Albuquerque's City Council is About to Approve Mayor Keller's Disastrous Budget. Here's What That Means for You.

In April, Albuquerque Mayor Tim Keller released his proposed budget for fiscal year 2027. District 9 Councilor Renée Grout, a Republican and the budget chair, seems happy with the budget. “I started just barely started going through the budget, but I am pleased that they did make some cuts. I think it’s important that we all tighten our belts and make some much-needed changes,” she said to KRQE. All in all, the Mayor’s proposed budget cuts $1.47 billion in spending. Here’s the breakdown of what is getting the axe and how it will affect you.

Animal Welfare

If you’ve ever lived outside of Albuquerque, you know that Albuquerque has an enormous population of stray animals. The Mayor’s budget takes a hatchet to its efforts to help these animals.

The State of New Mexico has the highest rate of deaths of shelter animals in the country, at 7 animals with a non-live outcome per person, according to the ASPCA. This is a good proxy of how many stray animals there are in total and the shelter’s capacity to care for them. While this is state wide, anybody who has walked around Downtown or Old Town for ten minutes knows that the number of stray animals in our city is massive.

At the Committee of the Whole Meeting on Thursday, May 7, public comment was provided overwhelmingly in favor of not cutting jobs and resources for the city’s Animal Welfare Department. As one commenter who is a veterinarian noted, “Spay and neuter programs are not just about animals; they’re about public health, public safety, and responsible city management. Every time we reduce access to affordable veterinary care, we increase the number of unwanted litters in our community. That means the stray animals in our communities grow, our shelters get overcrowded, we get higher euthanasia rates and greater costs to taxpayers over time. Preventing the problem is far less expensive than reacting to it later.” Mayor Keller’s myopic budget only kicks the very real problem of suffering animals down the road in the name of a veiled “fiscal responsibility”.

The Public Library

Albuquerque’s libraries are some of the last places in the city where you can go without the expectation to spend money. But if you’ve been to some of Albuquerque’s libraries around lunch time, they may be closed. Why? If a library doesn’t have staff to work, then the library does not open. The libraries in Albuquerque are already running with a skeleton crew, and Mayor Keller’s budget ensures that they will continue operating as such for the foreseeable future.

But it’s not just staffing at libraries that’s problematic, it’s also technology funds. When you first go to the library and obtain a library card, your library card information is put into a database managed by the library’s IT system. When you go to the library and check out a book, you scan a barcode on the spine of the book, also managed by the library’s IT system. When the library is purchasing new materials, they are managed by the library’s IT system. The library’s IT system is not free–it costs money to operate, and the Mayor’s proposed budget does not account for that. The library then has to take that money out of staffing, further worsening the doom loop in library closures just to keep the Albuquerque’s public knowledge center accessible.

ABQ Ride Forward

Albuquerque Rapid Transit and the surrounding bus system is one of the best innovations that Albuquerque has made in the last 20 years. But Mayor Keller’s budget hamstrings efforts to get us back to pre-pandemic levels of ridership and efficiency. This will hurt all people, regardless of if you ride the bus or not. Disabled people depend on the bus. Low income people depend on the bus. If you are a driver, you benefit from the bus through decreased traffic. If you walk and bike places, you benefit from the bus through always having a safety net in case your destination is a little farther than walking or biking distance. If you are a small business owner, you benefit from more people being able to cheaply get to your business. In other words: the bus costs nobody, but it benefits everybody.

In a time when gas prices have doubled in 2 months and on the edge of climate catastrophe, the Mayor has decided that stagnating progress of our public transit system is a priority. This makes no sense. During crises like the ones we are facing, why is the Mayor intent on worsening literally every outcome of his administration? As the Transit Advisory Board to the City of Albuquerque noted in a recent resolution, “the success of the Health, Housing, and Homelessness Department, the Arts and Culture Department, the Economic Development Department, the Municipal Development Department, and the Youth and Family Services Department are inextricably dependent on the success of the Transit Department.” Why is Mayor Keller intent on destroying his governance strategy and his legacy?

