‘It starts right away’
Mayor-elect jumps into transition; first council meeting next week
Alan Webber called it a “blur,” his first day as the victor of the 2018 city election.
He was the last man to leave his campaign’s election night party at Hotel Santa Fe in Wednesday’s wee hours, after latearriving results showed he had racked up 66 percent of the vote in the final round of the city’s first-ever instant runoff. Still, the mayor-elect was early to rise. “Looked at the papers,” he deadpanned with a grin. “Discovered I’d won the election. That was a high point.”
The deluge of congratulatory calls, texts and emails from friends and col-
leagues the world over — he said he’d heard from old pals as far afield as Austria and Singapore — had not abated.
The correspondence included phone conversations with three of the four candidates he’d knocked off Tuesday night: City Councilors Peter Ives, Joseph Maestas and Ron Trujillo.
“Ron and I have a shopping date,” Webber said. “We agreed — he’s gonna help me pick out a vest that looks like his.” Trujillo is known to rock a sweater bearing a Zia symbol.
Webber said he’d also reach out to the third-place finisher in the race, Kate Noble, later Wednesday.
“It’s a matter of respect,” he said of the calls, adding he wants to sit down with each of his erstwhile mayoral opponents as part of the meetings he’s already scheduled as the first steps of his transition.
“Everyone in the campaign had interesting things to say,” he said. “It would be useful not to have that simply be lost at the end of the campaign.”
Mayor Javier Gonzales paid a visit to the mayor-elect’s home Wednesday morning for what Webber said was as a 75-minute discussion about “the things I should know,” and the outgoing mayor later guided his endorsed successor on a tour through City
Hall, introducing him to various personnel.
Webber said he has scheduled talks with City Manager Brian Snyder, Finance Director Adam Johnson, interim police Chief Andrew Padilla, fire Chief Erik Litzenberg and each of the city councilors.
Alongside the governing body’s three new members, Webber will be sworn in Monday. There’s a City Council meeting scheduled two days later. The council agenda is the first order of business, Webber said, as well as making committee appointments: “It starts right away.”
Requiring immediate attention, he said, is the 2019 fiscal year budget, as well as the next steps for the city-owned Santa Fe University of Art and Design campus, which the for-profit school will vacate after a final commencement in May. Also top of mind are “contingency planning questions,” not only on the financial side but pertaining to summertime fire risks and the city’s water.
Webber has a full-time police chief to hire, as well as potentially other top administrative roles, including department heads and a full-time manager of the city-owned Santa Fe Regional Airport.
But, he said, “It’s not gonna be my style to put out bulletins: ‘Here’s our daily schedule.’ … I probably won’t announce: ‘You can expect to see the following decisions made by the first 60 days.’ But there will be a dashboard, internally at least, of the things we’ve got to focus on right away.”