New Mexico in Focus; 1007; Albuquerque Growth

Can Albuquerque handle more growth? As contractors plan to build 85,000 new homes, city planners find ways to stretch their already limited resources. What does the city plan to do about this uncontrolled urban sprawl will have a special report in a newsmaker interview with Albuquerque's new mayor, Jim Baca, next on Infocus. Hello, and welcome to Infocus, I'm RC Chapa. A question that is often asked, and one that more and more people seem to be concerned

about, is can Albuquerque handle much more growth? In 20 years, the population is expected to double to 700,000, and it's not just Albuquerque. The population of the metropolitan area is expected to break 1 million in the same period. Complex are emerging over how to manage growth in the cost to the taxpayers. On the one hand, urban sprawl to the west is creating affordable housing for thousands of Albuquerque residents and city newcomers, but that same uncontrolled growth is creating a series of problems that will inevitably have to be dealt with. In a moment, we'll be talking with Albuquerque Mayor Jim Baca about some of these issues, but first, Kevin Lee has this background report. Four months ago, John and Nancy Matthews decided to buy their first home together. They had been renting in the knob hill area for several years and thought it was time to make a move. We were looking for a place where there was some separation from the city, the traffic and some of the more troubled areas in Albuquerque, and feeling that we could raise our family

in some security. The Matthews are not alone in choosing the west side. More and more of Albuquerque's young families are moving there. In the last eight years, 35,000 new residents have made the west side their home. We wanted to have a neighborhood where our daughter could easily find friends and where there were families around to other young families around to help to be a support to us. A place that would provide us an affordable house with the space that we wanted. We looked at some homes in the northeast heights. What we found is if we went with a new home, a newly built home, it was about $30,000 more than the same house on the west side. Don Arnold is a sales representative from Sintech's homes, one of the west side's biggest

developers. Arnold has been selling homes on the west side for several years and says he understands why families choose the area. The thing is that people are going to go where they perceive as the best place for them to live and a lot of them really feel like this is it. This may be the American dream, but many are beginning to question the cost of urban sprawl. For Albuquerque, it has met traffic problems, increased strain on the water supply and questionable air quality. Unless there's an alternative, they're going to continue to move out here and enjoy the west side in a nice newer neighborhood, newer home. But it is not just the west side. Now in Bernalillo County, contractors are planning to build 85,000 new homes. This new growth is expected to cover 34,000 acres of land. And it was not that long ago that Albuquerque was a city compact enough to fit mostly between Old Town and Carlisle. In the 1930s, Nob Hill was just that, a hill, with just a few houses.

U&M set a loan on a Mesa on the edge of the city. Today, Albuquerque covers 162 square miles and the population is expected to double in the next 30 years. You know, my hope is that we're going to change that, but right now there's nothing in place that's going to prevent sprawl from continuing and getting worse. Ken Balliser is president of 1,000 friends of New Mexico, a group that advocates manage growth. If we're going to continue to expand at the fringes, then we're going to see our existing community die, and which has already been happening. When people talk about the existing community in Albuquerque, they often mean areas of the city like the Valley. It is these older and more established core neighborhoods that often pay the price of growth in Albuquerque's outlying areas.

And Sims Clark has lived in the same house in the North Valley for 65 years. Last year, the city extended Montanoa Road through her property in order to accommodate increased traffic to and from the west side. Our field used to go right across here and across where Montanoa is and our access was right down here along the mother ditch. Montanoa goes through here now, as you can see. Clark is one of a few Albuquerque residents who can recall a time when the North Valley was a different place. We rode horses down in the Bosque, and the air was sweet and fresh. We swam down in the clear ditch, and farming was the thing. There was farming and irrigating from the conservancy ditch. Life was simple and very beautiful, there were pheasant and quail and lots of quiet, peace and quiet.

Clark warns the loss of what used to be her beautiful valley, and she now fears that more changes lie ahead. I've loved living here, and I feel so lucky that I have lived here, and only time will tell. It's going to happen. There's going to be more controversy and more pressure in this valley, because there's only so much land. City leaders have proposed several new ideas to help control growth in the Albuquerque area. There has been talk of urban growth boundaries, mass transit, and cluster housing. But as long as there is a need for affordable housing, families will continue to move to the west side. As long as there's a demand for housing, and people want a newer, nicer cleaner, more dynamic neighborhoods, they're going to be moving to where the land is, and there is a large supply of land out here. As long as there's no stopping it, I think that it will continue.

