‘No confidence’ in mayor, union says
About 36% of Local 3999 members vote on resolution slamming Webber
While Mayor Alan Webber presided over Wednesday’s City Council meeting, a surprise awaited him.
The mayor received a “no confidence” vote from members of the city’s largest union, Local 3999 of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, which also called on city councilors “to immediately suspend and ultimately remove” Webber from office “for reasons of malfeasance and nonfeasance.”
“We have a struggle with City Hall and the way they conduct business. I mean, you’ll hear that from half the city councilors about the way they conduct business there,” said Chris Armijo, a union representative.
“Mayor Webber treats City Hall like his boardroom, I guess,” he added. “There’s just no confidence in the way the mayor is handling his affairs at City Hall. As a matter of fact,
it’s kind of reminiscent of Donald Trump, you know? They just figure they can do whatever they want, and they’re going to do it and to hell with it. They’ll fight. They’ll sue. They’ll do whatever they have to do, but this guy’s got no integrity.”
Kristine Mihelcic, the city’s constituent and council services director who is temporarily filling in as a spokeswoman for the city, said late Wednesday afternoon she was unaware of the “no confidence” vote. She said the city would have no comment “due to the ongoing council meeting.”
Webber isn’t the first Santa Fe mayor to face a “no confidence” vote from the union.
In 2007, union members expressed “no confidence” in then-Mayor David Coss, who wrote at the time the vote was orchestrated after threats from the union president “regarding a pending disciplinary action that he wanted me to reverse.” Turnout then was small at about 20 percent.
In the latest action by the union, Armijo said about 36 percent — or 252 of 696 members — voted on a resolution declaring that Local 3999 members “have no confidence in the leadership” of the mayor. Armijo said all but 12 members who participated in the balloting voted for the resolution.
Armijo said it proved difficult to bring more union members together to vote because of the coronavirus pandemic, and “we have to have actual ballots submitted.”
The resolution union members considered is five pages and includes a long list of what the union called examples “of serious concerns of public safety and mismanagement.”
The examples start at the beginning of Webber’s term, when he originally defended temporary raises that former City Manager Brian Snyder awarded on the eve of the mayor’s inauguration to a select group of employees who had been working on a high-profile technology project. Webber later conceded that a policy enacted in 1992 required City Council approval for the raises, which led to the resignation of Snyder and Lynette Trujillo, then the city’s human resources director.
The union raised serious safety concerns in its resolution, asserting “employees are subjected to safety concerns and have experienced numerous safety crises, due to management’s non-adherence of OSHA (Occupational Safety and Health Administration) guidelines.”
“One incident was the failure to protect workers from exposure to hazardous waste and needles when they responded to a sewer backup near a hospital,” states the resolution, which also cites last year’s accidental death of 27-year-old Tobin “Toby” Williams, a convention center employee who was fatally shocked while doing electrical work.
The union also painted a picture of a dangerous working environment at the emergency shelter the city opened at the midtown campus to house homeless people when the coronavirus pandemic spread into New Mexico. After employees were put on furloughs earlier this year amid an economic downturn, the union said employees were offered the opportunity to work at the shelter, which is being run by Regina Wheeler, who was the city’s public works director but is now serving as the city’s emergency operations incident commander.
“Many of those employees affirm the lack of specialized training to work with the homeless, unsafe conditions at the shelter and operations suffer from poor management that put employees at risk,” the resolution states.
The resolution also accuses the mayor of consistently refusing “to address or even acknowledge the enormous wage disparity” among union members when compared to their counterparts in other comparable cities. It asserts that a classification and compensation study “failed to fairly address and institute wage and classification changes in many areas to bring employees in line with compensation rates based on individual classifications, experience and years of service in said classifications.”
Other examples listed in the resolution range from payroll issues to missing evidence at the Santa Fe Police Department evidence room.
The last example cited by the union is less than 2 months old.
In mid-June, amid a growing controversy over historical monuments and markers not just in Santa Fe but nationwide, Webber authorized the removal of a statue of Spanish conquistador Don Diego de Vargas from Cathedral Park as a “safekeeping” measure. An obelisk in the middle of the Santa Fe Plaza was damaged in a failed overnight attempt to remove it, too, ahead of a planned protest.
“Mayor Webber took it upon himself to make a decision, without city council or community input, to successfully remove one statue and consequently create damage to an unsuccessful attempt to remove a centuries old monument, which depict historical events,” the resolution states. “This action for removal was initiated and carried out under the cover of darkness. Accordingly, had Mayor Webber initiated and carried out a public discussion, this may or may not have necessitated the actions to do the removal, which ultimately created a community controversy.”
In a news release, the union called the last 2½ years of the Webber administration “turbulent.”
“In a new development this past week,” the news release states, “a newly released audit of the city’s finances for the fiscal year ending June 2019 further demonstrates the ineptness of the administration regarding mismanagement of finances and required reporting to the New Mexico State Auditor, who now states the results were serious enough that his office will keep a close eye on Santa Fe.”