OPINION: Why vote for Keller for mayor if he doesn't want your vote?

I bet Tim Keller is pretty glad his third mayoral campaign will be over in about two weeks. It’s been a bruising campaign and the mayor’s shtick of staying the course with more of the same is wearing thin.

The local election on Nov. 4, essentially a referendum on Keller’s first two terms as Albuquerque mayor, has probably been the toughest campaign of Keller’s 17-year political career. The weight of Keller’s record in office, with record numbers of homicides some years and an exploding homeless population, is taking its toll on his Harvard-man ego.

Driving to the office Wednesday night to write this column, I heard KKOB radio’s report on the mayoral roundtable hosted at the Albuquerque Journal earlier in the day. City Councilor Louie Sanchez, an adamant critic of the Keller administration, was the only candidate to get quoted on air. That had to annoy Keller, whose TV ads end with: “We’re doing a lot more than the news media is telling you about.” Keller kind of is the media’s Charlie Brown who can’t get credit for anything.

Sanchez criticized the mayor during Wednesday’s Partners for Impact roundtable for Keller’s initiatives to police the mean streets of Albuquerque with technology. But in typical fashion, Sanchez was more focused on what Keller has done than what Sanchez would do if elected mayor — other than Sanchez’s unrealistic goal of staffing the Albuquerque Police Department with 1,600 officers.

The last couple of weeks have tested Keller’s composure. At an Oct. 15 KOAT-TV televised debate, mayoral candidate Alex Uballez accused Keller of firing the director at the West Side homeless shelter for giving Uballez a tour of the facility.

“She’s not the director and I didn’t fire her,” Keller said. “Fact-check Channel 7 later.”

KOAT’s Target 7 did fact-check the claim. The station obtained documents that had been delivered to the shelter employee who gave Uballez the tour.

The nonprofit that manages the West Side shelter, Chicanos Por La Causa, fired the employee for “an unauthorized tour of their premises to the mayoral candidate that she supports without notifying the leadership team,” KOAT reported.

The mayor’s deputy chief administrative officer said the city had nothing to do with the employee’s termination, but that assertion strains credulity. Keller’s signature may not have been on her termination papers, but his political imprint sure was.

Those are the kind of powers of incumbency Keller has been using to limp across the finish line with a 42% approval rating, according to the most recent Journal poll conducted in late September. Another example was the city paying up to $30,000 to five local TV stations to air Keller’s 30-minute State of the City address, originally delivered Aug. 23, in the final weeks of the campaign. And yet another was “City at the Crossroads: The Pandemic, Protests, and Public Service in Albuquerque,” a book that heavily mentions Keller’s work during 2020’s Summer of Love and that the city spent $97,000 to publish in 2022.

Keller also accused Uballez of lying that city solid waste workers have thrown away the personal belongings of the homeless, including ID cards and, in one case, cremated remains.

“To say things that aren’t just true, I think, is sad,” Keller said in the KOAT debate. “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.”

I’ve been observing Keller for years, and we’ve met numerous times in my near six years with the Journal. He is a likeable guy, the type of guy with whom you could watch a football game and afterward, toss the ball around in the backyard with the kids. But politics brings out the worst in him. Keller has a nasty habit of counter-punching below the belt when a smile and shoulder shrug would suffice.

A day after KOAT’s televised debate, Keller made a rookie mistake during the Oct. 16 mayoral forum sponsored by the Greater Albuquerque Realtors Association when the discussion turned to the removal of homeless encampments.

“So if you want to just believe the red meat that everyone is throwing out here, vote for them, I don’t want your vote,” Keller said. I’d wager Team Keller didn’t craft that sentence.

I obliged the mayor by not voting for him; he doesn’t want my vote nor those of many of yours. We’re not enlightened enough to be on Team Keller and I’m cool with that.

Many of us who live in Albuquerque, including mayoral candidate Darren White, believe Keller’s homeless policies have made Albuquerque an alluring destination for Americans across the nation who want to smoke fentanyl and live in tents.

The city has massive supplies of cheap fentanyl, offers free motel vouchers, and police generally look the other way to street drug use and the panhandling needed to pay for it. That’s Keller’s legacy in a nutshell — think Coronado Park.

The shine is off the apple. We’ve seen the show twice. Keller has never lost a campaign because of his ability to build a loyal political machine, but he does not have the pep in his step he had just four years ago. The fact that 37% of voters polled in late September were still undecided reflects the malaise city residents are feeling.

Wednesday’s roundtable at the Journal gave all six mayoral candidates opportunities to present a vision, but I didn’t hear much I haven’t heard from them before. They’re repeating their own talking points at this point. Keller continues to blame national trends for the city’s woes.

“Well, these are tough times and we have layers of challenges,” Keller said in his opening remarks. “We’ve got national problems, we have fentanyl eating away American cities and we have our own challenges that we’re still dealing with decades-old. And we also have a president who’s trying to divide us. That’s why we need strong, experienced leadership now more than ever.”

He’s been using those same cop-outs for eight years.

It’s still Keller’s race to lose, and I’m not expecting a runoff. I’m instead expecting four more years of city leaders blaming someone else, fentanyl pouring into the city and for the malaise to deepen.

I would be ecstatic if voters proved me wrong. But if not, let’s start the discussion about term limits on Nov. 5.