How does your experience and resume qualify you to lead the city of Albuquerque?
“I was most recently the United States Attorney for the District of New Mexico. I was its chief federal law enforcement officer, running an office of 200 people who reported directly to me, as well as hundreds of federal agents in leading law enforcement operations, statewide prosecutions and investigations and operations.
And so what that meant was a broad portfolio of things from violent crime in Albuquerque, where we did work in partnership with the DA’s office and APD for years to drive it down. And you'll notice that there was a decrease in violent crime, starting when I took over in (2022) to now. That's because we had a really robust partnership with APD, with the DA’s office, we brought state cases, federal (cases) and investigated those who are truly driving violence in our community.
Another component of that was the Violence Intervention program that I helped build with the mayor back in 2019, off of a model from Boston in the 90s. It's been developing over the past four decades, but it is the most effective law enforcement invention to reduce violent crime, and so it's a thing I believe very strongly, and a cornerstone of what the mayor has been doing and what I believe in doing for the city.
Before that, though, I've spent my whole career in public service and public safety. I was a Crimes Against Children prosecutor at the DA’s office, and I was a cartel investigator for the Feds before becoming United States attorney, and as United States attorney, I led this office through the single largest budgetary shortfall in the history of the Department of Justice.
That meant we had to slash our operating budget by 50% to stay in the black. Despite that, we didn't fire a single federal employee. And despite that limitation, during that time period, we turned the office from a 100% paper file office to a 100% digital office, and we brought down some of the biggest cases in the history of this district, including the largest fentanyl seizure in the history of the nation, in FBI and DEA history, taking down 30 years of corruption in Albuquerque Police Department DWI department, building the first Federal reentry courts, so folks coming back from federal lockup get the support that they need to reintegrate to our communities, building the first missing and murdered indigenous persons program.
We had a database statewide, tracking all the cases, and we had a national program we launched here from Albuquerque, where we had prosecutors assigned to those cases to make sure none of them fell through the cracks.
And so what makes me qualified as an excellent administrator who loves the public servants that serve our people, and I'm goal-oriented, which means I get things done that maybe have been impossible for years, but that the people of New Mexico deserve.”
What is your vision for the relationship between the city and the University of New Mexico? And what steps will you take to reach that vision?
“It needs to be very strong, obviously, there’s different governance between the city, UNM and (Albuquerque Public Schools), but education is really the foundation of everything.
And so while the mayor may not be a shot caller in any of these decisions, there should be a senior level liaison to both APS and UNM in the mayor's office, because we need to be building pathways for people, our youth, and the youth that join us from out of state, to have professions, to have specialties, to have traits and skills so they can build their lives here with well paying jobs and futures and opportunities.
So that's college for sure, but it's also, when I think about it, it's the traits we're severely lacking in staff. And so I think we need to be working in very tight partnership, to be bringing these institutions closer together and figuring ways in which the city can support each of these institutions, whether it be through housing, through public safety, to transit across the state or across the city.”
Get content from The Daily Lobo delivered to your inbox
There has often been what some would call a contentious relationship between city council and the mayor's office; how will you ensure city government runs smoothly and works together to respond to residents' needs?
“Well, the mayor has to do his part. No matter who's on city council, it's the mayor's responsibility to be out there and trying to build the bridge. If you go to our city council meetings, you’ll notice the mayor never goes.
He doesn't go to push his big initiatives. He doesn't go to defend his staff when a mistake occurs. My number one lesson of leadership from being United States attorney was knowing that it is your job as a leader to take the arrows when something goes wrong.
That's how you lead a staff that believes it, and when you let them swing in the wind for a decision that you made, then you lose their trust, and they won't work for you in the way they'll work for someone who trusts and loves them.
And so I think it's important, first of all, for the mayor to go to city council. Not all the time, I don't want to make an impossible standard here, but you got at least go. It's important for the mayor to have relationships with counselors, even if he fundamentally disagrees with them.
And so I fundamentally disagree with a number of our city councilors. I still will call all of them because of the promise I've made to each of them, that I make to the people of Albuquerque. We're gonna have differences, we all do. This is called living in a society with other people.
But a difference on one thing won't mean that tomorrow, when you come to me with a thing that makes sense for our community, that I agree with, I will do that. We will do that together, because that's how government works.
None of these positions belong to us. As U.S. attorney, I was just a temporary custodian of a role that belongs to the people, and that's the mayor too.
You don't elect a mayor for his feelings, you elect them for his judgment, right? And that means we are required to put our feelings aside, no matter how we feel about a person, or what they did to you, what they said about you, and get the job done.”
What is the most important issue you feel our city is facing and how will you work to fix it?
“Over the 1000s of people I have spoken with, it's overwhelmingly been homelessness. There's a Journal poll that showed public safety as the leading issue. But I think, when I've had these conversations, what I found out is it's the quality of life crimes ancillary to homelessness. That is, the feeling of disorder that comes with people living on our streets, not necessarily violent crime specifically.
So I think for me, what it comes down to is looking at the drivers of these types of crime and the reason that people are on our streets. And there are three: it's poverty, it's addiction and it's mental health. These are things that we can solve. They're not easy. I'm not saying they’re easy problems, but the problems that we can solve.
