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Rachel Mills

Mayor-Go-Round

Six people have launched campaigns for the 2025 mayoral race, and we’ve got questions …

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While the City of Santa Fe’s 2025 Mayoral Election is still eight months away, six candidates have already announced their bid for the seat held by Mayor Alan Webber, who has thus far declined to comment on whether or not he will be running for re-election this year.

“It’s way too early and we still don’t know what the full slate of candidates will look like,” Webber tells SFR via written comment. “So, no, I’m not commenting at this time.”

Although there’s still potential for more candidates to throw their hats in the ring, SFR has met with the six who already have to learn more about their individual campaigns and proposals on issues including housing, homelessness and public safety.

Candidates and their answers will be listed according to their last name’s alphabetical order. Answers have been edited for clarity and length.

Michael Garcia

Michael Garcia has represented District 2 in Santa Fe as a city councilor since 2019, and was re-elected to the position after winning a close race—by 8% of the vote—against challenger Phil Lucero in 2023. For nearly two decades now, Garcia has also been a federal employee for AmeriCorps and working for its VISTA program, a national service program in which members serve to alleviate poverty, and currently works as a program and partnership specialist for the organization.

Letitia Montoya

Running as “a concerned citizen,” Letitia Montoya is the managing partner and chief operations officer of Nebula Advisers LLC, a  local janitorial service provider that also works with volunteer citizens to retrieve lost or stolen shopping carts. Additionally, she has experience in financial organizations such as Wells Fargo, Wachovia Financial Services and Assure Financial Group, and has independently contracted financial consultant services. 

Tarin Nix 

Tarin Nix is the State Land Office’s deputy commissioner of public affairs, and in 2024 founded Fix Our City Different, an organization of citizens working to “raise awareness of our city’s shortcomings and restore good government” in Santa Fe. Nix has worked with several political and issue-advocacy campaigns, such as Stephanie Garcia Richard’s successful campaign as Commissioner of Public Lands and a campaign to raise Santa Fe County’s living wage.

Oscar Rodriguez

Oscar Rodriguez (Lipan Apache) is the chief financial officer of the New Mexico Finance Authority, and previously served as finance director of the City of Santa Fe for two years. He is also on the Santa Fe Community Foundation’s Native American Advised Fund, which supports different tribes’, schools’ and organizations’ community initiatives to promote core Native values, and is treasurer of the Santa Fe Railyard Community Corporation.

Ronald Trujillo

Ronald Trujillo is a former Santa Fe City Council member who represented District 4 from 2006 to 2018, and this is not his first run for mayor—in 2018, he unsuccessfully campaigned for the seat Webber won after four rounds of ranked-choice voting, receiving 34% of the vote in the last round. Trujillo has more than 25 years of experience in state government, and for a decade has managed the Fleet Management Bureau at the New Mexico Department of Transportation.

JoAnne Vigil Coppler

JoAnne Vigil Coppler is a qualifying real estate broker who runs JoAnne Coppler Real Estate, LLC, and is also returning for another mayoral campaign after unsuccessfully challenging Webber’s seat in 2021, having received 35% of the vote in the first round. Vigil Coppler has also represented District 4 on the Santa Fe City Council from 2018 to 2022, and worked as director of human resources for the city under the mayoral administrations of Sam Pick and Art Trujillo.

Question One

If you were to be elected mayor, what issues would you prioritize when you first step into office?

Garcia: Basic city services. There are things such as building up the infrastructure of the city, road maintenance, water line maintenance, trail maintenance, sidewalk maintenance—those have been neglected and have to be front and center. Besides that…one concern I’ve heard time and time and time again is the transparency and available information that is there for residents. Really having a community-facing government that really supports residents’ needs. I am confident that the current city team has the ability and skillset to do that. I would be restructuring the powers and duties of the mayor. The mayor has their foot in two different roles—the executive, but also as a policy maker, in the legislative side. I’d begin to separate the mayor from having that legislative role. The way the current setup is, the mayor has one vote, and each governing body [member] has a vote, so for any of the mayor’s initiatives to get through, it requires the mayor and four councilors. I would be a mayor who would encourage the council to have their own respective agendas of their districts be met. It’s not a, “This is the mayor’s way or the highway,” which we’ve seen recently. 

