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Copyright © 2023 Albuquerque Journal
The beginning of the end of Albuquerque’s now-defunct City Commission came during a raucous meeting in December 1973, when commissioners voted 3-2 to fire the city manager.
Accusations flew back and forth for five hours at a packed Convention Center Auditorium with an estimated 500 in attendance.
“The City Commission has lost control,” then-Commissioner Bob Poole said. “Policy has gravitated to the city manager.”
Flash forward half a century, and a pair of Albuquerque councilors want to restore a similar form of government – one that predates the “strong mayor-council” system that voters adopted in 1974.
The two councilors contend the “strong mayor” system has resulted in inconsistent governance that changes with each new administration, hindering the city’s progress.
Opponents say a “weak mayor” system would make the city less democratic and result in timid leadership by city managers beholden to city councilors.
At the Dec. 10, 1973, City Commission meeting, three of the five commissioners berated then-City Manager Herb Smith for hours, accusing him of involving himself in politics and assuming too much policy-making authority, the Albuquerque Journal reported.
Some speakers demanded a change in government, calling for a mayor and city councilors elected by district.
David Rusk, Albuquerque’s mayor from 1977 to 1981, said the city’s previous form of government “fell apart in very controversial circumstances” at that meeting.
A strong mayoral form of government had already been in the discussion stages for a few years, but the meeting appears to have been the tipping point.
The three commissioners who voted to fire Smith “expressed the view that perhaps Albuquerque had outgrown” the weak-mayor form of government, said Rusk, the city’s second mayor under the current system.
“The city needed strong executive leadership, and yet the city manager was in effect a hired hand and couldn’t appropriately provide that kind of leadership in terms of helping shape public opinion,” Rusk said.
Albuquerque was growing rapidly at the time, he said. Smith “was trying to establish an environment of more managed growth for the city, and that was at odds with some of the important interests” of the city, Rusk said.
A majority of commissioners found it inappropriate for Smith to exercise that kind of public leadership, he said.
Less than three months after that contentious meeting, Albuquerque voters approved a new form of government by a nearly 4-to-1 margin.
Voter approval of Proposition 3 on Feb. 27, 1974, gave Albuquerque a “strong mayor” with authority to “organize the executive branch of the city.”
The amendment to the city charter also gave the city a nine-member City Council elected by district, creating Albuquerque’s existing “strong mayor-council” system of government.
The change ended the five-member at-large city commission that had governed the city since 1917.
Once the results were tallied, then-Commissioner Ray Baca remarked that “the controversy over former City Manager Herb Smith pointed up the inadequacies of the commission-manager system” and created the impetus for the change of government.
But Proposition 3 emerged after years of discussion about the city’s appropriate form of government.
The strong-mayor system was first recommended in 1971 by a study group headed by the late Sen. Pete Domenici, who from 1967 to 1970s served as chairman of the City Commission – a post referred to as “mayor.” Domenici went on to serve as a U.S. senator from 1973 to 2009.
Additional details emerged from a working committee that met for 18 months following the initial recommendation, the Journal reported.
In adopting the strong-mayor system, Albuquerque followed a path taken by most large U.S. cities.
Timothy Krebs, a professor of political science at the University of New Mexico, said about 60% of U.S. cities with populations greater than 500,000 have mayor-council governments.
Proposed charter amendment
This year, Councilors Renée Grout and Louie Sanchez are co-sponsoring a proposed City Charter amendment that would retain the nine-member council elected by districts. But it would add “one additional member to be known as the Mayor.”
The mayor would “preside” at City Council meetings, but would “cast a vote only in the event of a tie.” The mayor would “be recognized as the head of the City government for all ceremonial purposes” and “have no administrative duties.”
The council would appoint the city manager, who will “organize the executive branch of the city,” appointing the chief of police and other city directors, according to the proposal.
The proposed amendment to the City Charter requires approval by six of the nine City Council members in order to be placed on the ballot. It would then require approval by city voters.
Sanchez blamed the strong-mayor form of government for Albuquerque’s lack of progress over the past half century.
“If we look back to the late ’60s, early ’70s, Albuquerque was in a friendly competition with Phoenix to see which city was going to be the economic driver of the Southwest,” Sanchez said. Given the presence of Sandia National Laboratories, Kirtland Air Force Base, great weather and New Mexico’s abundance of oil and gas, “Albuquerque should have won that friendly competition,” he said.
Phoenix has a council-manager system that makes the government more efficient and better able to attract business, he said.
“We’ve suffered because of this system for many, many years,” he said. “And it’s time that we work together as a city and move our city forward.”
Mayor Tim Keller and two former mayors say they oppose the weak-mayor proposal.
The measure as proposed would not take effect until after the next mayoral election, slated for 2025.
Keller’s spokeswoman, Ava Montoya, called the proposal an “extreme change” that would “eliminate individual accountability and checks and balances, placing all city power into a committee and an unelected city manager.”
Former three-term Mayor Martin Chávez said passage would result in an absence of leadership in the city.
“You’re going to have the City Council running the city,” Chávez said. “You are going to have a city manager who is beholden to that council. And there will be no unified, centralization of authority to do stuff.”
Passage of the proposal would set off a power scramble among business groups, labor and other interest groups angling for position in the new government, Chavez said.
“A whole lot of dynamics will come into play that I don’t think Louie (Sanchez) is thinking about,” he said.
Former Mayor Jim Baca, who served as mayor from 1997 to 2001, worked as a reporter for KOAT-TV in the early 1970s before Albuquerque adopted the mayor-council system.
“It was hard to get decisions made with a council-manager form of government,” Baca said. “Things just took forever because there was nobody actually in charge. The manager was always trying to second guess – would he get fired if he made this one small decision.”
Krebs, the UNM political science professor, opposes the proposal “mainly because it would harm our local democracy,” he wrote in a guest column published in the Albuquerque Journal.
Most large U.S. cities with diverse populations and competing interests have strong mayors who can make tough political decisions, he said.
Council-manager systems, Krebs said, “are good for places that are small and that are more homogenous, where there’s not a lot of political conflict and there’s not a lot of disagreement about how things should be done.”
Some councilors have expressed caution about returning to a weak-mayor system.
“I personally bounce back and forth on this,” Councilor Pat Davis said of the proposed charter amendment. Davis said he wants to hear the sponsors making a stronger case for the proposal.
“I think it’s something that really needs to be considered, but I’m anxious that making a big structural change in the city, and with three weeks of notice, might have some unintended consequences.”
The city must file the measure with Bernalillo County no later than Aug. 29 to get it on the Nov. 7 election ballot. The council has four meetings scheduled prior to that date.
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