Council race starts
Candidates say Native Americans, how they are treated is key to Gallup's success

City Council candidate Emmett Bryan Wall, center, answers a question while fellow candidates Mike Enfield, left, Bill Nechero, Steven Seeger and Pat Butler listen during a forum in Calvin Hall on the UNM-G campus Wednesday. — © 2009 Gallup Independent / Cable Hoover

Copyright © 2009
Gallup Independent
By Bill Donovan
Staff writer

GALLUP — The five candidates running for City Council in the March 10 city election were on hand Wednesday for a forum to discuss issues affecting the city.

This is the first in at least three articles that will be published over the next few days on what the candidates said to questions that were submitted by members of the Gallup Chamber of Commerce and selected by a special review committee.

Only about 30 spectators showed up for the forum, which was co-sponsored by the University of New Mexico-Gallup and the chamber. Speaking at the forum were incumbent Bill Nechero and Mike Enfield, both running for the Northside District, and incumbent Pat Butler, Steve Seeger and Emmett Bryan Wall, who are running for the Southside District.

The questions were arranged in three areas — economic development, quality of life and hot topics.

The first question dealt with the relationship of Gallup with the area’s Native American population and centered on what each candidate would do, if elected, to help the area’s Native American population.

“We need to treat them a lot better than we have in the past,” said Nechero, who added that he supports plans by the city to create a Native American museum and a Code Talker’s museum.

Wall, who is the former owner of the Holiday Garden Nursery, stressed in his answer the importance of Native Americans in Gallup’s prosperity.

“If it hadn’t been for Native Americans, there wouldn’t be a Gallup,” he said, adding that he would like to see the city sponsor more events that would attract more Natives to this area.

Seeger, a public defender, said he felt Gallup merchants are taking the Native American trade for granted. A lot has been said about the need to get more tourists to come to Gallup, but merchants would be better off if some of the lodger’s tax money was used to attract more Natives to come and shop in Gallup.

Butler agreed with Seeger. “Native Americans — these are our tourists,” he said, adding that anyone who lives 25 miles outside of Gallup could be considered a tourist.

“It’s how you treat people,” he said, that determines whether they are going to shop here or go elsewhere.

Enfield, a former economic development director for the city, said that over the years he has seen a major change in the way Gallup treats Native Americans who come to shop in town. “But that’s not to say that we don’t have a long way to go,” he said.

He said he felt the city could do more with development of the industrial park at Churchrock and by doing so, would open up thousands of new jobs for this area. “People need jobs,” he said. “If they don’t have jobs, they don’t have any money and they can’t shop.”

The second question centered on issues such as panhandling and the city’s handling of nuisances.

Wall said that no matter what the city does, there’s going to be panhandling. “I don’t see that as much of a nuisance,” he said.

But he said something needs to be done about cleaning the city up. There’s too much gravel on the sidewalks, which makes it difficult for people in wheelchairs, and there’s just too much dirt. “We need to take more pride in our city,” he said.

If you talk about nuisance, said Seeger, he feels the biggest example has to do with the inability of some people in the city to keep their property up to standards.

“We need to deal with this aggressively,” he said. “Other cities have cleanups. We need to put positive peer pressure on people to clean up.”

On the question of panhandling, Butler said that this is a problem that can be handled by police resource officers who have been trying to alleviate the problem.

He pointed out on the question of cleaning up Gallup, the city owes a debt of gratitude to the work that has been done over the past several years by the Youth Conservation Corps here. Because of their efforts, they have picked up thousands of tons of trash from throughout Gallup.

Enfield said he didn’t think the city was enforcing the codes, pointing out that one of the big complaints he hears when he goes around talking to people is the amount of junk and blight that is allowed to be in people’s yards. He told of people complaining about their neighbor’s yards violating city blight laws and nothing being done about it.

“We need to start citing people when they violate a city ordinance,” he said.

Nechero said that when he first became a city councilor eight years ago, the city had only one code enforcement officer.

He and others on the council said this wasn’t enough and three more were appointed so that each district would have its own code enforcer.

“Now we are back to one code enforcer again,” he said. “It’s too big a problem for just one code enforcer to handle.”