On Nov. 4, Albuquerque voters will be choosing from a list of six people to fill the mayor’s office for the next four years. As part of a series exploring all the candidates, KUNM’s Daniel Montano spoke with incumbent Tim Keller, who is running for what would be a historic third term. Keller says he wants to finish the work he started and outlined his top priorities.
KUNM: You've announced you're going to be running for a third term, and obviously we've only had one mayor who has actually ran for a third term since 1974, Marty Chavez, who lost to Richard Berry in 2009. For the people of Albuquerque, what do you have to say? Why do you deserve a third term?
KELLER: Well, I think there's two reasons. And the first reason is because, you know, these are tough times, and I see what everyone else sees walking down our streets. Literally, even if I walk outside City Hall, or sometimes I get to walk to work in the morning, and there's boarded-up buildings, there's encampments, there's just a sense of the city is in a really difficult place. And I agree with that. I understand that very deeply actually. Even as someone who's born and raised here, I can remember one other era when our city was going through these tough times. I think, just one. And so for me, the difference is this, we have been trying to do the real work to actually address some longstanding, decades-old challenges that Albuquerque has been facing. Whether it's how we deal with our unhoused and how we house them, whether it's a police department that had tremendous challenges, these are things where we actually are breaking through. We are finally gaining traction in big ways in some of these areas. So, we have now built an entire spectrum of services for homeless folks, the Gateway System, that filled gaps that we had for decades and that just started really working around September. So now we house 1,000 people a night. That's incredible. Ten years ago, year round, we housed zero.
So the police department — falling off a cliff 10 years ago, no staff, consent decree out of control, and crime going up. All of a sudden, now we have a department, despite the challenges, 99% compliant with CASA (court approved settlement agreement). Staffing levels are up and crime, for the first time in a decade, half the crime categories are actually going down. So in general, we just see us breaking through, and we want to make sure that we continue and build on this real traction, because the change is real. It's not a pilot project. It's not a one-off thing.
The last example I give you is the [Albuquerque] Rail Yards. That has been a decades-old project for our city, and nothing really ever happened. Well, we are actually going to open around the end of this year the CNM Film Academy. It's gonna bring hundreds of students downtown every day. These are things that are real. We've just got to keep doing them to make sure that we reap the benefits, essentially, of many years of doing the real, hard work to actually do systematic change.
So that was a long answer. That was one of two parts. The second part, frankly, has to do with our president. I woke up after the election and I had renewed conviction that I had to be there and try and defend our city from what's going to happen from the Trump administration, and I feel that way because I was there for the first time around. I remember what they put our city through. I remember how they tried to separate children from parents at the border, and how Albuquerque helped reunify them. I remember how they tried to take our funding, and I remember what we did that worked, and I remember what we did that didn't. And so to me, it's also about defending Albuquerque. These are tough times, and we need experienced, steady leadership who's going to hold us together when we're literally under attack from DC. And so that's the second reason why I'm running for another term.
KUNM: Let's dig into homelessness a little bit. You know, that's obviously been a ubiquitous issue, especially since the COVID pandemic. Advocates have estimated that the population of people living unhoused has risen by three or four times pre-pandemic levels. Advocates have also been highly critical of certain things that have happened in the city, encampment clearing operations, saying people have been detained or lost their pets or personal items. How would you address some of those issues that have been brought up by critics, and also, do you have any plans for maybe expanding public bathrooms or sanitation stations, or anywhere where people who are living unhoused might be able to store some of their items?
KELLER: So those are great questions, and I think they actually speak to what it takes to actually build something that is a system instead of just solve a singular problem. Meaning, okay, we have to figure out what to do with pets. We have to figure out how to store all of these things. And then there's this notion that Albuquerque never had a system for support for our unhoused population. We never had that. We relied on, for the modern era, nonprofits and faith communities to do that work for us. That was our answer, until my administration. So we decided we were actually going to own this problem. I believe that this is part of the city's role to help these folks who are struggling on our streets. And so we've worked really hard to do that. And when you're doing that level of change, you've got challenges. And so I think the short answer that I would give to some of your specifics is that number one, we now have 100 public bathrooms. We’re actually installing another dozen this summer. Number two, we've added drinking fountains that work all over the city. We allow pets at most of our shelters now. We also require us to offer storage, and we have a whole — I can see it out from City Hall’s windows — we have a whole warehouse full of hundreds of folks' belongings that we appropriately store for them as we should.
