity between his campaign billboards and city billboards touting city-financed bond projects across Albuquerque.

Media articles at the time had similar rebuttals from the Chavez camp, with James quoted in the June 15, 2005 Albuquerque Journal as saying “public service announcements” featuring the mayor were nothing out of the ordinary for Chavez.

“We’ve been doing this since he took office,” she said at the time. “Every mayor has a responsibility to call the community to action, and no one has been more successful than Mayor Chávez.”

She was also quoted saying the Chavez administration would “adhere to the city’s 90-day policy to pull back public-service announcements before the election.”

In response to Berry and Romero yesterday, James again said the Chavez camp would follow the rules and pull back from appearances by the mayor in city advertising campaigns in the three months prior to the election.

Ultimately, James noted, Chavez is the “only mayor the city has” and he’s within his rights under the current city charter rules.

Nonetheless, Romero said such responses ring hollow. He says the problem was recognized by the City Council after the 2005 election, when it amended the city charter to make the rules more stringent as a result of “Mayor Chavez cross-marketing his campaign materials with official city business such as road projects.”

Romero charges that Chavez’s current actions represent more of the same.

“Our new campaign laws are supposed to level the playing field,” he added. “But, typical of Marty, he’s skirting the rules and exploiting loopholes.”

In the end, Romero and Berry’s concerns may be partially addressed by the City Council’s actions last night to eliminate much of the city’s advertising from the 2010 operating budget, which takes effect on July 1. The move slashed the entire advertising budget for the environmental health department, in whose ads the mayor often appears.

Candidates had to collect 3,287 contributions of $5 each from registered Albuquerque voters in a six-week period ending March 31.

Those who pulled it off get $1 for every registered voter in the state, or about $328,000, minus any seed money they collected. They can then use those funds to run the remainder of their mayoral campaign.

According to Matt Brix, former head of Common Cause who’s credited by city councilors as a policy resource in crafting the system, the original intent of the $5 contributions was to ensure that large sums of public money weren’t too easy for people to tap into.

“All full public financing systems have to balance two competing interests: giving a candidate who forswears raising money from special interests the chance to finance their campaign, while also making sure the candidate can demonstrate solid support among the electorate,” Brix explained. “This is the inherent trade-off in public financing systems.”

In the end, three candidates qualified: former state Senate President Pro Tem Richard Romero, state Rep. Richard Berry, and current Mayor Martin Chavez.

But a couple of prominent candidates — city councilors Michael Cadigan and Debbie O’Malley — dropped out at the midway point, saying it had become clear that they wouldn’t be able to make the deadline.

Political science professor Tim Krebs, who specializes in urban politics at the University of New Mexico, said he was surprised when O’Malley and Cadigan dropped out, and that the outcome shows “organization matters” when it comes to Albuquerque’s public financing system.

“Romero was in the state Senate for a decade and then ran two citywide campaigns for Congress that taught him a lot about going up against an incumbent, all of which has given him a citywide network from which to raise money and build an organization,” Krebs explained.

“Berry doesn’t have a particularly high profile, but the Republican Party is his organizational base,” he continued. “The party went all out to get him qualified.”

While Albuquerque city elections are ostensibly nonpartisan, Berry is the lone Republican in the race and enjoyed the full support of the state Republican Party in efforts to qualify for public financing. He benefited from a measure finance committee that was set up in early March to support his campaign. All other candidates were Democrats, so they couldn’t count on similar support coming from their party.

As for Chavez, Krebs concluded that his organization in large part rests on his “incumbency advantage.”

“Chavez is a three-term mayor with a citywide reach,” Krebs said. “He has an organization he runs called the executive branch. He has people he can go to for support.”

But O’Malley and Cadigan, he said, didn’t have the citywide reach or an established organization of that scope, so they needed to build an organization from scratch.

In their reflections about the process, O’Malley and Cadigan touched on the advance preparations that Richard Romero undertook for the campaign.

On Jan. 1, Romero had an exploratory committee in place that was full of other elected officials, and he focused right away on raising seed money in order to get several campaign staff hired, a level of staffing early on that no other candidate had — officially anyway.

“You have to get started in earnest,” O’Malley said. “Richard [Romero] did that. He was talking to people the year before.”

Cadigan made similar remarks.

“You have to decide to run much earlier and start getting organized in late winter of the year before,” he said. “Richard pulled it off, with a big push at the end, which might have been because a lot of the groups of volunteers who I thought would be helpful sat on the sidelines until we dropped out.”

When they dropped out of the race, both O’Malley and Cadigan expressed support for the system even while noting how difficult it was to gather the $5 contributions.

The normal field work of getting petition signatures didn’t quite apply to the contribution-gathering process, they pointed out. Obtaining contributions was more time-consuming, for example, because canvassers had to explain the new system to most potential donors. On top of that, many people don’t happen to have $5 or a checkbook on them when they’re asked, making donations logistically difficult.

O’Malley said she thinks she would have been able to meet the goal had she had more time.

