Going where even New Mexico angels would fear to tread, Bernalillo County will place two potentially controversial measures on the November ballot, one raising taxes and the other opening the door to replacing elected county officials with appointed ones.
How the voters react to the two measures will test the success of the county’s effort of recent years to move from a history of policy inertia and political shenanigans to an efficient modern government.
Imagine a donut in which the hole constitutes 82 percent of the whole. The hole is the city of Albuquerque and the dough is the rest of Bernalillo County, the 16 percent of the population that the county government rules. (Two small incorporated enclaves, Tijeras and Los Ranchos, constitute the other 2 percent.)
If you wanted a meal or even a substantial snack, such a donut would be unsatisfactory.
So has been Bernalillo County government for most of the 162 years since its creation in 1852, 146 years after Albuquerque’s founding: the county tail wagged by the city dog. Traditionally, county government and politics received little attention from the media. Politicians used county jobs as sinecures for themselves and their friends who washed out of city and state government. Its law enforcement officers played second fiddle to higher-profile city and state cops. Its politicians were known more for corruption than capacity, its governance more for cronyism than competence.
Now, with everything in the city from police to jobs, from schools to businesses, from public safety to population growth going to the dogs, the tail may be coming into its own. Perhaps it’s time to take a new look at the relationship between dog and tail, city and county. Is there new life in the old—many have thought outmoded—institution of county government?
Bernalillo is the state’s largest county by far, three times the population of the next largest county, Doña Ana. Its total population of 673,000 includes 111,000 residents of unincorporated areas, primarily the East Mountains and the South Valley; if the unincorporated areas were a municipality, they would constitute the state’s second-largest city. About 555,000 live in Albuquerque and another 5,000 in Los Ranchos and Tijeras.
After decades of bickering, political infighting and petty scandals, in the past few years the five-member County Commission and the bureaucracy run by the county manager have started functioning with professional competence. There continue to be alarms and crises, but the county by and large has found relatively graceful solutions that, while not painless, at least manage the pain.
Where Bernalillo County government has failed in recent years, it has generally been due to its numerous independently elected officials. While the city appoints all its department heads, the county persists in the old notion of electing the chiefs of four administrative bureaucracies—the treasurer, assessor, clerk and sheriff. The clerk’s office, under exceptionally vigorous and able leadership of Maggie Toulouse Oliver, has put scandals behind it. Managing recent elections, the office’s highest-profile task, has come to resemble an orderly hike in the woods rather than falling off a cliff, as too often in the past.
However, Sheriff Dan Houston, who got himself into endless hot water with his two key constituencies, the county commissioners and the voters, lost his re-election bid in the June Republican primary. “Whoever wins in November has got to be better,” Commissioner Maggie Hart Stebbins said during a leisurely conversation over coffee last week.
The treasurer, Manny Ortiz, is in such bad odor that voters are circulating a rare recall petition after his incompetent investment policy cost the county at least $17 million dollars.
And the young, relatively inexperienced, publicity shy but well meaning assessor, Tanya Giddings, has launched a risky campaign to have her department personally inspect every one of the more than 200,000 properties in the county, the first such reassessment in 14 years. Stebbins said she has already heard of one incident, and more are possible when the assessor’s agents move from relatively safe northwestern communities to the more remote precincts in the South Valley and East Mountains. “Why doesn’t she just use Google maps?” Stebbins wondered. The assessor has her own independent funding through a small percentage of property taxes and thus does not have to seek commissioners’ approval. When the assessor announced the new program last fall, I repeatedly but unsuccessfully sought an interview with her to discuss it. Stebbins, for one, remains sympathetic to the assessor. “She reminds me a lot of myself when I was that age,” the commissioner remarked.
There is a potential solution to some of these problems in the offering. In November the county is putting on the ballot a referendum that will launch a lengthy and complex process of reforming county government. The first step was to get the Legislature’s approval early this year to set up a formal study of creating a home rule charter. While some cities such as Albuquerque and Santa Fe have home rule charters, no county has ever gone that route.
After the study commission produces a proposal, the voters would have their say. Exactly what will be in the charter is impossible to say. Stebbins suggested it would make the county independent of some state oversight and regulations, for example allowing it to sidestep the state procurement code process.
The charter could also free the county to change the status of elected department heads and make them appointed, if it wished to do so. In the past, the elected officials have launched outspoken campaigns to protect their jobs, and voters have been resistant to the change, particularly relating to the clerk and sheriff.
The other big proposal on the November ballot is to be a $2.8 million tax increase to pay for open space improvements and acquisitions, including sites in the East Mountains.
There is no public list of just which projects would be financed. This is in part, Stebbins said, because if the county signals its acquisition intentions in advance, owners of the property would demand more money. But she said the county has bought several large tracts of open space in the East Mountains that are not open to the public because the county has not had the money to develop them.
In the past the county has financed its open space program through its general fund, but times are changing, as Commissioner Wayne Johnson pointed out in a commentary in the Albuquerque Journal on Monday. Johnson, who is a Republican running for re-election in November, has often dissented from the commission’s Democratic majority. He opposes the tax increase. He points out correctly that the county is still struggling to deal with the shortfall created by the treasurer’s missteps. In addition, the Legislature, in order to pay for a tax cut to lure out-of-state businesses to New Mexico, decided gradually to eliminate payments to local government that were intended to compensate for an earlier decision to end gross receipts taxes on groceries and prescription drugs—in essence making cities and counties instead of the state pay for a state tax cut.
The county has been trying to raise taxes to pay for open space for eight years but has encountered technical difficulties. It may have gotten it right this time, but it is unclear if the voters will be willing to burden themselves with even a minuscule tax increase during a six-year-old recession that shows no sign of abating. The tax, however, is actually rather small potatoes, an increase of about $1 a month on a home assessed at $200,000.
On other issues, the county appears to be making some progress. The county’s biggest expense and by far its biggest headache is the jail, which in effect has been run by two federal judges for the past 19 years. The county keeps trying to get out from under federal oversight but then makes some kind of misstep and the judges stay on. The county is now closer than it has ever been to satisfying its federal guardians, with the number of prisoners approaching the roughly 2,000-inmate design capacity. At a hearing last week in federal court, Judge James A. Parker seemed to recognize the progress the county has made in almost eliminating overcrowding, Stebbins recounted, giving her hope the end of the court’s role is in sight.
County officials must have repented a thousand times the hubris that made them take over the jail from the city of Albuquerque. The problems never seem to go away. Twice this year male prison guards have been charged with raping female prisoners, threatening to punish, beat and in one case kill them if they resisted. The jail has also been a huge drain on the county’s budget. Money that could have paid for open space or other programs has had to be used to house some 600 inmates in other jails to reduce overcrowding.
In some other ways, the county has managed to look downright progressive compared to the city, whose government remains stalled and stagnated under a narrowly divided council and a largely inactive mayor.
While the Albuquerque Police training program has been attacked by both residents and the U.S. Justice Department as focusing too heavily on violent responses to crises, the county’s training program for deputies has emphasized community policing and de-escalating situations without recourse to Tasers and bullets, according to Stebbins. The result is that the county has seen nothing like the wave of Albuquerque Police violence that has taken 26 lives in four years. Many of the victims have been mentally ill.
Last week, the county began moving to spend $1.1 million to pay for housing 75 newly released prisoners with neither homes nor mental stability. The county is hoping the city will follow suit.
When is the last time this or any county led and a city followed, when the tail wagged the dog?
(Photo of Sandias by Samet K Jain)
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