Powerlift

What would you change about Santa Fe’s governing document—the charter that serves as something like the city’s constitution?

Would you like more direct democracy—an easier way for voters to get their ideas on the ballot?

Maybe you just want to get rid of that weird rule banning bikes from the Plaza.

Whatever it is, you probably haven’t told the only people who can really do something about it.

Every two weeks for the last few months, a nine-member commission has gathered to discuss how to reshape the city’s charter. So far, they have gotten suggestions from approximately two people.

You are forgiven for overlooking the Charter Review Commission.

Santa Fe’s charter requires the mayor and council to appoint a commission at least every 10 years, and past commissions have made some big changes to city government. It’s how we got ranked choice voting, for example. But the group does not have a page on the city’s website and City Hall has done little to publicize its work. For all the community engagement sessions and outreach surrounding the city’s truth and reconciliation process and the redevelopment of the Midtown campus, city officials have done little to get local residents involved in rethinking the very foundation of Santa Fe’s government.

But now might be the time to pay attention.

The commission plans to make recommendations next month to the mayor and city councilors, who will decide which—if any—of the group’s ideas to add to November’s municipal election ballot. And while commissioners have yet to finalize any particular proposals for tweaking the city charter, they are considering some remarkable changes.

The commission has mulled, for example, making it easier for voters to get initiatives and referendums on the ballot, giving local residents more power to make their own laws and repeal the laws they don’t like. Commissioners are also considering taking away the mayor’s vote on all matters that go before the City Council, potentially leaving him with only a tie-breaking vote.

Plus, commission members are floating an amendment that would declare access to food a human right and commit the city government to making land and water available to ensure the sustainable local production of food.

Commissioners are also considering making the charter review process itself more engaging.

“How do you have nine people voting for a whole city with no public input? That’s the saddest thing I’ve ever heard,” Commissioner John Paul Granillo tells SFR.

A draft proposal calls for city officials to provide more resources for future commissions, such as a website and a budget. It could also include a requirement that the commission convene outside City Hall and hold at least two meetings in each of Santa Fe’s four council districts.

The Charter Review Commission is not exactly free to do whatever it wants. State law, for one thing, is a check on the commission’s work.

Granillo says he was interested in a charter amendment that would cap rent increases in the city. But commissioners say state laws have tied their hands on that issue.

The City Council also sends a list of ideas to each commission. This year, councilors tasked the commission with studying whether Santa Fe could have an at-large council member or rejig the number of districts. But again, commissioners—and the city legal staff who reviewed the issues—say their hands are tied.

The council will get the final say, too, on which of the commission’s proposals end up on the ballot later this year.

But commissioners are discussing a change to the city charter that would make it harder for the council to reject the proposals of future commissions. A draft proposal would require a supermajority of councilors to block any proposals from the ballot, giving more power to a group that—for this year, at least—has largely labored in obscurity.

The commission meets again at 5 pm on April 13 in the City Council Chambers.

Here’s a look at a few issues the commission is tackling.

Democracy

For better or worse, New Mexico has no initiative process allowing voters to put issues on the ballot. When Colorado voters legalized weed and Arizonans raised the minimum wage (yes, Arizonans), all New Mexicans could do was wait for the Legislature to do something.

New Mexico has no recall process, either, leaving voters to wait for the next election to get rid of unpopular politicians if shame doesn’t drive the disgraced from office. Voters can put laws they don’t like up to a repeal vote. But it’s not easy and has only happened three times in state history.

Unlike the state Constitution, however, Santa Fe’s charter includes direct democracy.

Still, residents who want to put a proposed law up to a citywide vote need to circulate petitions and gather a lot of signatures. The number of signatures needed is equal to 33.3% of the number of people who voted in the last mayoral election. That would be about 6,000 signatures today (and any veteran of initiative campaigns will tell you to get far more in case some are found void). A share of those signatures would have to come from each of the city’s four council districts. The same rules apply for trying to repeal an unpopular law through referendum or recalling a deadbeat elected official.

“That threshold is extremely high. Most cities have it around 10% or so,” says Charter Review Commissioner Maria Perez.

The commission is considering a change to the city charter that would lower the threshold for getting initiatives and referendums on the ballot.

A draft proposal would cut the required number of signatures by more than half, to 15% of the number of residents who voted in the last mayoral election. That means if campaigners were trying to get a measure on the ballot this year, they would only need to collect about 2,700 signatures instead of 6,000.

Such a revision would bring the threshold for initiative campaigns in line with some other New Mexico cities, such as Las Cruces, where local voters put direct democracy to use in recent years to raise the minimum wage.

The commission is considering leaving the required number of signatures for a recall campaign untouched, however.

“That is adequate because voters do have recourse. There is a remedy if there is an elected official that is just not doing their job. If voters are very dissatisfied with somebody, we can wait until their term is over and elect somebody else,” Perez says.

The mayor and council

The last Charter Review Commission recommended Santa Fe create the sort of strong mayor system Santa Fe has today.

With the approval of voters in 2014, the mayor—starting after the 2018 election—became a full-time gig. The mayor also went from having a tie-breaking vote on the City Council to a vote on all matters that go before the governing body.

In a way, the change fit the mayor who came into power that year—Alan Webber, the founder of Fast Company magazine who sees the city’s top job as dealing as much with climate change as potholes and might have been as comfortable running to lead a municipality several times the size of Santa Fe.

But the change has blurred the roles of the city’s leaders, with the mayor taking on both a legislative and executive role. Meanwhile, the role of councilors has become fuzzier.