“Given that we have four weeks to gather 300 to 400 contributions for a City Council race, it doesn’t make sense to have just two extra weeks for basically 10 times as many contributions for a mayor’s race,” she said.

And Cadigan questioned the reason for gathering the $5 contributions, saying he was no longer sure about the purpose.

“If the idea was that you had to get out and knock on doors to show you have support, well, I don’t think the mayor did any of that,” Cadigan said. “And Richard Berry was in the state Legislature almost the whole time. He wasn’t out talking to voters — the Republican Party did it for him. I’m not knocking their operation, just pointing out that gathering those contributions doesn’t mean the candidate will be out doing it himself.

“So while it seemed to make sense at the time,” Cadigan continued, “now I find myself wondering what the purpose of collecting the contributions is. Why not up the number of petition signatures a candidate has to gather instead?”

Photo by zizzybaloobah/flickr

ALBUQUERQUE — The condition of Albuquerque’s fund for publicly financed elections is not as dire as recent speculation in the mainstream media might suggest, city councilors and officials say.

The Albuquerque Journal reported recently that the city’s “ethical elections” fund will only have enough for “four wannabe mayors.” That article plus another one the next day both said that the fund holds about $1,400,000.

But the city actually has $1,537,000 in its fund for this year’s publicly financed campaigns, according to the city clerk’s office, and a city councilor has committed to adding more money to the fund in the event it runs out.

The fund is intended to finance a mayoral race and the bids for five city council seats. Mayoral candidates who qualify as of March 31 each get slightly more than $328,000 to run their campaigns on April 3, minus the seed money they’ve already gathered. That figure is based on $1 per registered voter in the city.

Or, if there isn’t enough money in the fund to give every qualified mayoral candidate that amount, then the existing pot of money is simply divided equally among them.

In order to qualify for public financing, mayoral candidates must gather roughly 3,280 $5 contributions and turn them in to the city clerk by March 31. In order to qualify for the October 6 ballot, candidates must also submit 6,500 petition signatures.

Currently, five candidates are gathering the $5 qualifying contributions to use public financing for a mayoral race: former state Senate President Pro Tem Richard Romero, city councilors Debbie O’Malley and Michael Cadigan, local activist Donna Rowe, and state Rep. Richard Berry, the only registered Republican in the field.

Mayor Martin Chavez is also gathering contributions but hasn’t officially announced his candidacy, and another person — James Thomas, a local businessman who owns a tree restoration company — may be getting in.

But it’s unlikely that all will qualify. KOB-TV Channel 4 reported this week that neither Rowe nor Thomas think they’ll be able to gather enough contributions to qualify.

If five qualify, the city would divide the pot evenly for about $307,400 each. If only four qualify, the city would pay out $1,312,000 minus seed money. This would leave about $225,000 to fund publicly financed city council candidates.

If the mayoral distribution does use all the money in the fund, the city council could choose to appropriate money to fund city council races, according to City Clerk Randy Autio. The distribution of funds for those races is scheduled to occur on June 1 — two months after the mayoral distribution.

City Councilor Rey Garduño told the Independent that if the fund is depleted before a distribution is made to qualified city council candidates, he’ll sponsor a measure to put more money into the fund.

“If it looks like that will happen, I’ll introduce a resolution to add money to the fund,” Garduño said. “Public financing is too important to the city for us to not be committed to making it work.”

Garduño said he thinks there will be enough money, however. “I feel very confident that we won’t run out of money based on raw numbers,” he said.

Publicly financed city council candidates, like mayoral candidates, get one dollar for every registered voter in their districts, or an equal division of the money in the fund.

The five odd-numbered council seats are up for election this year. Four of the five council districts have electorates ranging from 32,390 to 37,502 people. The outlier is District 5, which has 47,274.

It’s too soon to know how many will run for those seats. It’s conceivable that some current councilors will run unopposed, Garduño said, and there will be multiple candidates in others.

Once the new fiscal year starts on July 1, the fund gets a new infusion of cash automatically, which will be somewhere between $400,000 to $500,000, Autio said.

The Clovis News Journal is reporting on the fourth railroad fatality this year alone — keep in mind that’s in just 2 months. Officials say conductor Gregory Blevins died after losing communication with a locomotive engineer while they were moving rail cars to a side rail. Blevins had 35 years of experience under his belt before meeting his untimely death.

In other news, the Farmington Daily Times reports today that archeologists are excavating 7 ancient skeletons that may be up to 700 years old in Aztec. Construction crews discovered the bodies last week and the site was first considered a modern-day crime scene, until the age of the remains were determined.

And drivers beware! The Las Cruces Sun-News reports that a proposed city ordinace could get your car impounded if you’re driving an uninsured vehicle or have an invalid ID. Current laws allow the uninsured and unlicensed to drive away after merely receiving a citation.

Last but not least, and true but strange, a Farmington woman swallows down her own engagement ring, reports KRQE TV. The woman’s fiance thought he would propose by hiding the ring in a milkshake, then encouraging a chugging contest. She eventually got her ring back, but a bit of the romance may have been lost in the process.