But I mentioned those and the West Side shelter. It was terrible. This is the other thing about where we're at. You know, we were using an old jail that had a leaky roof, toilets that didn't flush. It was disgusting. It was inhumane. Well, it's taken us years to renovate that. Now it is actually about three-fourths done. It should be totally done by the summer. Now it looks like, in general, a nicer medical facility, and it has all of those things fixed, and has a new provider that also offers services. So, I think this is an example of where we're breaking through these in a way that will last, hopefully, whether I may or not, but I don't think — now is not the time to change direction. And on top of that, we've built a system. So you mentioned terms that reflect Albuquerque history, the West Side shelter and then the Gateway Center. Basically, in September we changed all that and connected it into a system. Inside the Gateway Center, we now have housing navigation. We have the first first-responder receiving area that our city's ever had, so people can go somewhere besides the emergency room or jail. We have medical sobering. We have medical respite, and we have a men and women shelter. Plus, we have the Family Gateway, where we take care of 100 families every night. We're converting a hotel into a Youth Gateway for teens, because we have that problem. We're adding a Senior Gateway inside the Gateway Center, because we have 100 seniors that we're taking care of that have special needs. And we're opening the Gateway Recovery, which is a pallet home set-up out at the old DMV for folks who are suffering from addiction. And these are all linked together through our community safety department (Albuquerque Community Safety), which could actually transport people for free, direct from point to point. Something again that we never had before. So what you see is we've actually built a system to match people's needs where they're at instead of just trying to have a shelter, right? We're vastly different from that, but now we've got to use it. It's no time to change the plan, in a sense, that we're finally building a system to take care of our own house that we've needed for decades. We're basically three-fourths of the way done, and so we want to finish the job.
KUNM: In regards to running the city, obviously, the legislative and executive branches need to work together, and there have been some recent disagreements between you and your administration and the city council. There's the legal complaint that was filed by your administration regarding the council's decision on AFR (Albuquerque Fire Rescue) paramedics staffing. There were spats over the rail trail versus the west side support complex, and of course, the city charter amendments last year. How do you plan to improve that relationship going forward?
KELLER: Well, there's two pieces to this. One is that certainly, by definition, right, we have different branches of government in Albuquerque, and just like you see the legislature and the governor, like we're always going to have some tension by design, because we have the separation of powers embedded in our city charter. Now I want to acknowledge that what you're saying is totally true, but I've never really seen a mayor and a city council just be hand in hand, you know, regardless of their party. But on top of this, look, we're in the midst of, in many ways, a prolonged — it's very similar to what's happening in DC, but in this case, it's Council — we have essentially a MAGA-oriented Council. And they want to control our police department, our fire department. They want to tell us how many people should be on an ambulance and how many shouldn't. And they do not want a mayor running our city. They have made that clear because they have run all sorts of bills to try and eliminate the actual notion of an executive branch. Now this isn't all councilors, of course, this is either three or four or five or six, depending on the particular issue. And they've also made it clear that they want to not have a spectrum of services for the unhoused, which is the Gateway System. And they've also made it clear that they don't want the Rail Trail, which is the number one pedestrian safety and pedestrian transit-oriented project that has been proposed in the city in several decades, and it's already under construction. [NOTE: Since this interview, the Trump administration pulled federal funds from this project. Keller vowed to sue.] So we are adversarial. I absolutely disagree with them, and that's why I have to fight for these issues each and every day for our city. And I think that's also why, I believe, we absolutely need a strong mayor, because what council is trying to do is be mayor. And I think our voters have a real choice here. They can support candidates who believe that we should have one leader that represents the whole city and unifies us, or they can support a council system, which divides us into nine districts and parochial interests. And so I think this will be an issue for all the candidates, is my point. And I also think City Council is up for re-election too, and I think we're going to see this play out too.
So the long answer to your question is, I'm super-confident that after the election cycle, we're going to be able to really come together and work this out, because this has become such a big issue that actually voters will decide it. They will decide this issue based on the councilors they elect and the mayor they elect. And I believe that this is the first time I've seen in the modern era a council literally just saying we don't want the mayor period. Like we don't want them to have power or tell us what to do, and so that essentially is indirectly, the referendum that is before voters today. And I'll just close on this issue, I think, by saying this: with a mayor, you also get direct accountability. You can not like me, you can not vote for me, but you know I'm responsible. And what you see in the council situation is we have this amorphous term ‘the council,’ and it's very hard for people to actually follow or understand or try and have input in these issues, and that's fundamentally why we've set up the system as a modern Albuquerque. So that was a lot on that question, but I think you asked, actually, it's kind of a political science question at this point. And that's why we went to court, because we think Council is violating the law by dictating the staffing of firefighters. That's not saying the proposal is good or bad. That's just saying, ‘hey, where are we?’ It's just like the federal government, the courts are going to have to say who's in charge. And so I think that's why we have courts, and it's the right thing to do,
KUNM: If re-elected, what would be your highest priorities as soon as you start your next term? Can you kind of go down the list of what you'd like to do in your first 100 days, or what you would like to get done before addressing other issues?
KELLER: Sure, the first thing for sure is with respect to public safety. We have rebuilt a police department that is bringing crime down. And what I want to do a lot of it has to with technology and civilians. So we use civilians, like the community safety department to take lower level calls. That frees up officers to take violent crime calls. And we use technology, unfortunately, like speeding tickets, which I know 100,000 Burqueños have gotten. We do that so that, again, officers are freed up. So we basically have built crime-fighting technology around 20% of the city. And I believe every Burqueño deserves that safety that that provides. And so that has to do with expanding things like gunshot detection and even our speed cameras and things like this. So we've got to make sure that that sort of safety net is available to everyone in the city. So that's number one.
