Mayor Keller

It's been a tough stretch for ABQ Mayor Tim Keller who is now getting it from both sides.

His fellow progressives--Dem City Councilors Pat Davis and Ike Benton--complain of the police response to the downtown riots and now to Monday's protest and shooting incident at the Oñate statue near Old Town. (Statements here).

Meanwhile, Republican Councilors Trudy Jones and Brook Bassan announce themselves skeptical of the Mayor's Community Safety Department aimed at relieving police and having them concentrate more on violent crime.

At a news conference (complete video here) Keller took a measured response to the latest mayhem showing little emotion and sticking to the facts of the Oñate statue violence and not sending a broad message of concern to the city as a whole. He defended the police, saying they need a crime to occur before they intervene but Benton saw it differently:

It is the responsibility of the police and senior leadership to understand and anticipate the dynamics and potential conflicts, and take appropriate precautionary measures. In events last night and a few weekends ago, the City failed to plan for or respond quickly enough as the dynamics evolved. There is now an unfortunate perception that the City has been willing to stand aside as destruction occurs. That perception must be changed. 

Critics of Benton and Davis were quick to point out that while serving with Republican Mayor RJ Berry and when APD was descending into dysfunction, costing the city millions in lawsuits and the many lives of wrongful shooting victims, they were more or less bumps on the log.

How police conducted their interviews and investigation of the Monday Oñate protest is also being questioned. And all of it raises questions about just what kind of APD do we have after six years of federally mandated and expensive reforms? Does anyone really know?

Keller is seeking re-election next year and his potential foes are probably stockpiling video of the riot-torn downtown and the wild protests near Old Town. Soon the city will know more about the huge budget deficit it faces because of the Covid-19 shutdown, That will be another shoe dropping, but that's now a familiar sound in our town in these most troubled of times.

CHEESE AND CRACKERS

Mayor Webber

The state has huge cash reserves to deal with the economic crash, but what about a place like tourist-reliant Santa Fe where the estimated shortfall for the budget year that starts July 1 is a startling $100 million out of a budget of about $400 million?  Only a massive tax increase or massive layoffs will make up that kind of money. Santa Fe Mayor Alan Webber, who has probably been plodding around his kitchen at 3 a.m eating cheese and crackers and fretting over what to do, comes with this:

The. . . proposal, which Webber called the “most important one and the one that promises a great deal of help,” is the creation of municipal emergency loan program with money from the state’s Severance Tax Permanent Fund. “Cities could avail themselves of a long-term, low-interest loan to cover our revenue shortfall,” he said.

Webber would like the Governor to have that measure considered at the special legislative session that begins Thursday. It's not a handout so Webber might be able to get buy-in from the budget hawks, especially if the loan program includes other small cash-strapped towns and cities

If there is no relief from somewhere (the state, the Feds) then there's probably more insomnia in store for Webber and more economic pain across the board for the denizens of the City Different. (No, we don't think a GoFundMe drive would do the trick.)

Webber is up for re-election in November 2021 and told me recently he will run again. Insiders report that Santa Fe City Councilor JoAnne Vigil Coppler is looking at opposing him.

NO EMAIL, PLEASE

A recent blog suggestion that the state look into having absentee voters send their ballots in via email brought a considered reply from C. M. Sperberg-McQueen of Black Mesa Technologies:

No one knows how to make such votes secure against tampering. The most reputable security specialists seem to agree: the system has not been designed that could make email voting (or internet voting in any form) secure, confidential, and tamper proof. There are those who say otherwise; they generally have a product to sell, and the product has so far always turned out to be snake oil. 

The internet in general, and email in particular, were designed to enable cooperation among people who wanted to collaborate to get things done. It is very hard to adapt systems designed in that way to withstand attacks by adversaries who do not want to cooperate. Most security experts say it’s not just hard, but basically impossible: their advice on building secure systems is, if you did not design it for security from the ground up, then start over and do so. Please don’t propagate the idea that internet voting would be a good idea, or would be feasible if only a few nerds would put their minds to it. A lot of very smart people have put their minds to it, and what they have told the rest of us is: there are no proposals for internet voting that stand up to even light scrutiny. 

Thanks, C.M. We just bought a bunch of stamps and are ready to snail mail one and all.

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(c)NM POLITICS WITH JOE MONAHAN 2020