Edgewood Politics – My, How You Haven’t Grown
by John Weckerle
Well, it’s silly election season in Edgewood, and things are gearing up in the usual, sad fashion. We found ourselves shaking our heads while reading this article in the Mountain View Telegraph about the Town of Edgewood’s last council meeting. The festivities apparently included Mayor Robert Stearley interrupting public comment and seeming to attempt a bit of smearing against Town Councilors Brad Hill and John Abrams; we won’t run through the details here but encourage our readers to read the MVT article.
The former is a rather inappropriate and unfortunately habitual behavior of Mr. Stearley’s – your editor has actually personally run into it – and we agree with Councilors Hill, Abrams, and Chuck Ring that members of the public should be allowed to provide input when it is solicited without being interrupted and/or having their motivations and character questioned. Mr. Stearley has plenty of opportunity to make his voice heard, and he should do speakers the courtesy of having theirs heard, as well. The latter behavior is all-too-typical of Edgewood politics, and we take exception to it as we have in the past. Some years ago, when people supporting Mr. Stearley attempted character attacks against those with whom Mr. Stearley disagreed (former Mayor Howard Calkins and former Town Councilor Paul Hoffman are two examples), your editor publicly denounced those actions as inappropriate, cheap political tricks. We do so again now. While we don’t always agree with Mr. Hill and Mr. Abrams (that’s not to say we disagree with them most of the time, by the way), we have no doubt that they have been acting ethically in their elected roles and thoroughly reject Mr. Stearley’s suggestion that they are using their positions for personal gain.
We’ll state for the record that your editor’s signature is on the Hill Ranch Road petition. While nobody here at New Mexico Central headquarters commutes via that route, we do have one primary use for it: driving into Edgewood to do business with various local enterprises; that and picking up packages at the Post Office are pretty much our reasons for driving on Hill Ranch Road. The road is often a mess, the dust is at times almost impossible to see through, and the condition of the road is one of several reasons that the Town of Edgewood has been collecting significantly less gross receipts tax from the denizens of New Mexico Central headquarters in recent times. We still, of course, patronize local small business as much as in the past; however, we are spending thousands less per year in Edgewood’s larger enterprises. We used to do the majority of our grocery shopping in Edgewood, but are picking up more and more in Albuquerque. Having become “Walmart shoppers” after the Edgewood store opened, we decided to cut back on that shopping after Walmart decided to cut health benefits to its employees. Smiths is good and we still shop there on occasion, but they lack several items we buy that are readily available in Albuquerque’s stores, especially since operations like Trader Joe’s and Sunflower Market have arrived – and if we have to go to Albuquerque to get some things, we tend to pick up everything else while we’re there.
The biggest reason for sending our gross receipts tax dollars, however, is that we don’t always like what the Town does with its money – or, more specifically, what it doesn’t do. To put it succinctly, we have no representation and don’t like what they’re doing with the taxation. We’ve always felt that the Town should do more to support the area’s principal attraction, the nonprofit Wildlife West. The final straw came last year, though, when the Town cut funding to a $20,000 children’s summer program while sitting on a $2 million reserve. We’re still “buying locally owned,” but if the Town is going to be doing things like that, we don’t see a need to help fill its coffers. We’ll revisit that position after seeing what changes, if any, the election may bring.