For the Matthews, the west side has met all of their expectations. I'm now that we've been here for four months. We're very pleased with the neighborhood that we've chosen, with the house, and the families in the neighborhood. So all in all, I think I think it was a good move. I think that's a good move. Joining us now is Albuquerque's new mayor, Jim Baca. Mayor, thank you so much for joining us today. Well, thank you very much. I was sort of taken there with the comment of the real estate person who seemed to imply that only the west side was nicer and cleaner. There's plenty of places within this community that's not on the west side that are wonderful neighborhoods. I live in one in the north valley. The area where I grew up around a morning side in central can be a very, very nice area. I guess the whole question that we're here to talk about today is how do we keep the core area of the city intact when we grow at the fringe?

Well, the fact of the matter is that if we keep growing at the fringe, if we don't become denser, if we don't use mass transit, this will not be a livable city in the future. And the quality of life that we love so much just will disappear. Is that how you plan on controlling growth in Albuquerque is with mass transit and with the cluster housing? Right. Dancer corridors where mass transit really works. I'm not so sure you control growth, okay? We are not going to stop growth. Growth is going to occur here, hopefully not up to the limits of our natural resources, but growth will continue. So what we can do is we can manage growth. Ken Balliser of a thousand friends of New Mexico, who's also a city employee, put it pretty well that we have to really worry about the core of the city, the downtown, the older neighborhoods because every time that you extend services outside the limits that we have now, in a way you're really taking away from the core of the city. The real question I guess here too is also affordable housing.

We must figure out a way of getting more affordable housing within the core of the city. We have a great supply of land within the core of the city where we can put in high-density housing, things, neighborhoods that will be vibrant with lots of services around them instead of the way we're doing it and we have to change if Albuquerque is going to remain a good place to live. I know that downtown is one of your main concerns. How would you like the downtown to be utilized? Would you like it to bring more housing into the downtown? Absolutely. In fact, just this week I met with several people trying to find developers who will bring more housing into downtown. Downtown can be a really great place and in the areas around downtown, they can become great neighborhoods like the knob hill section of Albuquerque has become a sort of the area that I grew up in. I think that if I would like to have a set of goals of getting a thousand units of housing down in the downtown area within the next few years, whether they're apartments or town homes or something like that.

If you look at an area map of downtown and the areas around there, there's lots of vacant lots where you could put some great projects on. This is something that I hope we can really get done. I know that that seems to be the case in a lot of cities across America and they try to revitalize a downtown and some of the things that they do is provide incentives for people to move in. Is that one of the things that you would like? We're probably going to have to use some incentives because of the land cost and things like that but I think in the long run it really pays off because it puts some taxable value down there where we can get some more incomes so that we can replace the infrastructure. I grew up there near knob hill not far from there. My dad bought that house in 1947. He still lives there and it's an older neighborhood around the, are they a Fatima church area like that and that area, the infrastructure in that area is old. I mean it's 45 years old, 50 years old now and sooner or later we have to start replacing the water lines, the sewer lines, the streets, the curbs, all that sort of stuff plus doing the other things to keep a neighborhood vibrant with police safety, providing police protection.

That's hard to do if you're sending 50% of your bonding capacity to areas where people don't live yet because essentially that's what we're doing. We have to care as much about the people who live here as the people who don't live here is what I'm saying and that's going to be a hard, hard thing to do. I guess I would suggest the developers who want to develop on the fringe of the city that they've got a tougher job than somebody who wants to develop within the city and now that I've hired my new planning director, his name is Bob McCabe and he's been a long time architect here in Albuquerque with a very large firm. It's very well known to all the developers and to all of the folks that really get into municipal kinds of issues, he is a visionary, he has many of the same views that I do about how the city is going to remain livable and I'm really going to count on him not to run the planning department as a bureaucrat would but to be a visionary who will go out and sell this concept to developers, to neighborhoods, one of our biggest really stumbling

blocks to revitalizing Albuquerque's core, it could be the neighborhoods because they're not going to want to get denser, they're not going to want a condominium that may be three stories high near them so we have to convince them in over the long run this is the good thing to do. I know that some of your ideas and your visions for controlling growth in Albuquerque have as one of the tutorials, editorial put it, there's nothing short of revolutionary. Do you consider yourself a revolutionary and what kind of problems have this cost for you? I don't think I'm revolutionary at all but I got to tell you that what we have here in front of us is a job of convincing the people who have helped Albuquerque grow that we have to start growing in a different way. I don't think that's revolutionary, other cities around the west are facing this, I was director of the Bureau of Land Management in the Department of Interior of the Clinton Administration and I traveled extensively in the western United States while our public lands are and we have to think, I will tell you that every community I went into like

