Whether it’s busting rocks or kicking tails, Marty Chávez is back
Marty Chávez spent much of the pandemic working on his own infrastructure. He built a patio. Constructed some planters. The list goes on.
“YouTube has guided my life for every DIY project imaginable,” he says. “I love that stuff.”
Yeah, but what Chávez loves most is politics, the nitty-gritty and sometimes ugly dirty work of moving government from point A to point B. It was his trademark — and perhaps, his downfall — in three terms as mayor of Albuquerque; the first real Hizzoner of the Duke City. Chávez is not a big man, but he was a steamroller, guided by this mantra: When it was all over, he was going to look back and see the things that got done, not how many companions or compromises he made along the way.
And Chávez got things done. He dragged Albuquerque toward water sustainability with the help of the San JuanChama project. He built a new bridge across the Rio Grande, something that had taken four decades of hemming and hawing to accomplish. He pushed through a charter school.
But as it does with all mayors, pouring concrete, busting rocks and kicking butts cost him.
Once the state Democratic Party’s brightest star, a guy who had the Clintons’ ears at the height of their power in the ‘90s, a candidate primed to topple a sitting Republican governor, Chávez’s political star eventually faded. By 2012, he was an afterthought, finishing third in the 1st Congressional District primary behind Eric Griego and the winner — a charger named Michelle Lujan Grisham. Maybe you’ve heard of her.
That’s where it gets interesting, because gobs of federal cash, Marty Chávez’s drive and Lujan Grisham’s ambition are about to merge.
Chávez, 69, was one of three people named by the governor to oversee projects that will be funded by $3.7 billion in federal money coming from the recently passed federal infrastructure bill. Though Chávez had never completely evaporated from politics — he’s a national committeeman for New Mexico to the Democratic National Committee — the appointment puts him back in the political arena. Maybe at the center of it.
The infrastructure money, Chávez says, could change the face of a state.
Still, there’s much that isn’t known — about the money, about how it will be distributed, about the things on which it will be spent. The state Supreme Court recently put the brakes on the governor when it sided with some Republican and Democratic state senators, barring her from doling out federal pandemic relief funds without the approval of the Legislature. But the court’s written ruling still has not been issued, so there could be details that either clarify the process — or complicate it.
Chávez is direct: He says he was brought aboard with the charge of getting money out the door. “But I want to be clear,” he adds. “The governor’s direction to me before even then [the Supreme Court ruling] was, we’re going to work with the Legislature. That was a given from Day One.”
He says he is calling every member of the Legislature to talk about it. But it’s clear the administration is not interested in looking at the money like pork spending on steroids. Chávez says Lujan Grisham sees the funding as something that could spur something huge — currently the favored buzzword is “transformational” — in New Mexico.
But to do that, Chávez and his fellow