How does your experience and your resume help qualify you to lead the City of Albuquerque?
“Well, the first thing is, I'm a 26-year veteran of the Albuquerque Police Department, where I worked every part of the city of Albuquerque. I worked Field Services. I worked the investigative impact team. I worked the gang unit, the auto theft unit, the air support unit, the organized crime unit. I worked in the New Mexico violent gang task force, and then I was promoted to sergeant, lieutenant and Commander. So I worked at the higher levels of the APD organization.
I also had an opportunity to work in the mayor's office at a high level under the Mayor Marty Chavez administration. So I saw all the inner workings of the departments and how each department is situated, how each department set up and how each department should function.
After I retired, I became a small business owner. And during my time as a small business owner, I grew a very small Allstate Insurance agency into one of the larger agencies in the state over a period of nine years.
During that time, I ran my my business with with with the culture of the spirit of excellence, making sure that the customers received the best customer service that they could possibly get, making sure that my staff understood that I'm one of the kind of people that holds individuals accountable to make sure that they're doing the right things and making sure that there is transparency and accountability in my workforce.
And when you have a culture that resonates not only with the customer, but it also resonates with the employees, and I hope to bring that kind of customer service, that kind of experience, and change the culture at the City of Albuquerque, so that we can service the public in a far better way than we're doing currently.
Now. I'm a city councilor, and as city councilor, I got to see the under workings of the legislative side of city government, and that's where we hold the purse strings of the government. And one of the things that I found out while doing this is something I knew from the other side of the government, which was the admin side, and that was that the mayor has so much power, and that was inherent again, when we passed a $1.5 billion budget and the mayor gave nine city councilors $15 million to deal with, which again, proves that the mayor has 99% power and the city council only has one nine city councilors have 1% power.
And I think running the city should be a unified effort, so that the mayor and the city council work together to make sure that the constituents are getting the best thing for their buck, because they're the taxpayers.”
What is your vision for the relationship between the city of Albuquerque and the University of New Mexico, and what steps do you plan on taking to reach that vision?
“Well, I think the city of Albuquerque and the University of New Mexico should have a major partnership in reference to helping each other. One of the things that concerns me more than anything is the fact that the city should be helping out with the transportation to and from, should be helping out with the with the university security and parking on the outskirts, because right on the outskirts of UNM, we have venues to eat, to socialize, and I think those venues, really need to be on on the radar of the city, so that we can have a better place for them to enjoy and a safer place.
When we start doing construction in those areas, we need to be able to maintain public safety corridors so that police can access very easily, so that the lighting is set up and the walkways are set up so that they're conducive to safety.
I think that we need to bring some of the kiosks that are available on UNM campus, and they should be looked at on the side streets and around the UNM campus, so that if anybody's in the area, they could utilize kiosks as well.
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I think that the city should actually lend a hand in security and the parking and also in some of the infrastructure that helps make UNM an easier place to get to for the students. Currently, I see students having to cross the streets and park in residential neighborhoods, and I think that we should come together — the city and UNM — to make sure that we have a safer place and not have so many people crossing streets.
I think that we could come into some sort of a public-private partnership, and also a partnership with UNM to possibly help with even a parking structure in the area so the students can actually go to and from without having to walk or be shuttled from very, very far distances.
One of the other things that we should be doing with the city and UNM is we should be utilizing the resources that UNM offers. We have a great engineering program, we have a great doctor's program, and we have a great law school.
Those things should be incorporated to help the city grow, and we, in turn, can return the favor by sending students and highlighting their academic achievements and and making sure that we work together as a community to make sure that the students that are attending UNM have the best of the best when it comes to when it comes to their education and to be safe in every part of that.”
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, currently, the mayor and I have not had a conversation on anything because he doesn't want to hear what city council has to say. You know, we all have been elected to move this city forward, but yet I've never sat down with the mayor for longer than 30 seconds because I have questions that are very serious questions about the direction of the city, the direction of the safety, the direction of many, many items, and also transparency issues. So that limits our conversations, and what we need to do is make sure that the next mayor has 100% conversation with the city councilors.
As a city councilor, right now, I have never seen the mayor walk downstairs to the ninth floor and walk in and speak to any of us. Me as a mayor, I will definitely not have any problem walking down and speaking to our colleagues on city council and making sure that we work together to get the best to get the best answer for the constituents.
We don't work for ourselves. We work for the citizens of Albuquerque, and the ultimate goal is to make sure that the city is safe, that the city is prosperous, and that we are working together to make the city safe and prosperous.