Montoya: Audit each department. Do it within the first 100 days, come out with a report—fix it right away. We’ve had audits that have been late. How accurate are they? We go in there, we do an audit in each department, and then we come up with a report so that we see if there’s mismanagement and spending too much on a product or different options that are going on within that department that we find—then we know that we have to fix that problem, because that’s money that we’re probably losing, that could go back into the department for giving people raises, dollar increases. We could change the dynamic of city government and run it more like a company. I fix the problem, cut the cost, use that fund to put back into the department. And like I said, it’s about bringing up the salaries to where it’s equal to the living wages, because that’s an issue that I’ve seen. A lot of people are working, but they’re not getting paid for what their job is describing, or what they have to do. More transparency is the most important part.

Nix: I would say first is a complete forensic audit. The lack of funding for projects that have been voted on repeatedly for the last four years says we have an issue. Two, addressing all aspects of crime. Our police force is almost half of what it should be from the community standpoint. That encompasses a little with the unhoused population as well—we need all of our service providers, law enforcement, everyone in one location, so they’re not only easier to serve, but also, we’re not spreading them out around town and pigeonholing them into a community that doesn’t have transportation, food, healthcare. Then, we could talk about what laws passed after we have a one-stop shop solution. I don’t like that we keep passing laws that criminalize behavior when we’re not providing solutions on the other side. And then, housing. I think there are a lot of great proposals out there, but I think there’s a healthier conversation about what we need to do in Midtown. If we want transportation, real health care services, then we need some infill happening in Santa Fe. I think the reality is, we need standard operating procedures in every division at the city, which clearly do not exist right now, not from permitting to public works.

Rodriguez: Having worked in this space and local government administration for more than 30 years, I can look at street maintenance conditions, at a lot of the things that the city does, and be able to say, “That should be a whole lot better than how it is right now.”  From day one, I would get the city to understand that, particularly the management class of city employees. I think that policy-wise, where the city needs to focus on now is how the city does its work. I very much believe that city government, unlike state government or even county government, is a very practical venue. Potholes, garbage collection, policing. Those are very basic services, front and center, and you must get them right, and you must do really well by them. The city offers its citizens quality of life based on really good services, and I think we have gotten away from that focus, and there’s other things that I think that have distracted us. I just think that by focusing on those sorts of things, we’ll be able to recenter and people will be able to enjoy better services.

Trujillo: Collaboration. The collaboration has to be communication between the city, the county, the state and education. As it is right now, we’re not talking to each other. Everything here, they say that it’s Santa Fe’s problem. Well, the education falls within the City of Santa Fe. The City of Santa Fe falls within Santa Fe County, and Santa Fe County falls within the State of New Mexico. So we all sit down, talk to each other, find out what’s working, find out what’s not working. If there’s ways that we can all work together to collaborate, working on one project or many projects, we have to have those discussions. That is my top priority, is to have collaboration between all these entities so that we can fix Santa Fe. I would definitely sit down with each councilor, to find out what their issues are, what their concerns are. That was the thing that I was able to do as a city councilor. I was able to sit down and talk with my colleagues—I have those people skills. We may not agree on something, but we need to come to a compromise. I think we have to have quarterly meetings between all our entities, within the county, city, state and education, so we’re not duplicating projects. 

Vigil Coppler: The first thing I would need to take a look at is who are in what jobs. You have to determine whether that team is going to work for you. The number one thing about success is hiring the right people, hiring qualified people, experienced people, to carry out their functions, and if you don’t have that—it’s kind of what’s going on now. The city is not functioning well. I’m pretty well known in the area of hiring and, when I was with the city, I put in new personnel rules. I think the city’s HR system is broken, and it’s been broken for some time, and I definitely would make sure we have the most fair, advanced, progressive human resource system that really goes out and brings to the table the right fit, not only for the department directors and the people that would report to me and to the city manager, but for all employees, and ensure that people are treated fairly and honestly and are given due process, are developed to the best of their potential. It’s key to run an organization the size of this city.  

Question Two

What solutions do you want to push to improve the state of housing in Santa Fe?

