Reasons to be excited about Webber
Alan Webber, who led in the Santa Fe mayoral election from the starting gate to the finish line, takes office Monday with a mandate. Or does he? Webber received 39.2 percent of the initial vote in the five-way race for mayor. With that showing, he would have won easily under the city’s old plurality system of electing its mayor.
But the history books will be kinder to Webber. They will list him with a staggering majority — 66.1 percent of the vote.
His final total was accrued through the manipulations of ranked-choice voting. Under this bizarre system, second-place votes for some candidates transform into first-place ballots for others.
Webber’s showing in the first round of balloting actually was similar to any number of previous winners in Santa Fe mayoral elections.
Mayor Sam Pick won re-election in 1990 with 39 percent of the vote, the same as Webber’s initial count.
Debbie Jaramillo received 38.5 percent in 1994. Her win was more impressive than the numbers reveal. Twelve candidates were in the race that year.
Louis Montano in 1982 and Javier Gonzales in 2014 both won mayoral elections with about 43 percent of the vote. But they were in three-way races.
Election totals aside, Webber stood out from the other candidates for mayor in five important ways.
1. He is a healer, skilled at bringing people together. His style is perfect for a melting pot city.
Even those who supported another candidate and are predisposed to dislike Webber will find it hard to do.
2. Webber will not tear anyone down, even if being negative would help him.
He ran for governor in 2014, beginning as an unknown in a five-person field for the Democratic nomination. The highprofile candidate was Gary King, then the state attorney general and the son of New Mexico’s longest-serving governor.
King had strong name recognition but a poor record. For example, King campaigned on equal pay for women, even though female attorneys in his own office said he had shortchanged them.
Webber quickly built momentum in the governor’s race. He could have attacked King in hopes of overtaking him. Instead, Webber kept it clean. He also lost to King.
3. Webber is a student of government. Ask him which mayors inspired him, and his list is long and detailed.
He mentioned John Hickenlooper of Denver, who worked to end homelessness.
Webber also liked John Lindsay, a maverick Republican who led New York City in the tumultuous 1960s. Lindsay joined in civil rights marches and walked into powder-keg neighborhoods to keep the peace while other cities burned in riots.
And Webber was a fan of Vera Katz, a three-term mayor of Portland, Ore. He campaigned for Katz when she ran for the Oregon Legislature, where she would rise to speaker of the House of Representatives. As a legislator and then as a mayor, Katz said sharing power was a means of gaining power.
She negotiated with the gun lobby and ended up with gun-control legislation. Katz in the 1970s called for a law to prohibit discrimination based on sexual orientation. It took another 30 years, but that measure became law, too. 4. Webber has a bulldog’s tenacity. As a private citizen, he fought Republican bills in the New Mexico Legislature that he believed would hurt unionized workers.
Republicans regularly and inaccurately said compulsory membership in unions had to be stopped. Webber refuted them every time. He pointed out that it already is illegal to require anyone to join a union. The GOP bills failed. 5. Webber is having the time of his life. At 69, after founding Fast Company magazine and spending years as a professional writer, he is back in government.
“Mayors leave their fingerprints on cities,” he said. I hope this one does. In a town that needs good government and good jobs, Webber’s imprint is welcome.