That’s not to say that our current bus system is world-class; it is still a shame that most of the buses in our city outside of Central Avenue only come once every 30 minutes. But the Mayor’s budget makes our current reality our future reality as well. Instead of making today the floor of the potential of ABQ Ride, the Mayor’s budget places a ceiling on it for at least the next year. This means more 45 minute commutes to go three miles, more missed buses, and worse traffic, not to mention the costs to low income and disabled folks.

Vacant Jobs

Cutting 247 vacant jobs might be a nice accounting maneuver that on paper saves the city money. But it actually has a negative effect on employment in the city by reducing the “tightness” of the labor market. The economic logic can be explained like this: if a city job is offering you $20 an hour and regular work hours, you are less likely to take a job that pays $18 an hour and has irregular work hours, assuming that you’re qualified for both. That, in turn, pushes up wages in the private sector because they have to remain competitive with the “floor” set by the city. While Albuquerque has seen substantial wage growth in the last few years (with the Bureau of Labor Statistics claiming a 4% increase in average weekly earnings in ABQ from February 2025 to February 2026), that trend, both locally and nationwide, has been slowing since 2021. Dropping those vacant jobs in the city from listing could pour gas on the fire. In other words, the city having vacant jobs is actually a very good thing for workers in Albuquerque, because it means that Albuquerque is effectively operating as an “employer of last resort”, which is to say that you can always fall back on the city for employment. The Mayor feels the need to tighten the city’s belt. But in doing so, he is ensuring that you have less bargaining power in the coming year, whether or not you’re employed by the city, which means you will probably not get a raise next year, or that the raise will be smaller than previous years.

A raise being smaller than previous years is not in itself a disaster. What is a disaster is that the rate of inflation nationwide has reached a 3 year high and that the city is taking an axe to your bargaining power in the labor market. This notion of a “tight” labor market being beneficial to the interests of workers was first described by none other than Friedrich Engels in his book “The Condition of the Working Class in England” but greatly expanded on by Karl Marx. They termed this concept the “reserve army of labour”, which dictates that workers without jobs are more likely to undercut one another for their own jobs, which in turn drives wages down, which in turn makes the wealthy wealthier because they don’t have to pay as much for labor while simultaneously keeping output steady. In other words, workers with no options will hurt other workers. Mayor Keller’s budget takes away some of those options.

Interestingly, the move to cut vacant jobs is also super myopic on the part of the city. The 2026 City Budget identifies that 40% of the city’s revenue is from the Gross Receipts Tax, which is a tax on the revenue of businesses in Albuquerque’s city limits. But businesses only sell goods when businesses have customers, and businesses only have customers when workers can spend their money. In the coming year, workers will have less money to spend, both because of decisions made by the City and external, global trends in the macroeconomy. That means that revenue from the Gross Receipts Tax will likely fall. If Mayor Keller thinks this is a tough year for the budget, he is making choices that will make next year worse.

The Police Budget

Notably spared from the draconian cuts on progress in our city is the Albuquerque Police Department. Instead, APD is actually getting an increase in the number of jobs even though crime has gone down in the last 10 years. Why does APD get a raise when everyone else gets chopped?

Mayor Keller was pressed hard from the right in 2025 on crime in Albuquerque. Keller appears to have taken the bait with his new budget. Again, this is despite crime being lower today than last year, and last year being lower than the previous. To be clear, if Keller actually wants to continue the downward trend in crime, he needs to invest in people. Investing in people includes funding for animal welfare, public libraries, public transit, and increasing the jobs available to Burqueños.

Every part of the Mayor’s budget is myopic and will increase costs and decrease revenues for the city in the long run. City Council must amend the budget in favor of long-term sustainability of the city’s finances and long-term welfare of its residents. If they don’t, we will be staring down the exact same fiscal crisis next year and the year after.

The views expressed in this piece are those of the author and not necessarily those of The Red Rose, any individual editor, Albuquerque DSA, or the National Democratic Socialists of America.