Choices, choices, choices – just don’t rank them

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SANTA FE, N.M. — Santa Feans apparently will have a lot of choices in next March's mayoral election.

As of Wednesday, seven people say they plan to run in what will be a wide open race after incumbent Mayor Javier Gonzales' surprise announcement that he won't seek re-election. The declared candidates include three city councilors, a school board member and a former candidate for governor, along with a local social worker and a board member of Keep Santa Fe Beautiful who is a property manager and operator of a moving company.

There are political outsiders and local electoral veterans, favorites and longshots, and contrasting styles. Not to play the "woman card," but, so far, former city Economic Development Director Kate Noble, elected to the school board earlier this year with no opposition, is the only person of her gender in the race.

Issues will develop. An obvious one off the bat is money – how much will candidates have and where will it come from?

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Three contenders – Noble, entrepreneur Alan Webber, who finished second in the 2014 Democratic gubernatorial primary, and Councilor Joseph Maestas, former mayor of Española – say they won't seek the $60,000 in public financing available for mayoral candidates. Those who take the public dollars can't raise additional campaign money from private sources.

Webber appears to be totally capable of self-financing a political campaign, or raising a lot. He raised about $1.2 million for his gubernatorial race, including $393,000 from himself.

Public employees unions, who have been the biggest financial players in recent mayoral elections, could be crucial. The unions can support even the candidates who take public financing by (at least theoretically) acting independently while spending gobs of money to support one candidate or denounce others.

Will the unions find a way to pass over actual public employees – like Maestas, who worked for decades as a federal government civil engineer, or Councilor Ron Trujillo, who works at the state Department of Transportation – for a national-style progressive like Webber or for Councilor Peter Ives, a lawyer for the Trust for Public Land who has been politically friendly with Mayor Gonzales, who the unions went with in 2014?

Maybe groups like EMILY'S List will provide national support for Noble, who has undergone training with the Emerge America program for Democratic women seeking public office.

And will Santa Fe's special version of nativism play a role? Webber moved to Santa Fe in 2003. Ives has lived here 35 years (raising the issue of when, really, you can say you're from Santa Fe).

So far, no one has proclaimed themselves the choice to continue the administration and goals of Mayor Gonzales, although one prominent Gonzales supporter – Meow Wolf's Vince Kadlubek – already is going with Webber, saying he "gives Santa Fe the best opportunity to build off of all the great progress we've made in the last four years." Stay tuned for whether other members of the Gonzales political team take a side.

There's been a lot of talk about healing divisiveness and getting back to basics in the wake of the nasty, expensive fight that resulted in the crashing defeat at the polls for a soda tax proposed by Gonzales to support early childhood education programs. "The divisiveness that has infected the national spirit has visited Santa Fe. A lack of trust in government and other institutions can be found in Santa Fe," said Webber.

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What percentage of the vote will be needed to win? With seven candidates, it's easy to see a scenario where 30 percent or even less takes the prize. And this comes when the council has rejected moving to "ranked choice," or instant run-off, elections in 2018, although voters overwhelmingly approved a city charter amendment to switch to ranked-choice voting a decade ago.

Next March's election may show why Santa Fe needs to get away from an election system where a fairly small segment of the voters can decide who serves as mayor (and now a stronger mayor, paid $110,000 annually starting in 2018).

A real run-off between the top two vote-getters would be better than ranked choice, which has been tried and then rejected elsewhere.

It's outrageous, though, that the City Council managed to postpone ranked-choice voting for another two years despite the voter mandate from way back in 2008.

Appropriate vote-counting software is ready to go, and at a cheap price. The delay is really due to the fact that the City Council did absolutely no work over the past nine years to prepare for a change to ranked choice to meet the voter mandate.

The council should have been deciding key questions, such how to handle ballots where voters fail to properly rank the candidates and whether voters get to rank all candidates or just a top three. Also, no plan was ever developed to educate voters about ranked choice. So trying to make the change in time for 2018, as the software earned certification in recent weeks, turned into a rush job deemed unacceptable by five city councilors. That was enough to thwart the will expressed by voters in 2008.

Under ranked choice, if no candidate gets a majority in the first round, voters' second-choice votes get counted in subsequent rounds until someone gets more than 50 percent.

Santa Fe is in fact the City Different. Maybe before 2020, the council can propose another city charter change, for a regular two-candidate run-off such as the one that is likely to place in the upcoming Albuquerque mayoral election, to replace a voter-approved ranked-choice system that somehow never got implemented.