Native son Tim Keller wants third term to better Albuquerque's future

In the past eight years, Tim Keller has wrestled with problems currently plaguing many American cities: crime, homelessness, the fentanyl crisis.

But while Keller believes progress has been made over his past two terms as mayor of New Mexico’s largest city, he is keenly aware that his bid for a third term in the Nov. 4 election is not a cakewalk.

A recent Journal Poll found more voters disapproved of his job performance than approved, down from a 50% approval rating four years ago. Though he has a sizable lead in a field of six candidates, some 37% of voters were still undecided during the Journal polling in late September.

“It’s certainly frustrating,” Keller told the Journal. “You’ve worked really hard, and people don’t always see it, but that’s OK. I don’t question that they’re frustrated in that they may disapprove, because these are tough times. I see the same thing everyone else sees in parking lots, up and down Central, so I agree with them, in a sense that that doesn’t feel good, doesn’t make me proud of our city, right?

“So I respect that. The frustrating thing is, I believe we are doing more than most cities to actually deal with those issues in a real way. That’s not just a press release. It’s not just a one-off thing, and that’s why it’s hard and that’s why it takes a long time.”

As a native son born and raised in Albuquerque, Keller had a Harvard Business School MBA and was working for Katzenbach Partners, a business consulting firm in Houston, when he “dropped everything,” broke up with his then-girlfriend and moved back home in 2007 — even though it meant living with his parents while he “figured things out.”

“For me, I missed Albuquerque the longer I was gone. I was only gone for 10 years, and in the end, I transformed my life.” He had spent his vacation days in Houston to intern as a policy analyst in the New Mexico Senate. A year after he returned to Albuquerque, Keller was elected to the state Senate in 2008 representing a southeast Albuquerque district.

He went on to win a statewide office, state auditor, which launched him into the high-profile job as mayor of the New Mexico’s largest city in 2017.

At the time, issues with the new problematic corridor transit system, Albuquerque Rapid Transit, or ART, and rising crime dominated headlines. While the complaints around ART have softened, crime remains top of mind for residents and remains higher than the national average.

Meanwhile, homelessness has come to the forefront and is now considered a crisis in Albuquerque, “like much of the West,” according to the Institute of Justice, based in Virginia.

In just one year, from 2023 to 2024, homelessness in the city increased 14%. The institute, citing 2024 data, stated, “A staggering 2,740 Albuquerqueans are homeless, and nearly half are unsheltered.”

During his first term, Keller spearheaded the creation of the city’s 24/7 homeless shelter system called Gateway. The city acquired the former Lovelace hospital on Gibson to initially shelter up to 100 individuals and 25 families. It has expanded into a network of shelters and resources spread across the city.

“We take care of 1,000 people every night. Imagine if we had another 1,000 people on our streets. That’s what we would have had if I had not pushed this far on the Gateway system,” Keller said.

Keller’s administration also created the civilian Albuquerque Community Safety department to handle mental health, substance abuse and homelessness calls. The aim of the department was to reroute such calls from the Albuquerque Police Department — an initiative brought about in the wake of the George Floyd protests.

Keller said ACS has handled more than 120,000 calls since its start in August 2021. He added, “Those are calls that the Albuquerque Police Department and (firefighters) don’t have to take.”

With national trends showing how “fentanyl is destroying America,” and the housing crisis “is absolutely a driver of the homeless challenge,” Keller said “you also have Albuquerque’s own problems.”

“We never had a system or network for the unhoused. We never invested in it,” he said.

The city, which he said clears hundreds of encampments a week, does issue citations for illegal activity and drug use, Keller said. Tents are not allowed, he said, “and we enforce that. But that person can walk down the sidewalk. They are allowed to do that. People have the right to exist, but we have to exist together.”

Keller has estimated the homeless population at 4,000.

With a housing shortage estimated at 20,000 units, Keller said the city has built 2,500 affordable housing units, with 2,000 more in the queue.

“I do believe Albuquerque has turned in the right direction, but we’re coming up from the bottom so we’ve got a long ways to go,” he said.

Keller has big plans for the future, including remaking the face of Downtown, but is focused on finishing what he started, adding more security cameras around the city to help fight crime; revitalizing the Railyards and completing the next phase of the Gateway for unhoused young adults.

But there will be at least one major leadership change, Keller said, in hiring a new police chief after Albuquerque Police Chief Harold Medina retires next year.

Medina has been chief for nearly five years, ushering in U.S. Department of Justice policing reforms aimed at improving the APD’s Internal Affairs process and eliminating use of excessive force by its officers.

“He’s accomplished what I’ve asked him to do,” Keller said, “which was to get out of the DOJ for the right reasons, in the right way.”

At the same time, Medina has transitioned the APD to more reliance on civilians for some enforcement duties, “and moving to a technology based department (to fight crime) and to restore morale in the department.”

Not insignificantly, Keller said, Medina “has all the crime numbers going down.”

During Keller’s first term, the number of reported property crimes saw double-digit decreases between 2018 and 2022 but have since leveled off. Violent crime — of which Albuquerque was once ranked worst in the nation — has proved more stubborn, going up and down marginally during his time in office but, according to APD records, has decreased over the last three years.

Of Medina’s leadership, Keller said, “He has saved the department from falling off a cliff.”

During Keller’s tenure, a decades-long criminal racketeering scheme involving a group of officers assigned to the APD’s DWI unit came to light with the federal prosecution of criminal defense lawyer Thomas Clear III. Clear and his legal assistant, Ricardo Mendez, have pleaded guilty to bribery and extortion, and so far seven former APD officers and a Bernalillo County Sheriff’s deputy have entered guilty pleas to accepting money and gifts from Clear and Mendez in exchange for intentionally missing court dates for DWI suspects the officers arrested. The non-appearances enabled Clear to get the cases dismissed.

Numerous other officers have lost their jobs after being implicated in the scheme, which Medina said he knew nothing about but began looking into in 2023 after receiving several tips.

With 17 years in politics, Keller isn’t lacking name recognition, nor campaign funds, given that he was the only mayoral candidate to qualify for public financing. His latest campaign finance reports filed Sept. 8 show a total of $757,147 in contributions, including $733,968 from the city of Albuquerque funding.

“My hope is that (voters) say, ‘OK, out of these candidates who actually has some answers?’ We do. People may not like them, they may think they’re the wrong answers, but I’ve been very clear about what we need to do as a city to work on these issues. If I get a few more years, people will see and feel that progress.”

“That goes back to my decision to run. It’s my hometown. To me, the best thing I could ever do in terms of public service is to lift up my hometown.”