Garcia: I will soon be releasing a blueprint for Santa Fe’s success that will outline issues such as housing…the way I look at it is to ultimately build a sustainable support system for housing, whether it be for the unhoused, affordable housing or workforce housing. I’ve really been a champion for addressing the affordable housing needs in our community.  A good example of that is working to fully fund the Affordable Housing Trust Fund—it’s one accomplishment I’m proud of. Another is working to identify city-owned property that can be donated for affordable housing development. We’ve identified a 16-acre parcel on the north side of Santa Fe that could be used to develop over 100 affordable units, and that is a project that is going to be gaining some more steam shortly. When the Community Development Plan was presented to the governing body back in 2022, the initial plan was to have 20% of all housing developed on the Midtown campus be affordable housing. Myself and one of my colleagues, Councilwoman Villarrea…we ultimately raised that to 30%.

Montoya: From all the research I do right now, when they have a development, there’s zero affordable housing loans. They pay a fee of $150,000, so, that means they don’t have to develop any form of affordable housing…we need to change that within city government, to make it so that if they don’t produce affordable housing, they get penalized $150 per day until they do, because we need to start standing up for the people of Santa Fe and the one way we’re going to do it is we have to hurt them in the pocketbook. Rent control is another portion we don’t have…we need to put a cap and bring it back into reality, and look and see what the average rate is in a city like this somewhere else, and bring down the rent to that cost. Section 8 should keep up with the inflation rate, and it’s not so. A lot of these city officials know about it, and have they done anything about it? The answer is no. And do they care? The answer is they don’t care. They’re letting things that are so basic disappear in front of us. And that’s a no. In my heart, that has to stop.

Nix: I don’t think we’re going after enough state or federal funding right now when it comes to expanding that kind of buildout. The city is going to have to get more aggressive on building its own—not only Section 8 housing or voucher worthy housing—because we don’t have enough in this town right now. We need a density level for apartments, so that way we can have actual affordable units. If we can’t get to six stories, the developers can’t have parking on the first story, and then affordable units above. Everyone’s priced out, because right now we’re at three stories of build, and so to make their money back, they’re higher [priced] units. I think there’s also a conversation about how we start locking in rent and pricing…with the county and the treasurer and the assessor’s office, to say we can’t keep increasing their tax roll if we’re going to ask them to stop increasing their rents. There’s going to have to be a lot of conversations and teamwork between both entities.

Rodriguez: There is a spectrum of things that the city can do to address the problem of housing scarcity. Everything from expediting or streamlining the permitting process, the whole development process, to capital investment in infrastructure that will put into play and make possible a lot more developable lots and the services that go along with it—the sidewalks, the streets, the parks, the maintenance of public places—so that those spaces you do provide have all the amenities such that people will find it desirable to live in any part of the city. I’d be proposing targets—that we are going to have X number of developable lots or land that can be developed for housing, and we’re gonna have X number of housing units brought online year after year, in order for us to not just keep up with growth, but also make up the backlog for housing. [Housing] is vital, and it’s at the level of a problem that we should genuinely consider it an emergency.

Trujillo: Affordability has never been defined. What’s affordable for some people isn’t affordable for other people. The city has gone round and round with this issue—how do we keep people living here in Santa Fe and not having them move to Rio Rancho and other places where housing is a lot cheaper. We need to build affordable housing on pieces of the property that the city owns. When I was on the council, we had the Northwest Quadrant, which supposedly was going to be built and made for affordability, that never came to fruition. I believe parts of it were either sold or were given. That’s the thing that I want to look at. I want to look at parcels of property that the city owns, or possible property that the city can buy, so we can put that affordable housing on there and make it available to the people.

Vigil Coppler: We need housing. When you don’t have enough housing and there’s less of it, prices go up. It’s supply and demand. I have been a realtor for a long time, and we know this kind of business. The other part of this is we need to really streamline the planning and land use permitting process. When I ran for mayor, the study we did through the National Association of Realtors was, what does it cost a building company in monetary value when they have to wait months and months and months for permits? The impact, we found, was $40,000 a month. They’re not building for free. The tenant pays the cost, and that’s why rents are so high. That’s how you tackle affordable housing. You build more of it. You make sure you don’t have roadblocks to builders that increase their costs. You make it so that you get things out and approved in a timely manner, and you speed up the bureaucracy to do that. 

