[Neighbors] Update on CABQ's sustained failure on Lead-Coal from Lead/Coal Safety Brigade

[Robert L Anderson]

Joseph Aguirre <leadcoalsafetybrigade at gmail.com>
February 9, 2021

State Senator Antoinette Sedillo Lopez State Representative Gail Chasey
(via email)

Dear Senator Sedillo Lopez and Representative Chasey:

Re: CABQ’s sustained failure on Lead and Coal Avenues

Thank you for the meaningful Lead-Coal conversation at the January 23 UHA annual meeting and for your subsequent letter to Mayor Keller and conversation with DMD Director Montoya.

There is the disastrous Lead-Coal crash problem and there is CABQ's sustained failure to solve that problem. After two decades of community mobilization we are clear that to succeed on Lead-Coal we need to understand that sustained failure. We need to understand and move past impediments to success on Lead-Coal.

By the first week of 2018 the University Heights and Nob Hill neighborhoods initiated what became a two year period of engagement with Mayor Keller and his team regarding the public safety emergency on Lead-Coal between Washington and Yale. By the middle of 2019 we saw many indicators that CABQ’s response was not serious. As a result we engaged you (and many other public officials) with the intention of developing awareness, support and accountability. Unfortunately, CABQ’s lack of commitment was made clear in December 2019 when it killed the broadly supported Road Safety Audit (RSA) and abruptly shut down the neighborhood process, without a serious plan for Lead-Coal then or since. With four deaths in front of living room windows and hundreds more crashes alongside homes since Mayor Keller took office, CABQ’s response to Lead-Coal remains to this day a failure.

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Here are key impediments we’ve identified over our long experience with CABQ along with our suggestions on how to move past them. I hope this provides a useful framework for you and other public officials in your conversations with the Mayor and his team about Lead-Coal.

1. CABQ has no implementation process for Lead-Coal. Without such, all solutions, new or old, are disempowered.

We need a binding, inclusive, and transparent implementation process with administration and council at the table.

2. CABQ’s task force process lacked the basics of competent program management.

We need an implementation process for Lead-Coal to include:

an unbiased program manager.

clear and meaningful goals and objectives. One meaningful goal?

Zero road departure crashes. Cars belong on the road, not crossing over bike lanes, parkways, sidewalks and into homes. What could be more fundamental?

3. CABQ administrations past and current have acted in bad faith with the neighborhoods.

Consequently, we now need any implementation process to include: a. a mediator.
b. an advocate for the community.

4. You are aware of concern that DMD not only has failed on Lead-Coal, but that across the City it has failed -including in new ART improvements on Central- at providing the basic infrastructure important to healthy neighborhoods: safe streets, accessible sidewalks, and good lighting.

We need:

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a vertical and horizontal audit of our DMD looking at competencies, compliance and safety culture.

new leadership at DMD with a fresh perspective on Lead-Coal and the necessary skill set to manage the complex challenge of urban transportation within established residential neighborhoods.

5. You are aware of concerns that CABQ misrepresented the Lead-Coal problem in two USDOT projects (Lead and Coal Avenues Improvements and ART). We can’t solve Lead-Coal if CABQ isn’t honest about it.

We need:

a report from our State Auditor and Attorney General about the status

of any investigation, state or federal.

public officials broadly to endorse that these concerns be thoroughly

investigated. The truth matters.

6. You are aware of concerns that CABQ abused the NEPA process to evade evaluation and mitigation of the known environmental impacts of principal arterial traffic on Lead-Coal. With homes just 15 feet away from the roadway those impacts -safety, noise and air quality- are severe. This is a significant environmental offense to which the Keller administration has given a pass. We expect more from Democratic leadership.

We need:
a. You and other public officials to endorse an examination of CABQ’s

NEPA compliance with particular attention to Lead-Coal-ART. b. You to provide legislative funding for community directed pilot

evaluation of noise and diesel exhaust exposure alongside our homes. c. Youtodevelop,withCountyCommissionerBarboa,aplantobring

diesel vehicles back into the Bernalillo County emissions inspections program.

7. We are concerned that CABQ’s sustained failure on Lead-Coal has been enabled by how it engaged engineering contractors for LCIP and ART. (Did

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the contractor for LCIP consider a road safety study to inform design? Did CABQ veto a road safety study? Did the engineering contractor have concerns about deficiencies of the roadway section between Washington and Yale? Was the engineering contractor who studied how ART lane reduction on Central would impact traffic on alternative routes even aware of the Lead-Coal crash problem? Did CABQ inform them? Or was the contractor allowed to assume there were no safety problems on Lead-Coal?)

We need:
a. engineering contractors involved with Lead-Coal to perform their

ethical, professional duty: protect public safety above all. That requires they take a deep look at the crash problem, not wear CABQ-provided blinders.

b. The Rest in Red contract to follow CABQ’s sole source procurement guidelines. A public meeting with a City Council vote is the community’s opportunity to make sure that, finally, the public interest is served on Lead-Coal.

c. YoutoaskstateprocurementauthoritiestointerveneifCABQ’s intention is to bypass sole source protections.

8. We are concerned about evidence of extreme bias against Lead-Coal neighborhoods to the degree that even the safety of our families is made secondary to the interests of other neighborhoods.

We need:
a. CABQ to commit and act to put the safety of our families first on

Lead-Coal: whatever it takes to keep the cars on the road outside our

homes.
b. An investigation of the apparent misuse of public position and

resources to retaliate against the community. Who at CABQ is in on

the “tombstone” prank?
c. PublicofficialswhomakedecisionsaboutorimpactingLead-Coalto

disclose any conflicts of interest. The public must know whether those decisions are motivated by civic interest or by some element of personal gain.

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9. We are concerned that CABQ's decades of failure on Lead-Coal have been sustained by its deeply entrenched false narrative: operating an expressway on two narrow residential side streets all the while telling everyone, including the USDOT, that there is “nothing to see here.”

If Mayor Keller, Chief Operations Officer Rael (former executive director of MRCOG) and Municipal Development Director Montoya (former cabinet secretary for NMDOT) assert that the crash problem on Lead-Coal is just the drivers, they need to prove it by executing the Road Safety Audit CABQ committed to and then killed in 2019. Otherwise, more and more we are clear that the recklessness on Lead-Coal, and the impediments to success, originate at City Hall.

We are deeply concerned about CABQ’s sustained indifference to the violent, dangerous conditions around our homes on Lead-Coal. The City’s conduct is widely viewed in the community as not just a failure of government, but as an abuse of government power.

We need CABQ to understand how seriously the community views both the conditions on Lead-Coal and the City’s conduct. And we need public officials, broadly, to assure that CABQ performs its foremost duty: protect the citizens.

Beyond a failure of governance, CABQ’s conduct on Lead-Coal appears a failure of conscience. What do the Mayor and his team see when they look at the scenes of destruction -the carnage- outside living room windows on Lead-Coal? Homes and families? Or just a road? Do our families fall within Burque’s community of care? Or is our neighborhood disposable? How is that kind of failure remedied?

Thank you again for your sustained commitment to bringing safety and civility to our streets.

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Sincerely,

Joseph Aguirre, MD
Spokesperson, Lead Coal Safety Brigade

Cc: Community members; County Commissioner Adriann Barboa; Governor Michelle Lujan Grisham; State Auditor Brian Colón; Attorney General Hector Balderas; District Attorney Raúl Torrez


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