Number two is we have to defend Albuquerque from the federal cuts each and every day. And I think actually, next year is going to be the worst year, because they will have a year to learn from all the things that didn't work this year. And so we're going to have to know how to — whether it's working the budget, working with our county and state partners, which we have an excellent track record of doing — we're going to make sure and hold Albuquerque together during these tough times. And the third piece is to fully utilize the Gateway system that we have invested and built. Because if we do that, we can actually pull 1,000 more people off the street every day. So there's about 5,000 unhoused in my estimate. My estimate is much higher than others, and we take care of 1,000 every night. We need to take care of 2,000. We can actually do that if I'm the mayor next year. And then we've got a real fighting chance at dealing with addiction, because embedded in some of those Gateway facilities, the recovery Gateway is actually finding people help, and then finding them housing. So the last answer to your question is housing. We've built 2500 units of housing, double any other administration, and because of our cooperative relationship with the county and the state, we can build another 2,000 within the next two years.
KUNM: There's been another issue that's obviously been quite a big issue here in New Mexico, here in Albuquerque. We're a border state. We have a very diverse population, and immigration has been a huge issue, and Albuquerque is known as a sanctuary city. This has obviously been something that's been important to your administration as well. I'd like for you to discuss a little bit what you're going to do going forward. I know it's been a priority to try and protect that population here in the city. What would you do with that in your next term?
KELLER: Well, I started the immigrant-friendly policy, actually by executive order when I came in and created some institutional supports for immigrant community and others, but namely our Office of Civil Rights and our Office of Equity and Inclusion, and we're going to continue those, and I've said this both this year and would in the future. Because it's the right thing to do for our community, because we do have a diverse community, and we love that, and we actually want to celebrate and honor our cultural heritage and our differences, because it literally is a defining characteristic of what makes Albuquerque special. So that's conceptually what I'm going to keep doing. That is the sort of ‘One Albuquerque’ spirit, if you will. But the other piece around this, because we're under attack on this, is I've already vetoed changes to our immigrant friendly policy once, and I will continue to defend what is now a law in Albuquerque. But it's interesting what the law is. It's non-disclosure, no matter what you want to call it, sanctuary, immigrant-friendly. What it says is that you can't, as a city employee, ask for status information or treat anyone different regardless of if they have that information or not, and you can't track that information. So we have no data to share, and this includes law enforcement, and we will never ask someone's status to go to a community center or to respond to a 911 call or to throw you in jail. So that's what we want to continue doing, and it's for two reasons. Number one, it is important for safety. If there's somebody experiencing domestic violence, and they may or may not know that there's a cousin staying with them that may or may not have the right documentation. We have to have them feel safe, to call APD to get help and protect them. And that's why this policy is in place, and that's why, under my leadership, APD is fully bought into this policy. The second reason is we want families to be together. I don't want to live in a community where there's children whose parents have all of a sudden been separated from them and deported or vice versa. Because, first off, the community has to bear that burden in the long run, but secondly, it's just immoral. I don't think it's the right way to live. Now there's only one exception to that, which I always say because it's true: part of non-disclosure means we will arrest you regardless of your status. We're not going to ask you your status. We're going to arrest you and put you in jail. So I do believe this actually makes our city safer in every way, and defends our families, and that's what I want to do for another term.
KUNM: Obviously, there has been a lot of progress made from an APD standpoint. That being said, there have been some critics who have said that even though on paper we are seeing progress, APD still has had some of the highest incidents of shootings in the country, especially per capita. What do you say to that? Do you have any plans of how to address that or change what might be happening in APD as a culture?
Sure, there's a couple of pieces to that. One is, you know, the correlation between officer-involved shootings and our population and so forth, that's really correlated to crime. So I just have to — you know, just to honor, like science and math, the correlation is to crime rates, not to, like the CASA or something else. Now, but that aside, it's a totally real point, and the question of whether or not the culture has changed or not, I know this: the difference is accountability, and that is 100% real. When APD makes a mistake, they are held accountable, and those officers are held accountable. And that is wildly different than just a few years ago. And you even see this, even in the DWI scandal. It was APD who said, ‘DOJ, you don't need a warrant’ — and this was under my direction, and the chiefs — ‘you don't need a warrant, you don't need a subpoena. You have 100% access to everyone. And by the way, we're gonna do our own investigation, and we're gonna get everyone out of the department as soon as we find out that they're involved at all.’ And that's why, when all of these names finally came out 18 months later, APD already had all of them out of the department. So again, no one is saying that there are not problems and there are not challenges. The difference is, number one, we hold people accountable, and number two, the speed with which we address them — that is drastically improved. And I think that's also why we need the same mayor, because I think in this regard, we have completely transformed how the department works with the superintendent of reform, and so you’ve got to have the same leadership to see this through during these tough times.
