Mayoral candidates discuss city's future in tense televised debate

Four of the six mayoral candidates clashed over how to handle Albuquerque’s biggest issues during KOAT-TV’s televised debate Wednesday afternoon.

Three challengers, Louie Sanchez, Alex Uballez and Darren White, criticized incumbent Mayor Tim Keller on all fronts, including the deployment of the National Guard, homelessness and crime.

“You see candidates either proposing my ideas or just blaming the problem,” Keller said. “I’m the one actually doing the work.”

Three challengers were left out of the debate — Mayling Armijo, Eddie Varela and Daniel Chavez. Chavez suspended his campaign last month, while Armijo and Varela were excluded due to low polling numbers in the latest Journal Poll, according to KOAT.

National Guard Deployment

Keller said he sees Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham’s deployment of the New Mexico National Guard to Albuquerque as forward-thinking cooperation between the city and state.

His opponents called it offensive and a political farce and compared the action to President Donald Trump’s deployment of the National Guard in Los Angeles, the District of Columbia, Portland and Chicago.

Reflecting on his own military service, White said that deploying the Guard to do paperwork made a mockery of serving men and women.

“These are people who are trained as fighters for our military,” White said. “We deployed them here in Albuquerque in such a way that they were put into polo shirts and khaki pants — that’s not the uniform of our military.”

Uballez compared Keller and Lujan Grisham to Trump and said the move “set a terrible precedent.”

Keller said he and the governor anticipated Trump’s decision to deploy the National Guard and by making the first move blocked any attempt to do so in New Mexico.

The public misunderstands the National Guard’s role in Albuquerque, Keller added. The National Guard doesn’t do law enforcement, he said, but helps officers with cumbersome and time-consuming tasks outside of making arrests.

Crime

Keller touted his administration’s creation of Albuquerque Community Safety, a department that uses civilians and social workers to divert crises and other calls from law enforcement. He also pointed to the use of crime-fighting technology such as the ShotSpotter system, which sends an alert when a gunshot is detected across the city.

Sanchez, a city councilor and former police officer, called these methods “reactive, not proactive.” He said the only way to bring down crime is to hire more officers and enforcing the law even when it comes to low-level crime.

Former Bernalillo County Sheriff White said he would choose a new police chief for the Albuquerque Police Department and focus on proactive policing, directing officers to do more patrols and make more traffic stops.

Breaking from the pack, Uballez, the former U.S. Attorney for the District of New Mexico, proposed streamlining the 911 process by creating a “unified dispatch center” shared by the city and county. Uballez also said he would focus on helping inmates re-entering society from jail or prison to stop recidivists from clogging up the criminal justice pipeline.

Crime, however, isn’t the biggest issue Uballez is worried about: “The true crisis that we are facing here is homelessness, it is not crime.”

Homelessness

Solving homelessness in Albuquerque was heavily debated by candidates, who proposed everything from making arrests to expanding social services.

Keller has estimated that there are 4,000 people living on the streets in Albuquerque.

Keller pointed to the development of the Gateway System of Care, a group of homeless shelters and social services, as a step in the right direction. According to the city shelter bed tracker, between 800 and 1,000 people sleep in city-affiliated homeless shelters each night.

Sanchez called the Gateway an ineffective use of taxpayer funds, saying “$300 million spent and look at the streets, they are not changing.”

White said that law enforcement needs to take a stricter approach to the homeless population and make arrests for illegal camping and drug use.

Both White and Uballez criticized Keller’s encampment sweeps, though for opposing reasons. White called the estimated 200 sweeps conducted each week by the Solid Waste department unproductive.

Uballez called them cruel.

Uballez alleged that city solid waste workers have disposed of personal belongings like ID cards and, in one case, cremated remains.

“To say things that aren’t just true, I think, is sad,” Keller said, rebutting the allegations. “To hear a politician stand up here and just lie about what we do on the street — I don’t care about that. But you know who does? The workers who do this every day.”

The recent Journal Poll showed 37% of voters were still undecided in the mayor’s race.