We need wins, and that means that the council and the mayor need to communicate, and I have no problem working with every single city councilor. I would love to have weekly and monthly meetings with my city councilors so that I can understand what's important in their areas and make sure that my directors are servicing their needs.
There will never be an issue with any of my directors handling any need or want that a city council can do within reason and within budget.”
What do you feel is the most important issue facing our city, and how will you work to fix it?
“The most important issue that's facing our city is crime, and homelessness and our economic growth. In reference to the crime and homeless issue, one of the things that we've seen is there's a massive amount of fentanyl out on the streets of Albuquerque, and that means that needs to be addressed immediately, the criminal element that's produced based on drugs. We have people who are stealing to get their drugs, you know, people that are breaking into cars, doing burglaries, shoplifting and any other number of crimes to get their drugs.
Also, a lot of the population that's out there does not want to give up their drugs, with the addiction and the threat of violence that comes from the drug dealer. It's very, very hard to break that cycle.
So the first thing that we need to do is we need to address drugs, and we need to address the crime at the lowest levels, and that would be simple assaults, assault and battery, aggravated assault, shoplifting, possession of a controlled substance, trafficking of a controlled substance. We need to make sure that the prostitution is being taken care of. Those are some of the crimes that are happening on the streets right now that we're not addressing that we need to be addressing because of the public safety issue. And we're seeing these things happen over and over within our city and they continue without stopping.
Under my administration, I will make sure that we start to address the crimes at the lowest level, and then when you break up that system, hopefully, we get people who will be able and willing to ask for the help, and then we can give them the help that they need.
But we also need to make sure that the help that we give them is good, solid help, and right now we're not having the amount of help that we need being administered properly. So we have people complaining that the service providers are not providing the adequate service that they need to be providing.
So we need to audit those providers to make sure, again, that the city is getting the best bang for their buck. The taxpayers need to be making sure — we need to be making sure that the taxpayers are getting what they expect when it comes to the services and the safety that we should be providing as a city.
Albuquerque has not grown in economic development. The economic development in Albuquerque has been 0.1% over the last several years. So we are not gaining. We are losing population and we are losing economic development growth. So what we need to do is we need to make sure that we are growing small businesses, because small businesses are the backbone of our city, and any city within the United States.
So what I intend to do is I intend to promote business growth and small business startups by actually using the city's bond rating, and that way we can actually subsidize or help some of these small businesses get started, or other businesses who have one location, and put them into multiple locations and start growing.
That way we create more jobs, more job creation, and more economic growth. And then on the other side right now, the only game in town is the (Kirtland Airforce Base). Almost the only game in town is the base. So what we need to do is attract larger industry, so we can have people here, but we also have larger industry.
I don't think we've had a billion-dollar company; not very many billion-dollar companies have ever come to Albuquerque, so I would love to see several billion-dollar companies come into Albuquerque. So again, we could strengthen our workforce with that.
We're going to need housing. And right now, I know we're short on housing, but what we need to do is build as many houses as we possibly can, so that we can create competition. Once you have competition, it creates a climate of lower prices and affordable prices.
That way, we organically build the city while we're building its economic growth, we also organically build everything else, because when we're building, we're putting people to work, and we're making sure that our city is organically self-sustaining.”
Sanchez claimed a economic development has 0.01% in Albuquerque over the past few years. A study by the Greater Albuquerque Chamber of Commerce reported that the local GDP increased by 30%, as did median income from 2019-23.
You have often claimed that homicide is up 19% and that Albuquerque is the 20th most dangerous city in the world. APD data shows that violent crime is down in all categories, including homicide, down 27% from this time last year. Where are you getting your statistics from? And are you saying that the APD numbers are incorrect?
“The bottom line is the numbers, the numbers are coming from, from sources like (ABQ RAW), who gets their sources from the (Office of the Medical Examiner) division. And when you're talking about the homicides being up, you know, we're also talking about the amount of police involved homicides, which actually could be justifiable homicides.
Those need to be included in the statistics as well, and they're not. One of the things that you have to look at, more than anything, is just Google is which (are) the most dangerous cities in the world. And just type that in, and you'll see the entity that prints it. And we just went from 23 to 20, over the year, of the most dangerous cities in the world.
Then the perception of what's being reported versus what we're seeing on the streets does not actually make a correlation. The streets are dangerous. The people are telling us that the streets are dangerous, and with the lower amount of officers, crime is not being reported the way it should be, and businesses and people know that it's going to take a long time to get the crime reported, so the crime doesn't get reported.”
APD crime statistics show that all measures of violent crime in Albuquerque are down over the last 10 months — including homicide, which is down 27%.
