‘I wanted to do things and make a difference’
Entrepreneur-author claims he is a political hybrid
Alan Webber wasn’t used to being asked the question. It’s a question he usually asks other people who aren’t native Santa Feans. What brought you to Santa Fe?
“That’s a question I like to ask people. What’s your Santa Fe story?” the entrepreneur and author said in an interview last fall, a day after he announced his candidacy for mayor at what was billed as a “Big Tent” event at Meow Wolf.
For him, it was happenstance.
In 2000, Webber and investors sold
Fast Company, the business magazine he co-founded five years earlier, for $365 million.
“We were looking to start a new chapter in life,” he said of he and his wife, Frances Diemoz, a native of Glenwood Springs, Colo., who at the time was contemplating a job offer with the city of Aspen. Their daughter Amanda was then attending Colorado College and had plans to visit a friend in Santa Fe.
“We decided to meet in Santa Fe,” said Webber, who at the time was living in Boston. “We walked around, saw what was happening in the city and got plugged in. We decided everything we want is here.”
“Everything” meant top-flight music performances and good bookstores.
Webber says he reads to relax and is currently in the middle of Sidney Blumenthal’s three-volume set on Abraham Lincoln. He also enjoys listening to music — country and western, the blues and Bruce Springsteen are among his favorites — and taking the dogs to the dog park.
With their two children grown up and living
in Santa Monica, Calif., Webber and Diemoz are now raising a pair of Italian water dogs, 2-year-old Cappy and 1-year-old Picolo.
The couple also decided to stay in Santa Fe, because they found the people here to be welcoming.
“It was not a calculated move,” he said. “If people say I’m a carpetbagger, nothing could be further from the truth.”
In an interview last month, Webber says he has heard criticism from people who say he shouldn’t be mayor because he’s not from here.
“When I hear that, it makes me smile,” he said. “Because what they are really telling me is, ‘I’m really proud of being from here; I want you to know that.’ But for a lot of people, what they really want to know is, ‘Can you make my life better?’ That’s what they really want from a mayor.”
Webber acknowledged “a network of people from all over the country who still like me.” That was before campaign finance reports were released last week showing he has raised more than $209,000 so far, nearly $69,000 from out of state, and more than double the combined total of what the other three mayoral candidates running privately financed campaigns had raised.
A St. Louis native, Webber moved to Oregon after graduating from Amherst (Mass.) College to work for the political journal, The Oregon Times. He got involved in city government as an aide to Portland city councilor Neil Goldschmidt and later served as policy adviser to Goldschmidt when he was elected mayor of Portland. He stayed on with Goldschmidt and moved back east to Washington, D.C., when Goldschmidt was picked as Secretary of Transportation by then-President Carter.
“There’s not a straight line to my career path,” he says. “I didn’t have a career path. I wanted to do things and make a difference.”
Webber zagged back into publishing, taking over as managing editor for the Harvard Business Review. He has written and co-authored several books, and has written columns that have appeared in the New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, USA Today and others.
Since moving to New Mexico, Webber started One New Mexico, a nonprofit that aims to advance a new economic strategy for the state. He has served as a consultant to many businesses, including the rapidly expanding arts collective Meow Wolf and San Francisco Bay Area transplant Descartes Labs, which has
moved its headquarters to Santa Fe.
Webber, 69, ran for office once before, seeking the Democratic nomination for New Mexico governor in 2014. While he gained overwhelming support from voters in Santa Fe County, he lost to Gary King, who went on to lose to Gov. Susana Martinez.
“The campaign for governor was a lot of fun, and we’ve seen a lot of positive energy left over from that,” Webber said of his new campaign.
Webber describes himself as a hybrid politically, both pro-business and socially progressive.
“Republicans said, ‘There’s no such thing,’ ” he said. “I said, ‘If there’s no such thing, how do you explain me?’”
One thing that sets Webber apart from the other four mayoral candidates is that he has never been on the city’s payroll. He’s also the only one to serve as a company CEO, which he sees as advantage.
Due to voter-approved changes to the city charter, Santa Fe’s next mayor will be the city’s first full-time mayor with added powers, such as the authority to hire and fire highlevel city officials without the consent of the City Council, setting legislative priorities and drafting a budget.
“I love my fellow candidates dearly, but I’m the only one with management experience with an operation this large,” he said of the city, which functions on a nearly $400 million operational budget. “I’m not saying that you run government like a business. It’s not the same. You can say there are skills that are transferable, like a devotion to detail and the ability to work with people, but I have no illusions about walking into City Hall and start giving orders.”
No matter how the March 6 election turns out, Webber says he’s not going anywhere and he won’t run for governor again. Santa Fe is the end of the road for him and Frances.
“Santa Fe is a place where you come to live on purpose. People live here because they want to be here, not anywhere else,” he said. “I’m home. I love this city.”