Question 3

What solutions do you want to push to improve the state of homelessness in Santa Fe?

Garcia: I would take a more coordinated and collaborative approach to ultimately providing a robust set of services to the unhoused. When I say services, it’s going to be a whole menu of options—it wouldn’t just be a shelter, so to speak. There would be many different levels of sheltering available, because there’s always the need for congregate shelters, as we saw during these recent Code Blue efforts. As we’re working towards trying to transition folks from unhoused to being fully housed, there are additional steps that can be taken, such as transitional housing, where we’re looking at the micro community model, or repurposing hotels and ultimately moving into affordable housing units. Having this type of campus provide these robust services and kind of case management services for individuals that ultimately might need that type of support…employment services, medical services, legal services—it would be dependent on the individual and their needs and what that end goal is for them. Having a very well coordinated street outreach program would be another focus.

Montoya: I think we could break up the homeless population into what their needs are, making smaller capacities throughout Santa Fe. Give them the services they need, but also give them security. We’re not going to let it be a free-for-all. They’re going to be monitored, because in order to re-engage them back into the community, they have to learn that, you know, you’re not outside no more, you’re inside. So it’s really retraining them to understand that.  A lot of these people have mental issues and need the guidance to treatments…we [could] have somebody, a licensed nurse, that would come in—they’ll be able to monitor, give them meds…but also, getting them off the drugs. That’s another issue—drug addiction is bad. Our police officers should not be held back. Those gang members, all that they’re doing is feeding all that stuff to the homeless people. We need to have stronger rules and laws in our city about those drug dealers. 

Nix: The one-stop shop, to me, is the model that is having the most success. We need to have an infirmary, medical care, we need to have food services. You need an encampment, because not everybody wants to live inside. I think a one-stop shop has to include transitional housing, as well as immediate emergency care services. You can bring stuff in, go through a metal detector, come back, come out. We can start really addressing a lot of the shopping cart issues, sidewalks and medians—all those things are a symptom. They’re not something that you make laws on right now unless you’re treating the issues that are going on.

Rodriguez: We are very blessed in Santa Fe that we have a big network of community groups and nonprofits that are active in this area. There’s a lot of cities that would be very envious of this and expend a lot of resources to try and create this network that we have. I would say, continue working with that network. As mayor, I would be pushing…that we would have targets, that we would have some very specific objectives of where that challenge sits now versus where we want to take it. I would be pushing for this network that the city works with to come up with a collaborative plan for making the [homeless] population go down. You’re never going to get to a zero solution. But the idea is to get it down as much as possible, and that means tailoring the services that are provided, applying strategies that’re proven in other places, so that the mix of services that we’re provided are achieving these objectives, of ameliorating the problem.

Trujillo: We have to look at homelessness in the future. You can’t go to any part of the city without seeing it. The city needs more outreach to the homeless population. People just walk past the homeless people—you actually need to sit and talk with them. That’s what we need to do, is we need to find out what they need. It’s the same thing with the pieces of property that we have within the city. Are there viable places to put the pallet homes? The thing that you have to get input and buy-in from is the districts that they’re going to be put into. Something that I, on the council, have seen and heard so many times—”not in my backyard.” That alone is another issue that’s the elephant in the room. You have to get buy-in from the district and those constituents to put these homes there.

Vigil Coppler: I  would put together a collaboration of people in all kinds of organizations that have familiarity with the homeless people that we have here in Santa Fe, that would be a consortium of people that we meet on a regular basis. It would be an entrenched committee in city government that gets paid attention to, budgeted if we need to budget it. If we had a cohesive, entrenched consortium that would meet on a regular basis—I would connote it to case management—and then really get these people some help. And if they didn’t want help, I mean, we need to enforce our ordinances. We need to be able to move these people. They can’t just camp on the streets. That doesn’t really solve the problem, but it should be done in cases where it has to be done. There are some businesses in our city who have taken it upon themselves to take care of the problem themselves, because the police aren’t doing it, or they are doing it, but then the people come back. 

Bonus Question

What solutions do you want to push to improve the state of public safety in Santa Fe?

