On Nov. 4, Albuquerque voters will be choosing from a list of six people to fill the mayor’s office for the next four years. As part of a series exploring all the candidates, KUNM’s Daniel Montano spoke with incumbent Tim Keller, who is running for what would be a historic third term. Keller says he wants to finish the work he started and outlined his top priorities.
KUNM: You’ve announced you’re going to be running for a third term, and obviously we’ve only had one mayor who has actually ran for a third term since 1974, Marty Chavez, who lost to Richard Berry in 2009. For the people of Albuquerque, what do you have to say? Why do you deserve a third term?
KELLER: Well, I think there’s two reasons. And the first reason is because, you know, these are tough times, and I see what everyone else sees walking down our streets. Literally, even if I walk outside City Hall, or sometimes I get to walk to work in the morning, and there’s boarded-up buildings, there’s encampments, there’s just a sense of the city is in a really difficult place. And I agree with that. I understand that very deeply actually. Even as someone who’s born and raised here, I can remember one other era when our city was going through these tough times. I think, just one. And so for me, the difference is this, we have been trying to do the real work to actually address some longstanding, decades-old challenges that Albuquerque has been facing. Whether it’s how we deal with our unhoused and how we house them, whether it’s a police department that had tremendous challenges, these are things where we actually are breaking through. We are finally gaining traction in big ways in some of these areas. So, we have now built an entire spectrum of services for homeless folks, the Gateway System, that filled gaps that we had for decades and that just started really working around September. So now we house 1,000 people a night. That’s incredible. Ten years ago, year round, we housed zero…