Mayor’s 1st act should be firing city clerk
Nobody will mind if Mayor-elect Alan Webber arrives at City Hall with a mop, a bucket and a pink slip filled out with indelible ink.
A fast, thorough cleaning of the City Clerk’s Office is mandatory.
Never again should Santa Fe residents endure an election that was run as badly as the one Tuesday. As a full-time mayor with sweeping new powers, Webber can make a move that is long overdue. He has the unilateral authority to fire City Clerk Yolanda Vigil, who presided over the torturous election.
It took Vigil’s crew almost five hours Tuesday night to tabulate about 20,600 votes.
Texas’ primary election drew about 2.5 million voters Tuesday, yet its results were available in half the time it took Vigil to process Santa Fe’s.
And the New Mexico towns of Hatch, Roswell and Española, all with fewer resources than Santa Fe, wrapped up mayoral elections in a fraction of the time it took Vigil.
As is typical of City Hall staff members, Vigil is offering a scapegoat. She is blaming her inefficiencies on Santa Fe’s new ranked-choice voting system.
Her claim won’t fly. Ranked-choice voting did not bog down returns.
Teams that Vigil assembled in the field were slow in bringing in ballot boxes from certain polling centers, according to technicians who provided the software program for ranked-choice voting.
And the ranked-choice voting system could not commence until Vigil had the ballots in hand.
With midnight approaching, Vigil finally had complete results. Instead of being embarrassed that she had run the worst election in the state, she grandstanded.
Vigil dragged out her verbal announcement of the winners. She could have posted them on the city website, but then she would not have been the center of attention.
Vigil has a track record of inefficiency and a taste for self-aggrandizement that date to elections before ranked-choice voting was used.
Four years ago, she sat on election results so she could stand in City Hall, reading aloud piecemeal returns from polling places. As Vigil prattled, advocates for the charter amendment to make the mayor a full-time city employee arrived in a celebratory mood.
The advocates had a mole inside the City Clerk’s Office. They were tipped that their issue had been handily approved by voters.
But instead of providing the definitive results that she already had, Vigil kept reading partial totals. The spotlight was squarely on her, exactly where she wanted it.
Webber’s campaign on Tuesday had runners checking and compiling totals from each of the 12 voting centers. His operation provided the first clear breakdown of votes for all five mayoral candidates.
Later, Vigil posted on a door at City Hall a hodgepodge listing of numbers from early voting. After some deciphering of the jumble by ordinary people, it became apparent that Webber was on his way to winning the election.
Even so, the city clerk remained silent for two more hours.
By the time election night mercifully ended, it was obvious that Webber had put together a better field operation than Vigil did.
The ray of sunlight is that Webber soon will have direct authority over the city clerk, city manager and city attorney. If he wants to, he can take some time in evaluating the legal department and city manager. But he cannot dawdle with the city clerk. Santa Fe needs a new one, and everybody knows it.
Abundant talent and technology are available to run elections properly. The Santa Fe County Clerk’s Office under Geraldine Salazar’s leadership is a model of professionalism.
City elections should be just as smooth.
And so this first election with rankedchoice voting should be known for something more personal.
Webber campaigned on providing competence in government.
That will not happen until a new city clerk presides over elections.
Ringside Seat is an opinion column on people, politics and news. Contact Milan Simonich at msimonich@sfnewmexican.com or 505-986-3080.