Albuquerque went to the polls last week to vote on a wide variety of bond questions and candidates for City Council and the APS school board, and Chamber-backed funding for important infrastructure, community development, and public safety projects in Albuquerque – none of which will raise taxes and all of which benefit the city and help tackle key challenges — passed with strong support from voters.
In particular, voters overwhelmingly approved funding for a new 24/7 homeless shelter that will improve how our community confronts this serious and persistent problem by providing first responders with a single location to take homeless individuals and families where they can receive appropriate services outside costly visits to the emergency room or the county jail. Coordinating services from a single location will also help reduce the time the homeless spend on the streets traveling from service to service across the city.
City Council races in Districts 6 and 8 were won by Councilors Pat Davis and Trudy Jones, respectively, while the races in Districts 2 and 4 will go to runoff elections on December 10th. Councilor Isaac Benton will face challenger Zack Quintero in District 2, and candidates Brooks Bassan and Ane Romero will compete to replace Councilor Brad Winter in District 4. As the Chamber has previously expressed, we urge voters to support Bassan — a fiscally responsible, public-safety-focused, and business-minded candidate endorsed by Winter — in that race.
The Chamber also supported APS Board Member Peggy Lee Muller-Aragón for re-election in Board District 2, who won her race handily and opposed the so-called “Democracy Dollars” initiative, which would have added burdensome, likely unmanageable complications to the public financing of city elections and was narrowly defeated. Click here for more coverage of local election results.