Boise, Sam and I to all these places are experiencing the same thing we are, everybody's looking for a way out of the old way of doing things and so what I'm doing is not revolutionary because they're doing it everywhere in this western United States and one other thing I want to say too that if we're going to keep our quality of life the way we want it, we have to not only be concerned about what's going on within the city but we have to be concerned about what's going on everywhere in our watershed all the way up to Southern Colorado because that affects the livability of this city too. So we shouldn't just focus on the municipal limits or the county limits, we have to focus on a lot more than that, you know I'm a big public land advocate, we only have three things on this earth is sustainous, one is the ocean, the other is the forest and the third are crop lands and so we can't mess up any one of those three or we just simply will have a tough time so we have to be concerned about our forests in New Mexico and our watersheds. Is that what you call regionalism that you've been saying is one of the ways we can control?

Yeah absolutely regionalism and a big player in this is going to be the county commission. The county wants to grow, there are lots of areas in the county that can grow and probably do so sensibly but I think the taxpayers have to look at both the city and the county not as I guess people who are butting heads constantly but as people who could who have the potential to make regionalism work. The county commission has some really good people on it, there are some Steve Gygos is the chairman of former city councilor, I think that we can make progress on this, not forgetting that 80% of the people who elect the county commissioners live within the city, we're county residents too so I don't think any of us want to see a lot of duplication, a lot of them fighting because the taxpayer deserves better than that. I'm going to pull a Charlie Rose on you and pull out a clip that you were talking, you were actually visionary back in 1985, you were talking about controlling growth 13 years ago and I want to discuss it after discuss your comments after this clip, can

we see the clip? We can either just let this stuff happen and the half hazard manner that it has, look what's happened in this city in the last 10 years because we didn't look that far ahead into the future. We can go up to one to bowl boulevard and see one of the ugly streets in the world, okay. It's the same thing that happened on Manol, it's the same thing that's happening on Coors and here's an ability right now to look out towards the year 2000 and figure out what kind of city our children can wake up in. We don't have to wake up in the Phoenix, Arizona or Los Angeles, we can plan way out into the future and what's wrong with that. There's absolutely nothing wrong with preparing ourselves for that because if Albuquerque grows, as it's been growing, we will reach out into those outer areas. So what are you thinking at that time? Pretty much what I think now and over the last 13 years or so since I ran that first mayor's race in 1985, I can't say that we have been successful in looking out that

far. I don't think that for one reason or another we got a handle on our growth, we just sort of reacted to it. And now we have situations on the west side of Albuquerque where this family is built to home where you're only way to get into work is to stand in line for 45 minutes a morning, to queue up to get on the I-40 or one of the bridges across the river. So I think that probably we haven't done as much as we could have and I wonder if I had been elected back in 1985 if I would have got it done because you know the economic forces for this sort of unfettered growth are pretty strong. I think the citizens of Albuquerque now are really expecting the leadership and the city and the county to look farther ahead to keep the quality of life where it should be. Well let's talk about the quality of life and the consequences if we don't do something about controlling growth and managing it somehow. Well I think what we have limits to our resources.

I think the biggest limit to one of our resources right now is our air shed. You mentioned it in the opening piece where we're bumping up again against that air quality that is so important to us all and that air quality is being affected by the automobile. Now we love our automobiles, I love my car, but sooner or later we have to get a mass transportation system that really works for people and the only way we're going to do that is on a regional basis. It was very sad for me to see the regional transportation authority go down in this year's legislature again. Rio Rancho chose to oppose it for some reason their city council which was I think very backward looking. I'm hopeful with their new council they will see the wisdom of getting together and providing a starting bus service that really serves the region that will serve people needs and so that's something I'm going to work very hard on with the new city council up in Rio Rancho and the new mayor I hope you'll do this. We have to have a system that is there for people that works for people from you know six o'clock in the morning until 10 30 at night where they know they can get the work

