City Council candidates cast their shadows at forum.
Punxsutawney Phil was wrong. Santa Fe will not have six more weeks of winter, but there are fewer than six weeks of politics until the city elections. Consequently, Feb. 2 was an apropos day to appraise Districts 2 and 3 Council candidates' performances in a forum sponsored by Voices of Santa Fe held at the Eldorado Hotel.
District 2
***image1***Candidate:
Marilyn Bane
Occupation:
Retired marketing executive
Performance:
Bane politely articulated her stances on the living wage (supports it), big-box development (loathes it) and water issues. But like most of the candidates, she used kid gloves to handle the economic and social impacts of immigration. Bane was downright neighborly in her opinions until she showed she has some bite to her bark by attacking development greed and government mismanagement as the root of Santa Fe's woes in her closing statement.
Score:
7
***image2***Candidate:
Rebecca Wurzburger
Occupation:
City councilor, owner of a construction management company
Performance:
At first glance, you might think Bane was the incumbent. Wurzburger seemed a bit defensive and even a little nervous in the forum's early stages, but managed to recover her confidence by her closing statement to assert her grasp of issues and her relationship with constituents.
Wurzburger largely used the city's economic planning strategy and her own sustainability plan to bullet-point her ideas. But while those two strategies informed the bulk of her stances on things like water and affordable housing, she also managed to ad-lib arguably the most salient response to immigration problems.
Score:
8
District 3
***image3***Candidate:
Carmichael Dominguez
Occupation:
Cartographer for the New Mexico Department of Transportation
Performance:
Dominguez peppered his responses with subtle digs at Montaño, asserting himself as being familiar with the city's current problems,
"not the issues of 20 years ago," and pouncing on a Montaño misstep on immigration by saying, "[immigrants] are people before they're illegal or legal." Dominguez used the bulk of his time to discuss issues-water, education, public safety, affordability-purportedly important to his constituents. He glossed over his stance on development but didn't pull punches about community segregation.
Dominguez managed to be genial even when he was cutting Montaño's legs out from under him. He softened up the low-key attacks with dry wit and reflections about his personal life but his table manners teetered the line between cordial and smug.
Score:
8
***image4***Candidate:
Anna Hansen
Occupation:
Owner of Dakini Design
Performance:
Hansen gamely tackled the living wage, traffic concerns, parks, traffic and supporting the art community but muddied her stances with cookie-cutter statements. She also tread a dangerous line when she said immigrants were good for the economy because they take "the service jobs you don't want to do" but saved face by reflecting about being a first-generation citizen herself.
Hansen had good intentions with her content but was a tad overeager in her delivery, like she was running for student body president instead of city councilor. And while she touched on relevant issues within the city, tangents like inviting the king of Spain to the city's 400th anniversary celebration disconnected her from the issues at hand.
Score:
6
***image5***Candidate:
Louis R Montaño
Occupation:
Retired employee for the New Mexico Department of Labor
Performance:
Montaño didn't harp on his political experience-former mayor and two-time city councilor-because he didn't need to. His résumé isn't at issue, it's whether or not he understands the intricacies of the modern political climate. Montaño answered that question with mixed results, discussing economic development and affordability adequately but making a gaffe on immigration by intertwining immigrants with the city's drug problem and saying he'd like to see illegal immigrants "disappear."
Montaño was also affable and politically capable without seeming like an old-timer who is still mesmerized by the invention of the microwave oven. But while he was eloquent ("District 3 has been the Orphan Annie of all the districts") and had relevant stances on pending issues like the privatization of city services, he wasn't as assertive as he could have been in showing he has his finger on the pulse of current city politics.
Score:
7