Once the key connection between their districts and City Hall, the creation of a constituent services bureau inside the clerk’s office has raised new questions about the role councilors play in handling concerns from local residents and working with senior officials in municipal government.

Should Santa Fe residents call their councilors to complain about a pothole or offer up ideas, or should they dial City Hall? Are councilors both legislators and advocates for their districts or do they just vote on bills?

As the city navigates this shift in local government, the commission is now considering a slightly different role for the mayor in the future. Several draft amendments to address legislative power are under review.

Under one proposal commissioners are discussing, the mayor would no longer have a vote on every matter that comes in front of the City Council. Instead, the mayor would go back to only having a tie-breaking vote.

As Commissioner Paul Dirdak described it, some members of the commission propose the mayor serve in a sort of citywide leadership role.

The mayor’s position, Dirdak said, would be more about “helping the city as a whole envision its progress toward meeting its goals, and describing what’s most important and crucial issues of the moment. And so in that case, we don’t see the mayor as necessarily attending each meeting of the council.”

Dirdak tells SFR he wouldn’t exactly call it a step back from the strong mayor system. Commissioners are still working through the idea.

But one proposal recasts the mayor’s role as something of a “facilitator in chief,” working to solve the challenges facing the city and then enlisting the support of the council to create legislation as needed.

Asked about the possible changes, Webber told SFR he hadn’t been following the process.

The commission is also debating a change to the city charter that would require the council to adopt minimum qualifications for the city manager—a discussion that comes after the current city manager, John Blair, came into the role with no direct experience in municipal government.

With the city running more than a year behind on submitting financial audits—missing out on state funding and risking the city’s bond rating as a result—the commission has also talked about attempting to add a whole section on financial management to Santa Fe’s charter.

That section could require the city manager to present councilors with a proposed budget at least two weeks before budget hearings begin, as well as calling for an independent financial audit every year.

Food and hunger

For all of Santa Fe’s green credentials and restaurants boasting of farm-to-table connections, the city isn’t exactly friendly to urban farming.

Consider Gaia Gardens, an organic urban farm in the Bellamah neighborhood that once operated a vegetable stand accessible by foot and bike on the Arroyo Chamiso trail. Cited by city code officials, the farm eventually folded amid a range of challenges.

Granillo, who helps run a farm just outside city limits, says a range of obstacles stifle agriculture inside Santa Fe, from zoning to access to water.

But the charter review commission is considering giving Santa Fe officials a mandate to support sustainable local agriculture inside city limits.

A charter amendment the commission is debating would declare access to nutritious food a human right and direct the city government to make available city land and water for the sustainable production of food.

“I know water can be gold and scarce but how can we give it back to our own community?” Granillo says.

The proposal isn’t as specific as some of the amendments commissioners are considering on the subjects of direct democracy or the role of the mayor. Instead, it would add something of a mission statement on ending hunger to Santa Fe’s guiding document. But the guidance it would give city officials to put resources to use for sustainable agriculture could be key in future debates over where and how to farm in the City Different.

In the short-term, Granillo says he would like to see a charter amendment like this kickstart more small-scale community gardening, building connections between city officials and local neighborhoods while also promoting education around sustainable agriculture.

“In the long run, I’d love to see farms all over Santa Fe,” he says.

Equity and inclusion

The proposal by several city councilors earlier this year to rebuild the obelisk on Santa Fe Plaza sputtered, but a nugget of that plan might live on through the charter. Commissioners are considering asking voters to create an Office of Equity and Inclusion as well as a Human Rights Commission at City Hall.

The office would be tasked with examining the city government’s actions from the perspective of equity, with backers pointing to the adoption in some cities of equity checklists as an example of the work the proposed office could take on in the future.

The Human Rights Commission would include five members—one for each council district and another appointed by the mayor.

While the mayor and council could set up an office on equity and inclusion on their own—and councilors have signaled they still want to—members of the Charter Review Commission argue that having voters approve the idea would give it staying power.

“A different administration may have different priorities and a standalone office is only as effective as the budget that is assigned to that office,” says Commissioner Alba Blondis. “So without a statement that a commission shall be, it can come and go depending on budget and administration.”

Meet the Commission

The city’s Charter Review Commission is named every 10 years. It includes nine members—one appointed by each city councilor and one selected by the mayor.

Nancy Long, Chair

Attorney at Long Komer and Associates and member of the previous Charter Review Commission; she has served on several corporate and nonprofit boards

District 1

Paul Dirdak

Retired from the nonprofit sector and now a member of the Santa Fe County Democratic Party’s central committee as well as president of a local HOA

Maria Perez

Co-director of Democracy Rising, which promotes ranked choice voting around the country

District 2

Peter Ives

Attorney, former city councilor and a candidate for mayor in 2018

A. Elicia Montoya

Attorney at McGinn, Montoya, Love and Curry; former member of the city’s Ethics and Campaign Review Board

District 3

John Paul Granillo

Artist and co-founder of the Alas De Agua Art Collective; also a member of the board of the Santa Fe Community Housing Trust

Alba Blondis

Chair of the Southwest Santa Fe Advocates and member of the board of the Santa Fe Community Housing Trust

District 4

Bridget Dixson

President and CEO of the Santa Fe Chamber of Commerce; appointed by Councilor Jamie Cassutt to fill a vacancy on the board in March

Lilliemae Ortiz

Chair of the city’s Independent Citizen Redistricting Commission; former Department of Finance and Administration