they know where they can get through they need to go I'm not a fool I know that all the people aren't going to use the bus but if we can get 15% of the people using a bus to get around this town that's really going to make a difference. And right now the transit system is not what it should be in Albuquerque. The transit system really needs about twice the resources that it has right now and we need the cooperation of other regional entities Albuquerque can start the system by itself. We can beef up and do some stuff it's going to be very hard this year given our current financial situation in our shortfalls and revenues but I think the citizen of Albuquerque would vote for an increase to put a mass transit system in that works and so we'll be working on that over the next year so to see if we can't get a vote out to the people. But from what I understand is that you just shut down a study on the transit system where the bus is. Well we shut down a study which wasn't needed because everybody knows that everybody wants better bus service in the middle of the night and our staff had much better things to do. Counselor Bergman sponsored this bill because he'll sponsor anything that makes him

look good okay but the fact of the matter is it was just a feel good piece of legislation that would have found out something that we already know would recommend us to spend you know millions of dollars to get something that we can't do this year and so I'll work with Counselor Bergman when it's a realistic time to do it and that realistic time to do it is when we have more revenue to do it and maybe we should put in a quarter cent sales tax for transportation something like that and if he would like to help me take that to the voters I would be more than willing to work with them to do it. Well let's let's talk a little bit about the economy I know that when Mayor for Mayor Chavez came into office his first budget he called for 19% increase in spending you're having to call for a reduction in like two to six percent and then maybe even you're also discussing a tax hike property taxes how is that looking what well what I'm proposing is it's awful I mean I don't want to spend the first six months you know having to cut six percent of the budget or two percent the fact the matter is that a lot of money would spend it's because of the gross receipts tax that we rely on for 70% of our general

fund revenues it's cyclical it goes up and down with the economy the same thing happened back in the administration of Mayor Louis of Adro but they had to cut 400 positions or so from city government the problem is the gross receipts tax is unstable it's not it's not dependable and I would suggest that we replace part of that gross receipts replace part of that gross receipts tax with some property tax we have the 48 lowest property taxes in the country the nice thing about the property taxes you can build in circuit breakers for older people which you can't do with gross receipts tax is deductible on your income tax which the gross receipts tax isn't and is not near as regressive and so it might be a way to make up some of these shortfalls and stabilize it now in the really good economic times it's not going to grow as much as gross receipts but that way we won't have a tendency to binge like has happened in the last few years and so I'm really hopeful that we can convince the public that this might be a good thing to do to stabilize our

revenues and give us a better idea of how the city can grow and react can you determine or predict at this point what the economy is going to be like in the next two or three years is it going to get better or worse well it's hard to say right now because nobody really knows I mean if I knew that I probably wouldn't be mayor I'd be owning Wall Street you know if I could predict the economy that well but we have a cyclical economy here and so we have a cyclical city government because we depend on gross receipts that comes in from that cyclical economy we need to stabilize that for everybody's good what are your plans I have lots of plans I just don't know if I'm going to have time to do them all I am I'm going to start focusing on these big issues along with the new planning director Bob McCabe I don't want to get consumed with the little things all you do have to pay attention to them you do have to keep the potholes filled and all that stuff but that's why I've hired some really good department heads I think that we have to concentrate on the future of this city on the livability of this city on our resources our water supplies

our air shed things like this so that this will remain a great place to live you know this is a great place to live absolutely wonderful place to live I wouldn't live anywhere else I love Albuquerque I'm a native I just want to make sure that my kids and grandkids and other generations have this kind of quality of life I know that one of the issues that's kind of been a thorn in your side recently is the issue of police accountability right and I know that you're hiring a new police chief where are you with that well I believe that everybody has to be accountable I'm accountable to the city council you're accountable to station management or or others I'm everybody's accountable and I think the police should be accountable to to independent review and the new police chief that I'm going to be looking for has to agree with that I don't know exactly what the formula is going to be for independent review certainly the police department should still have an internal affairs department to look after the day to day stuff and then an independent council or auditor with a staff to investigate the really serious things that might come out with some sort of appeal to and if they can't agree maybe it goes to a civilian oversight committee

with file recommendations to the chief administrative officer I mean I'm not sure how exactly we're going to do it I just know we have to do it well let me ask you the typical question that's asked at the end of an interview is how would you like to remember at the end of your at the end of your term I would just like to be remembered as somebody who did have a vision and did look to the future and cared more about what was going to happen between now and the next election I think once we get out of that kind of rut and we can thank further than the next election that's going to work for Albuquerque in the state you know we can't be making decisions just to get ourselves votes we have to make decisions for the long run thank you so much for joining us well thank you for having me if you would like to contact us here at in focus you can reach us on our website at www.pbs.org slash K&ME or at our email address at in focus at K&ME1.UNM.EDU and that's our program for this week next week and in focus special about women in science

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