Challengers in ABQ Mayoral Race Looking Crazier by the Day

The performance of Albuquerque’s Mayoral challengers at a recent forum left the audience about as comfortable as a priest at a Miley Cyrus performance. Mayor Berry can simply adopt the campaign slogan of, “Hey, I’m the only sane one in the race” as his mantra.

Pete Dinelli supports something called Project Labor Agreements which even Santa Fe repealed because it was found to be too wasteful. These agreements raise prices of public projects and have been found to exclude women and minorities from PLA jobs.

Paul Heh thinks New Mexico is a Right to Work state. The answer to this question (it isn’t) takes less than 10 seconds to find on the Internet. One wonders what other misconceptions he’ll take into the Mayor’s office with him. Oh, I just found it. Heh has sent out a press release calling into question the legitimacy of the FBI’s statistics on crime (the ones that indicate that crime is down in Albuquerque). He claims that with 200 officers fewer on the streets that “If there is no report, then there is no incident for the FBI to count.”

Sounds fishy to me. I haven’t heard any news reports about police not showing up to take care of murders or other violent crimes, yet those rates have dropped. One would think that such problems would make news as they have in Detroit. After all, if a friend or family is murdered or violently assaulted, people are going to AT VERY LEAST want the cops to come and take a report of the incident.

Heh also fails to make a compelling case that more cops = less crime. Like any policy, there is a law of diminishing returns. Does Albuquerque have too few, just right, or too many cops? That would be a good bit of data to have, but Heh would seemingly rather govern in a vacuum.

Berry is not always as conservative as RGF might like. We’d love to have seen him bring in private managers for the City’s golf courses and zoo. But in the valley of the blind, the one-eyed man is king. Mayor Berry is doing better than that as compared to Dinelli and Heh.