Place your bets: Who will be ‘strong’ mayor?

be popular in a city with strong Democratic tendencies.

The race has even attracted those who haven’t spent time in the political arena, with Keep Santa Fe Beautiful at-large board member Harvey Van Sickle, 66, and social worker Wesley Sandel, 63, seeking the estimated 265 signatures needed to appear on the ballot, too.

“I have as good a chance as anybody else,” said Van Sickle, who, like the other candidates, must have petition signatures submitted to the city clerk by the end of October.

With the current field of known quantities and unknown upstarts, there’s not much consensus on what — or who — might move voters.

“At this point, I don’t know what anybody’s platform is,” said Karen Heldmeyer, a former city councilor. “It’s going to come down, to a certain extent, to: What do we want City Hall to be? Who do we want City Hall to benefit? Those are the questions I think people need to ask.”

The next mayor will be the city’s first fulltime chief executive. Coss said the new role requires someone who has “a lot of knowledge about City Hall and city government, and how to make the snow get removed and the potholes get fixed and the weeds cut — but also how to lead a city.

“It’s a difficult time, and they’re gonna have to be a unifier,” he added.

Beyond the basics?

Before Gonzales made clear he would not seek a second term, there had been only one announced candidate, the three-term incumbent from District 4, City Councilor Ron Trujillo.

“I wasn’t fearful of running against the current mayor, and now, all of a sudden, as soon as the current mayor decided he wasn’t going to run, you have everybody that threw their hat into the ring,” said Trujillo, 48. “If being mayor was something that you wanted to do, don’t you think you would’ve joined the race earlier as well?”

From the get-go, Trujillo began to craft a platform centered on his stalwart advocacy for “the locals” and local concerns — improved road repair, public safety, parks maintenance and clearance of the plague of weeds that afflicts city streets and medians on an annual basis.

Trujillo’s message seemed tailored to counter the Gonzales administration and build on the critiques he launched during the sugary-drink tax debate in May. With his presumptive foil gone, Trujillo said he still doesn’t plan to change his message or his campaign. But now there will be plenty of different messages with

which he’ll contend.

Despite the initial bumper crop of mayoral aspirants, Vince Kadlubek, chairman of the city Planning Commission and chief executive of the arts collective Meow Wolf, said the race boils down to Trujillo and Webber. Kadlubek said he has gone so far as to ask Ives to drop out.

“I have yet to hear back, but I put it out there,” said Kadlubek, who supports Webber. “I’m not the only one. I know there’s a lot of people who are trying to figure out how we can get this down to just two candidates.”

Ives, for his part, said Friday night he would not leave the race. “At least at this point in time, such is not my intention,” he said.

Still, Kadlubek said it would be “tragic” if the city’s next mayor, its first to be considered a “strong” full-time chief executive, were elected without a majority vote, which some fear will happen with votes scattered between several candidates.

“Not having ranked-choice voting, plus having this many candidates, it would be such a travesty if our mayor was elected on less than 20 percent of a vote, or even less than 30 percent of the vote,” he said.

Kadlubek was referring to a voting system, sometimes called “instant runoff,” in which voters rank the candidates in each race with more than two candidates rather than cast a vote for a single contender. The system was approved by voters in 2008 but still has not been implemented in city elections.

Heldmeyer, a close observer of city government, said the conversation about basic services is only the beginning.

“Everybody’s going to have to say they’re going to make the core behaviors of City Hall run correctly,” she said. “Problem is, the focus has so far been on kind of the low end of the work — the stuff in the weeds, the stuff people can personally observe.”

Other core city functions — namely land use, long-term planning and finance — are “maybe not as easily observed by the public, but they are just as or more impactful, and people aren’t talking about those things,” Heldmeyer added. “So far what we’ve heard is the day-to-day, constituent-service kinds of things.”

Behind-the-scenes city operations, in particular in financial and accounting affairs, might indeed now rise to the fore after the release last week of a stinging external review that found “extremely high risks of fraud” in municipal operations.

A telephone poll in late August found the top issue for city voters was the economy, followed closely by education. Ranked third were roads and infrastructure; behind that were city services and parks.

Path to mayor’s office

The past three mayoral elections suggest north-side District 1 voters will turn out in the highest total number to vote for mayor; southeast-side District 2 has rated second in each of those contests dating back to 2006, with south-central District 4 close behind in each. Southwest-side District 3 had by far the fewest voters in all three mayoral elections.

House Speaker Brian Egolf, a Democrat and Santa Fe lawyer, said the conventional wisdom in Santa Fe is that Districts 1 and 2 decide the mayor’s race. But voter turnout in the two other council districts shot up during the special election in May, when voters rejected a proposal to tax sodas and other sugary drinks to fund early childhood education programs.

“I think that should make people start to reconsider where votes for mayor will come from,” Egolf said. “It showed that people who were organizing against the soda tax seemed to have done a pretty good job of, if not organizing, at least motivating some voters who aren’t traditionally participating in city politics.”

In his pair of successful mayoral elections, in 2006 and 2010, Coss won by wider margins than Gonzales did in 2014, but both men won every district. So, in recent contests, a successful candidate has connected with at least a plurality of voters all across the city.

“It was important to me to have relationships and get votes in every district, and so I think that’s what helped me, and I think that’s also what helped Javier,” Coss said.

Coss, a city councilor from the south side before he became mayor, added a successful candidate in March will reach voters across all areas of the city — especially now, with a field of candidates that is diverse and larger than many expected.

“I think the winner’s going to run it as a citywide effort,” Coss said.

Staff writer Daniel J. Chacón contributed to this report.