Mayor patches potholes, finds perception harder to smooth
Gonzales pitches in to repair roads, receives some cheers, plenty of criticism
Mayor Javier Gonzales traded a suit and tie for blue jeans and work boots Friday to fill potholes alongside city employees.
Gonzales, who recently launched a Twitter account that allows residents to tweet pictures and locations of potholes with the goal of fixing them within three days, said he wanted to experience firsthand the work city employees do.
“So many times you have politicians who will say things and promise things, and you don’t have really a good understanding of the people on the ground who are responsible for delivering those promises,” he said while taking a short break from patching potholes at Don Gaspar Avenue and West Barcelona Road.
Gonzales’ hands-on endeavor was immediately met with ridicule and cynicism on social media, especially since the mayor and his administration have been harshly criticized for failing to take care of the basics, from potholes to weedy medians.
“Puro show!” Emilia Martinez wrote on a Facebook post that included pictures of the mayor holding a shovelful of asphalt and operating a heavy roller that compacts the asphalt. “Photo Op 101,” wrote R.J. Laino. “You must admit this is fairly laughable,” commented Loveless Johnson, a spokesman for Smart Progress New Mexico, which worked to defeat Gonzales’ proposed tax on sugary beverages to fund preschool programs.
City Councilor Ron Trujillo, who is running for mayor on a platform that includes getting city government to focus on basic municipal services, such as street improvements and public safety, said he was glad to see the mayor patching potholes.
“I’m the one that made the comment ‘potholes before politics’ when we had the discussion about the sugar tax,” Trujillo said. “So am I happy that stuff is being done around the city? You’re darn right I am.”
Trujillo, whose relationship with Gonzales started to sour publicly in 2016 when Gonzales took away his chairmanship of the Public Works Committee and also moved him toward the end of the L-shaped dais in council chambers, said the increased attention to potholes and overgrown weeds in the city’s public parks and traffic medians should have started years ago.
“A lot of this stuff could’ve and should’ve been addressed within the last four years,” Trujillo said. “Why do I think the mayor is out there now? I could give you reasons, but I’m not going to go into that. I can tell you this, I’ve worked many times with our workers with the city, at the parks going and filling in gopher holes, prairie dog holes, throwing trash with our guys. I’ve done that many times. I don’t need pictures of me working to know that I was out there.”
The mayor recently criticized Tru-
“I think this is just as important, having a shovel in my hand focusing on potholes, as it is convening a group of early childhood advisers to figure out how we focus on early childhood.” Mayor Javier Gonzales
jillo for the condition of the city’s streets and parks because Trujillo had been a member and then-chairman of the Public Works Committee for so long.
“Ronnie’s running for mayor, so I get why he’s attacking the city,” Gonzales said. “What’s strange is the former chairman and longtime member of the committee in charge of infrastructure ducking accountability for streets and parks he allowed to fall apart. I came in three years ago to a parks bond mess, a $15 million deficit and $240 million in infrastructure needs that had been ignored — all on his watch.”
Gonzales, who has not yet announced whether he will seek a second four-year term as mayor next year, described as unfair the criticism that his administration has ignored basic services.
“I think the people who criticize that, it’s basically a slap in the face of every city worker who is providing services every day,” Gonzales said. “The truth is over the last three years — while we’ve made the hard decisions to reform our budget so we can invest back into our infrastructure and back into our people — there have been people every day delivering the basics, keeping our neighborhoods safe, filling potholes if they had resources, taking care of our senior citizens. So to me, that’s more of political rhetoric that causes divisiveness than it is to really acknowledge the work that employees have been doing to provide the basic services.”
After voters overwhelmingly rejected Gonzales’ proposed tax on sugary beverages in May, former Mayor Sam Pick said Gonzales still had time to “read his job description on what a mayor is supposed to do in a nonpartisan city” in order to regain voters’ trust.
“While we all like pre-K and we all like God and motherhood, our job is to deliver city services when you’re at the city level,” Pick said. “The city is nonpartisan, and they have to get back to that. [Gonzales] is going to have to get back to that.”
During his time as mayor, Gonzales has kicked off bold initiatives, including a fund to fight poverty and climate change, which the City Council agreed to fund with $300,000 this year. Gonzales has also elevated his public profile on the national stage, appearing on Fox News and CNN to challenge President Donald Trump and his immigration policies.
“What I have done as mayor is believe that Santa Fe can be aspirational in its goals, that we can focus on solving community problems — and a mayor has a rightful role in doing that — but you never forget the fact that you still have a responsibility to keep neighborhoods safe, streets cleaned, parks cleaned,” he said. “Now that we have the resources, we’re investing back into those areas. I think this is just as important, having a shovel in my hand focusing on potholes, as it is convening a group of early childhood advisers to figure out how we focus on early childhood.”
When asked why he hadn’t patched potholes until eight month before the end of his first term, Gonzales said he’s gone in the field with other city departments before.
“Early on in the term, I did a ridealong with the solid waste folks,” he said. “But quite honestly, we hadn’t been in a position where we would have the funds freed up to actually start investing back into our crumbled infrastructure. We’ve had a pothole program moving, but this year, because we’ve reformed the way we do our budget, because we’ve overcome the structural deficit, we have resources now that can be deployed out there much more aggressively.”
Gonzales said the pothole repair program on Twitter may have been impossible just a few years ago.
“Asking people to report their potholes [on social media] even a year ago or two years ago would’ve been very difficult because we hadn’t overcome the budget deficit at the city,” he said. “Now we have, and we’re asking a lot from our employees and so being that we’re asking a lot from them in terms of helping to meet some of the customer needs. I want to be out here with them and being able to work on it is pretty cool.”
Marcos Esquibel, a streets supervisor who guided Gonzales on how to repair potholes, said he appreciated the mayor taking the time to understand the work that city employees do.
“You can hear what people do for a living all the time. Unless you’re trying it, you don’t know how difficult it is or how easy it is or the complications they run into,” Esquibel said. “I was actually kind of glad that the traffic picked up the way it did because that’s one of the things we run into regularly. You’re not just filling potholes. You’re dodging cars. You have to keep your head on a swivel. You don’t really realize what it’s like until you’re standing in the traffic and having cars fly past you.”
Motorists who observed the mayor and city employees patching potholes seemed appreciative, too, occasionally waving or smiling as they drove by.
“That’s special,” a female motorist said when informed that the mayor was helping repair potholes. “I’d like to see [Gov. Susana] Martinez doing it.”