The City Council is branching out
Judging by the crowd, the Southside has been waiting a while to speak to City Hall.
At the first regular City Council meeting in the southern part of town in recent memory, almost 200 people showed up to see how governing body works, to listen and to speak.
"We're here to remind you of the promises you made," Cecilia Medina told the council in Spanish. She urged more attention to parks, roads and—as the mother of a 9-month0old—better opportunities for child care.
"We are the base economically," said Claudia Lopez, one of those listening to a Spanish-language interpreter through headphones and an advocate for fair pay.
The Wednesday evening crowd at the Southside Library spilled into an overflow room with a closed-circuit feed of the meeting where the interpreter quietly spoke the details from the council into a microphone for a handful of Spanish-speakers who listened on headphones.
It's not as quaint as Santa Fe's historic neighborhoods, but one could argue this is the true heart of Santa Fe. Much of the city's growth over the past two decades has been on the southern end of town. District 3 Councilor Chris Rivera pointed out at the beginning of the evening that there are four elementary schools, a junior high and a high school clustered within 5 miles of each other.
The satellite meeting, which had been discussed by a number of candidates in the latest election—including Webber—was spurred by a suggestion by incoming District 3 Councilor Roman Abeyta, who told his colleagues Wednesday night, "not only should we have our council meetings here, but our committee meetings, too, if there's something of interest on the agenda."
"I think this is just the beginning of something we need to do on a regular basis," Webber told the council. "We want to bring City Hall to the people." The incoming mayor has said he'd like to hold a council meeting in each district, and Abeyta pressed him to set a schedule for the rest of the year so neighborhoods can get ready.
While the city's last election on March 6 was popular, turnout in the Southside's District 3 still lagged all other parts of the city. It was more than doubled by its neighbor to the east, District 4. Its turnout was tripled by District 2 and nearly quadrupled by District 1.
"Clearly, if you're passionate about something, you're going to get out to vote," Rivera told SFR after the meeting. He suggested the city explore combining municipal elections with other political subdivisions to boost the impact of voting and, hopefully turnout. The Legislature recently approved measure that would allow cities, school boards and the like to have concurrent elections.
Abeyta said making satellite meetings common can help drive that passion.
"Sometimes there's a sense that everything happens on the other side of town," he told SFR. "If we're down here more often, it will make people feel like they matter, because they do."
Tuesday night, the evening before the council meeting, a half-dozen neighborhood advocates sat in the chilly common room of the Boys and Girls Club of Santa Fe as snow fell outside.
The group, five older men and a woman who is a longtime neighborhood organizer, were trying to figure out how to inject some political urgency into Southside neighborhoods. Abeyta and Rivera sat at the table and offered a few suggestions.
It's tough, acknowledged Pilar Faulkner, who helped grow neighborhood support more than a decade ago for the library in which the City Council held its meeting Wednesday.
"Everyone has kids and they're busy," she told the group, and often, simple pleasantries and getting to know your neighbors goes by the wayside. But getting younger people involved in city politics is the polish on the brass ring that is a more active Southside political community.
Several times Tuesday, the group spoke about that fact that younger families are drawn to tech-based gathering spaces, like Facebook or, more recently, the website Nextdoor. Virtually meeting neighbors has taken the place of actually meeting them.
Jerry Joyce, who organized the group along with Larry Silva and a handful of others, said the Tierra Contenta community has long struggled with maintaining its roads and sidewalks. In the huge development, the city doesn't own the thoroughfares. And the group said the cash-strapped neighborhood doesn't have the funding to keep paving and pulling weeds.
Plenty of families are interested in making the neighborhood look nice, the group reasoned, if it can work with the city to make it easier to do so. A couple hours at a time, it can pull people in to pull weeds and meet the folks who live next door or on the next block.
Add public safety to the mix—a topic on both Tuesday and Wednesday nights—and Southside councilors and neighborhood advocates think they might be able to push the city to the political prominence its population could dictate.
