OPINION: The people of Albuquerque deserve a mayor who works as hard as they do

My name is Alex Uballez and I am running for mayor because I believe the people of Albuquerque deserve leaders who will work as hard as they do every day to make our city great.

I am the former U.S. Attorney for the district of New Mexico — the highest federal executive office in our state — where I am proud to have prosecuted cartels, led the largest fentanyl busts in the history of both the DEA and the FBI, and exposed 30 years of corruption inside the Albuquerque Police Department’s DWI unit.

I’ve spent my whole career protecting the most vulnerable.

I’m not a lifelong politician. I’m a lifelong public servant.

I grew up a working class kid who overcame obstacles and was granted opportunities to eventually become a lawyer. After graduation, I started my career in New Mexico keeping families safe, ferreting out corruption, holding people who profit off the misery of others accountable, and building opportunities for people who deserve it.

Through that work I learned that public safety is built not only on punishing crime but by preventing it, that economic and community development have to be pillars of our safety plan so we are not creating revolving doors, pushing problems from one neighborhood to the next, or harming people who need help to heal.

I’m proud to have helped build Albuquerque Community Safety to make our emergency response more robust and calibrated to the calls for help the city receives. I created New Mexico’s first federal reentry court to help people who have served time be productive members of society upon release. And I pioneered national initiatives to confront the crises of Missing or Murdered Indigenous Persons because no family should face tragedy and have their case unexamined and allowed to go cold.

In every position I’ve held, I’ve not only worked to help others, but also to make the entire office operate more effectively and aggressively to better serve the people.

What frustrates me to no end — and what motivates me to run — is I believe Albuquerque deserves better options than deciding between the ineffective and the just plain wrong.

The challenges our city faces are real but I’m not a stranger to hard work. I’m a doer who has always been hungry for results and unsatisfied with excuses.

The solutions for Albuquerque exist. What’s been missing over the past eight years is the political will to implement them.

We can partner with developers, for example, and provide incentives and make it easier to build up our city. At the same time, we can also have a community benefits agreement that ensures that large municipal developments are built by local workers from our city and held to the highest standards with access to union jobs and benefits. We can offer job pathways and apprenticeships that prepare youth and others to have the skills for those jobs. Together these things could contribute to a city fund to build social housing. Those developments can include solar, micro grids and water catchment that create more jobs and more revenue for the city to then build more housing for working families.

The truth is, I’m running because I want my children to grow up and choose Albuquerque. I want all of our children to grow up safe. I want them to grow up in a city they don’t feel they’ll need to leave in order to find good jobs, a city whose richness in people and culture is matched with leaders who create a city rich in opportunity.

Eight years is a long time to wait to gain traction and a third term is something voters reward a leader as a victory lap for incredible results. That is not what we have witnessed under the current administration. It is not what we’ll see if the only challengers in this race are self-funded candidates.

I’m running because there has to be a better choice on the ballot in November. It’s time.