Garcia: One of my priorities would be to increase the number of police officers that are within our department. We've heard many times from our colleagues in the police department that they are stretched thin, and unfortunately, the issues that police have to respond to are not going away anytime soon, so we're going to need much more officers to help with these rising issues. In conjunction with that, not only building up the number of uniformed officers, but also building up a robust public safety aid program that also can be very visible in our community and help to address some of the public safety concerns that residents have right now. One thing as mayor I will really encourage is government to government collaboration. This is not an us versus them matter. We’re all in this together, and we are going to address these challenges and develop solutions together. That's one thing I have not seen, and it's critical. 

Montoya: We need to bring public safety back to what it was in the past. Growing up, police officers knew their neighbors. They have to show that they're a part of our community, and they’ve got to show people that they do care. I know that there was something that came out about how the police force wanted more equipment…But did anybody go in there and do an audit? Do they really need to spend that kind of funding? We could need that funding for other purposes within the police department, because they don't get paid enough. Audits need to be done in every department; that's including the police department. I will support the police officers 100% because I believe in them, because we need them. We need to overhaul all the departments. And it's not firing anybody, it's restructuring and having everybody understand that we have to follow policies and procedures, and that's going to be something I will enforce in all departments.

Nix: Our police force itself is half of what other communities are, and they don't have a capital in their city, and some of them don't have the level of tourism that we have. I would like to see street teams taken full advantage of in the way they were meant to. Right now we have one, and the numbers go down every year of interactions that they're doing. It shouldn't be run through the Fire Department either. I want to see social workers, EMTs and police officers together on the streets in the communities starting to have those conversations back. I want the housing program that used to exist in our parks. We used to have double-wides in our parks that single police officers lived in not only to give them housing, but to protect the parks. I'd like to see those community-based programs back, and I think also just a level of honesty. I don't know if the numbers are what they are, but I hear a lot of people complain about not having people show up, no one filing police reports. We can't have that level of misuse that's going on.

Rodriguez: It would be the same approach—making it really clear to everybody what that problem set is. For example, in some cities, and I would be advocating for this in the city of Santa Fe—crime statistics, or even incident reports and things like that, are put out there so that the public can see that. In the neighborhood, if there is a spike in people breaking into cars, if there's a spike in traffic accidents or whatever is occurring that is affecting them. Crime presents itself differently in different parts of the community, which means that the kinds of things that you would do in different parts of the community would just have to adjust to what it is that they're facing there. Generally, that's called community policing. And I think a lot of people talk about community policing as somehow an alternative to policing. I just consider that to be modern policing, and I would be advocating for those kinds of approaches, that style of policing in the community.

Trujillo: Review, adapt and evaluate the current standards of law enforcement and public safety. We need to review what's working. If anything is working, adapt to make sure it keeps on working, and then evaluate if something's not working. Again, collaboration—that is going to be one of the biggest ones you hear in my campaign, is collaboration between entities. We need to be recruiting police officers we want. We want our police force to be fully staffed, and we want those police officers living here in Santa Fe. Unfortunately, a lot of our police officers work in Santa Fe, but they drive 50-something miles to their home in Rio Rancho. So again, we need to see if we can find housing, build housing, for our police and fire [departments]. We want those people serving the City of Santa Fe in the public safety realm to be living here in Santa Fe.

Vigil Coppler: We need to fill all those positions. I've heard this the whole time I was city councilor, and I'm still hearing it today. Why can't they fill those positions? What is it internally that keeps police officers from wanting to work for the city? I don't believe that pay is always the answer, but pay is a real indicator of people coming here. The second thing we need to do is have a mayor that lets them do their job, that doesn't dictate and micromanage everything they do. And then to have a police force, the people in charge, the decisionmakers, actually have some of the best practices and the ability and the know-how and the experience to put them in place. What I know is that the officers do want to do a good job. They do come to work and want to make a difference, so capture that, motivate them to do what they need to do and are hired to do, and then enforce the laws. 

Editor's note: This article has been updated to correct the percentage by which Michael Garcia won reelection to his seat in 2023 and to clarify that he is a federal employee of Americorps, and not a VISTA volunteer.