So on the front end, what we need to be doing is investing in UNM Hospital’s street medicine. They have a great team of people, but there's only like five of them who go out and do street medicine.
The first step of street medicine is going and re-earning the trust of people who don't trust the government anymore. They don't trust the government because what our city is doing right now, what our mayor is doing right now, is sweeping the streets hourly.
You got here in East Central and Tennessee, Solid Waste is picking up people's things and throwing them away, moving them from this spot to the next spot.
And this is not only inhumane, right? I went and walked because I walk every couple of weeks, and I met a young man who told me his father's ashes had been thrown away. I met many other people who said, ‘You know what? Yesterday, they swept and threw my whole cart of things. And so today, I spent my whole day collecting a new cart of things that I need to survive.’ This is ineffective on top of inhumane.
And the number one thing that gets thrown away in these sweeps is a person's ID. Without an ID, they can't get a job, they can't get a house, they can't apply for benefits. You're making it worse. You're making it harder for people to get off the streets.
Any government invention first has to rebuild the trust by saying, ‘No, no, I'm actually here to help you,’ and then building the meaningful relationships and connecting people with the services and medical treatments that they need that actually help them in their lives.
You can slowly progress a person towards more independence and towards housing. And the crazy thing is, we have the solutions for this stuff, right? We have shots that temper psychosis for 30 days, right? Which is enough to stabilize somebody, enough to connect someone with housing, enough to connect them with services, and get them right on the right path to continual independence, if we can just get that first touch right. And that's about building trust.
So, street medic teams are number one. Number two is transitional housing. We have a shelter system, right? So we have the West Side shelter. We have The Gateway on Gibson. These are crisis responses that we need, right?
We need somewhere to put someone if it's cold outside and they're going to freeze to death, but they're not solutions to homelessness. You need a gateway to somewhere. You need transitional housing on the back end for people to go to, to leave the shelters and gain independence.
The reason people don't get out of the West Side shelter is because there's 600 people that live there. There are three caseworkers and zero medics, which means 20% of the people out there have been there for five years.
They're getting stuck in a temporary shelter. And so we need transitional housing on the back end. It’s going to range from campus style to independent, but it's housing that people can go to and have their own dignity and independence linked to the services and treatment that they need to stay stable.
Once they've been stabilized in our crisis response centers, then we need to make sure that they have somewhere to go so they can build that independence back into our community.
And finally, there's folks with serious mental illnesses who most often contact us through the criminal justice system.
There, we need to implement what's called the sequential intercept model. It's based on a model in Miami that's worked highly effectively there, and to take advantage of a $1 billion Mental Health Trust Fund that our legislature passed this past session to staff our courts, from arrest, arraignments, detention, sentence and especially at re-entry, so that they can identify and connect people with services, instead giving them the care that they need, instead of the consequences that will make them worse.”
You filed a nine-point investigation into the Keller administration, alleging mishandling of funds and negligent exposure of workers to toxic materials. What policies would you implement in your potential administration to make sure that that administration is open, transparent and accountable to the citizens of Albuquerque?
“The first failure here, and the most important thing for us to do as a city, is have a fully independent inspector general. The only reason we know about the asbestos that this mayor put city workers into contact with in the Gateway is because the inspector general wrote a report and released it publicly.
The only way we knew that these (American Rescue Plan) funds are being misused, not given to frontline caregivers, but instead given to staff and high-level bureaucrats who sit behind doors during a pandemic, is because the inspector general released that report. There are six more. There are six more because once the inspector general said, ‘I'm releasing these two, and I have six more that show fraud, waste and abuse in the city.’ She was immediately put on admin, and then she was not renewed.
And so that lack of independence, and I asked the mayor this too, I asked him this question at a forum, straight up. I said, ‘Why is the Inspector General on admin? I need an answer.’
He's had an opportunity to answer, and the people of Albuquerque deserve answers. Our government must be transparent and accountable to the people. I don't know what's in those reports, but I also know that we don't know what happened to the asbestos, lead and silica that was pulled out of the Gateway Center.
We know that it was in there. We know we put workers in there and exposed them to it without PPE. We know that there was a stop-work order the minute a whistleblower went to the inspector general. And then we know, mere days later, four days later, we put workers back.
And I'm not an asbestos removal expert, but I've talked to some and I know that four days is probably not enough to remove the asbestos, lead and silica throughout that huge facility. So my question is, who did it and where did it go?
Because there's a proper way to take it out, and there's a proper way to dispose of it, and if that was disposed in our city dumps, we are creating a new generation of downwinders exposed to asbestos, lead and silica in our ground, in our water, in our air.
And the citizens deserve to know it was done right. And look, it was done right, he's absolved. Right. If he's done right, then I've done a public service, because then we all get to put it to bed and be like, ‘Oh, good. I'm so glad that our government functioned rationally with ethics,’ and that's all I demand, right? We needed a government that responds to the people.
That's why I was so proud of the work we did on the APD investigation, because we need a government that's responsive to the people and rebuilding that trust that we have broken by hiding things, by covering things up, that is through a strong and independent inspector general.
And I'm calling on the administration yet again to release those reports that have been done for a year, to tell the people, before he asks them for another term, to tell the people exactly what the fraud, waste and abuse was in his administration, before they have to vote for him. I don't think any person could vote for him without hearing those answers.”
