Mayor: Progress report needs update
Keller wants a more useful, modern format
Albuquerque Mayor Tim Keller says the city’s latest publicly issued “progress report” is full of outdated information and that he plans to work with City Council and the citizen group that creates it to develop a more useful, modern format for the future.
The 2018 Albuquerque Progress Report, released Sunday, charts the city’s headway reaching eight broad goals. It uses 59 indicators, comparing Albuquerque’s numbers to comparable cities and national averages when possible.
The scorecard rated Albuquerque’s status on 27 of the 59 indicators as “undesirable,” including most of those in the public safety and economy categories. But much of the data comes from 2016 or 2017. The score did not reflect recent job announcements — Keller said the Downtown area will see about 2,000 jobs come on-line this year — or the city’s latest crime statistics. Those numbers, released in late December, show all crime except gun violence falling from 2017 to 2018, with drops in robbery, auto theft and auto burglary measuring at least 29 percent each.
While Keller said crime “is still way too high,” he said he’s optimistic about the recent progress.
But the new progress report is “telling us a lot of what essentially I knew even coming into the job (in December 2017) and why I ran for the job in the first place,” Keller said Sunday. “We’re really excited about next year’s edition, because that’s hopefully going to reflect our administration’s approach.”
A 1997 ordinance created the Albuquerque Indicators Progress Commission, an appointed citizen group, and charges it with the biannual report.
The mayor said it was cutting edge at the time but is now “a decade behind in its sophistication” and questions its current value given the amount of trailing data incorporated. He said the internet should make it easier to include more citizen feedback and gather data to produce more frequent versions. He suggested that a quarterly report would be more helpful as would a review of the peer cities used for comparison. Currently, the peer group includes Colorado Springs, El Paso, Oklahoma City, Tucson and Salt Lake City.
City Councilor Ken Sanchez said Sunday that the commission’s work has always impressed him but that he would support an effort to modernize the report, perhaps making it more regular or changing the format.
“It’s 20 years old, and any time we can make improvements, I think it’s beneficial to the city, and also for the (commission) members,” he said. “I think they’ve got to be somewhat frustrated also because of things being so old.”
The commission did not respond to a Journal inquiry sent Sunday afternoon to its email address.
While the 2018 scorecard rated Albuquerque poorly in many public safety and economic metrics, it showed that Albuquerque compared positively to peer cities on indicators like citizens’ proximity to parks, air quality and water usage.