Evan Chandler
On Nov. 1, former City Manager John Blair said goodbye to Santa Fe after nearly three years on the job. He announced his resignation Oct. 22 to take an as-yet undisclosed job in Washington, D.C. Ahead of his departure, SFR caught up with Blair, who recounted his time in the position while he packed up his office. This interview has been edited for clarity and concision. (Evan Chandler)
What’s your biggest takeaway and regret from being city manager?
I genuinely feel I’ve helped my hometown be a better place to live and to work. I was born in Albuquerque, but I grew up here, and that’s probably the biggest takeaway for me. Broadly, I do think I’ve helped create a culture of teamwork and compatibility and empathy for each other. We’re stronger when we work together, and we get more done. As for regret, there’s never enough time. There’s always wanting to do more, and so it’s about learning how to juggle being there for your employees and your team and supporting them when they need that, but also being able to be there when it’s just a function of things getting done faster.
During your final comments at your last governing body meeting, you talked about how sometimes it feels like everyone has been “othered” in some way. How do we overcome that?
I genuinely think that we have an epidemic of loneliness in the country…and what I continue to see is that it affects our elected officials as much as it does our residents, and informs how they approach things. Part of my work has been about building relationships and building community. My experience has been that when you have an interpersonal relationship with people that you work with and the people that you represent, you’re much less inclined to burn it to the ground when there’s something difficult to work through. It’s easier to have productive and destructive conversations. It is not lost on me that me having grown up here has been meaningful for a lot of people, and yet I still get othered because I recognize that for some people, I represent what they fear about Santa Fe. There’s a fear of people who don’t know me that I look like a wealthy, white, progressive person who’s moving here from fill-in-the-blank state and is changing Santa Fe, even though it’s not true. Sometimes when I talk about things like, I want to modernize city government, for some people, that sounds scary or exclusionary, but when they realize I’m actually from here and I don’t have any interest in causing harm to anyone who also grew up here, they are more willing to talk about it.
Was it in your mind at all that you were serving this role as the first openly queer city manager, and how much did that weigh into how you approached your job?
We didn’t have queer leaders when I was a kid, and I didn’t come out of the closet until my early mid-30s, in part because I didn’t understand how I could do the work that I love and be who I am. When I came out of the closet, one of the things I was able to rationalize was that I feel some shame around the fact that I didn’t come out until I was in my 30s, and that there were people who were braver and stronger than me, who were able to do it when it wasn’t as popular, wasn’t as cool, and I’m cognizant as well that I’m a white, cisgender guy, and a lot of privilege comes with that still to this day. So what I committed to doing after I came out was to be as out as possible, to create a safer space for people. For me, it’s about trying to be for other kids what I didn’t have. I still continue to firmly believe that when straight people come to realize that they know someone who is queer—whether they’re a colleague down the hall, an elected official or their neighbor—it does help to break down stigma. It is striking in the climate that we’re in right now, of all the anti-queer rhetoric in this election cycle, particularly for nonbinary and trans people, particularly with trans youth, it is still a dangerous place. What’s weird is that, in many ways, some of the ugliness I’ve encountered in this job feels exactly like that, and it sort of takes me back to being that 14-year-old boy who doesn’t really understand anything about who he is, or what he’s about to become but knows the fear.
