Candidates: Voters don’t trust S.F. on spending
Candidates competing for the city of Santa Fe’s only contested council seat kept coming back to one theme during a forum Tuesday night: People don’t trust the city to spend their tax dollars wisely.
“People are mad. They’re upset about that,” said candidate Frank Montaño as he pumped his hand in the air.
Two other candidates vying for the north-side District 1 council seat — Marie Campos and Renee Villarreal — echoed that sentiment throughout the two-hour forum, which drew an audience of more than 50 people. The fourth candidate, Kate Kennedy, steered away from the matter.
City Councilor Patti Bushee has held the sought-after seat for more than two decades but chose not to run again in the March 1 election. The vacancy attracted political
newcomers as well as candidates with experience in local government.
Campos, an artist with 17 years of experience in “community development,” ran for City Council in 2014 but lost to an incumbent.
Kennedy is a partner at Skylight Santa Fe, a downtown nightclub, and until recently was a marketing coordinator at Los Alamos National Bank. This is her first run for a public office.
Montaño, a businessman, served three terms on the City Council and two terms on the Santa Fe school board, and Villarreal is a former Santa Fe Planning Commission member.
Campos made headlines recently when she criticized sitting councilors in a post on her public Facebook page, questioning why they would appoint a man with a 2012 shoplifting conviction to the city’s Planning Commission. She was referring to Planning Commission Chairman Vince Kadlubek.
Kadlubek, also CEO of the artist collective Meow Wolf, then accused Campos in a Facebook post of petty politics, saying she was throwing mud because he supports Kennedy for the City Council seat.
Answering a question during the forum about public financing, Campos revealed some of that fire when she said she isn’t as naive as Villarreal to think public financing for election campaigns levels the playing field or keeps special interests out of races.
The event was otherwise mostly polite.
The first question of the forum asked the candidates how they would balance the city’s budget.
Villarreal’s approach would be multifaceted, but more than anything, she said, she would try to stop the city from shifting money from fund to fund to cover expenses, a practice taxpayers have criticized.
Residents have accused city officials of bait-and-switch tactics for using money from a $30.3 million voter-approved parks bond issue to keep city workers employed during the recession rather than completing park improvement projects. And many people also objected to the city siphoning millions of dollars in recent years from Water Division revenues to cover general government operations.
“We shouldn’t be pulling and taking funds that are not supposed to be used for staff or places that they are not designated,” Villarreal said.
It’s a problem, Montaño agreed, and it needs to end. Also, he said, the city needs to consider all its expenses when looking to cut its budget. From his time on the City Council and city commissions, he said, he knows how to do that.
Campos also spoke of cutting municipal fat. The city needs a complete audit of its operations to see where it can trim costs, she said — and that’s what voters have told her when she’s knocked on doors.
Part of Kennedy’s solution would be to shift personnel from overstaffed departments to understaffed ones. But the city also needs to “strengthen” its gross receipts taxes, evaluate how it spends money, diversify the economy and “attract, retain and foster” small businesses, she said.
“There’s not a silver bullet,” she said, “but together we can come up with a comprehensive strategy that will work for all of us.”
The candidates were asked what the city’s legislative priorities should be, and Kennedy said looking at laws to legalize pot should be one of them. A few people in the audience joked about that after the forum.
The City Council is scheduled to vote Wednesday on whether to put a 2-cent-pergallon gas tax increase on the ballot in the March election to raise funds for road maintenance. Villarreal, Montaño and Kennedy said if they were on the council now, they’d vote no.
But Campos said she would vote to send the tax initiative to the ballot. The decision should be the people’s, she said — though, as a voter, she would vote it down. “I think we have very intelligent citizens.”