Mayor Berry’s Lack of Experience Costing Voting Public

Mayor R.J. Berry is paying a professional negotiator $55,000 to develop contracts with city workers such as police and firefighters. It would appear that the new mayor lacks the ability to do the hard work and has to hire someone else to get it done.

While city employees are facing pay cuts and layoffs just to balance the budget our new mayor is spending huge sums of money to hire professionals to cover his lack of experience which only results in higher cost and reductions in services to the voting public.

This mayor campaigned on smaller government yet so far all he has managed to do is to enlarge his support staff to get things done that former Mayor Marty was able to do all by himself.

In the past few months since he took office the new mayor has managed to not bring in any new businesses to the city and he is driving out experienced firefighters and police officers which will not encourage future growth.

Where is his great ability to create new jobs and provide for a safer community? Where is that great ability he promised to reduce a top heavy city government?

The city council now controlled by a republican majority is doing no better since they have dug up a failed attempt to spend good money after bad to develop the downtown area with a event center that promises to only cost the whole city more money instead of using that money to develop areas of small business around the city. A events center would only draw business away from other activities in this city and not bring in any huge amount of new business.

Small business owners are facing tougher restrictions on doing business and tight controls on city bars are driving owners out of business all together without even the benefit of due process and fairness in administrative hearings.

With this crack down comes a new growth of community parties where people are resorting to drinking at private homes which could result in more unwanted noise in residential areas. Neighbors will now and in the future have to face more traffic in those communities and drunk noisy neighbors more often thanks to the new mayor’s tough stand on local bar owners.

Single individuals will find this city an even tougher place to meet people and because of cut backs in events such as summer fest there will only be smaller events and fewer people. The house parties will cause an increase in the need for police officers to be all over the city dealing with dunking house parties where their will be even less ability to supervise underage drinking. Local community streets will become the next great danger when it comes to drunk drivers in our city.

This mayor is a total failure in his job up until now and the taxpayers in Albuquerque are the ones that will pay the price for his failure over the next four years. How soon will that price be a child playing on a bike that gets hit by a drunk driver coming from a private house party where the driver supplied themselves with the liquor that caused the incident in the first place.