Printer-friendlyGallup Mayor Praises New Mexico First
Editorial written by Bob Rosebrough, Mayor of Gallup
(Published in the Albuqerque Journal and the New Mexico Business Weekly)
GALLUP, NM, August 23, 2006-- I am standing at a podium looking out into the audience of an opulent banquet room in a glass skyscraper in downtown Dallas. The 200 people in the audience are the members of a prestigious Texas foundation and they have asked me to speak about a local town hall on water that New Mexico First organized for Gallup in the summer of 2003.
As I speak about the New Mexico First town hall and the results that followed, the sea of rapt expressions and forward-leaning bodies tells me that these folks have nothing like New Mexico First or its town hall process in their experience. And then the thought occurs to me: We have something special.
It’s not really hard to figure out why Senators Pete Domenici and Jeff Bingaman came up with the concept of New Mexico First 20 years ago. Can you imagine what it would be like to formulate public policy from traveling around New Mexico talking with our diverse citizenry?
One day our senators are in Tohatchi talking to a Navajo silversmith. On other days, they talk with Catron County ranchers, Rio Rancho Intel engineers, Highlands University college employees and students, Santa Fe environmentalists, Clovis farmers, Las Cruces Head Start teachers, and Farmington power plant managers.
The current New Mexico First chairperson, Bill Garcia puts it this way, “New Mexico is a remarkably diverse state and we cherish that diversity. Yet, our diversity challenges us to stretch ourselves beyond our normal comfort zone. We have become national leaders with our town hall approach because, as an organization, we readily accept that challenge.”
When New Mexico First was formed, business and civic leaders joined with our senators in looking for ways to set aside special-interest agendas and party politics by working together on state issues. They created a bi-partisan, nonprofit public policy organization that provides a statewide forum in which citizens of New Mexico come together in structured town hall meetings to debate key issues. After 20 years, it is still a good idea.
With about 400 members, New Mexico First aspires to create a statewide network of informed and caring citizens. Generally, around 125 to 150 people participate in each town hall, which amounts to nearly 6,000 citizens over the past 20 years. The organization’s board, whose membership revolves, comprises 33 members, 11 each from New Mexico’s three congressional districts.
From its inception, New Mexico First has gone against the grain in two fundamental ways: representative diversity and consensus decision making. Both the board of New Mexico First and the town hall participants represent the diversity of New Mexico by culture, party affiliation, gender, and geography. Town hall decisions are made on the basis to consensus, not by majority.
When left to our own devices, most of us tend to gather in homogeneous cliques and pursue self-interested agendas. New Mexico First asks us to do the opposite by stretching ourselves to work through issues with people who are very different from us and by committing ourselves, at the outset, to reaching decisions through consensus. Somehow the approach actually works.
Diane Denish, as a member of the initial task force and as the organization’s second chairperson, has seen it all from the beginning. “New Mexico First has not only been a catalyst for new ideas for New Mexico,” she says, “ it has also allowed policymakers and leaders from every corner of the state—from rural to urban, from Taos to Lea County to Gallup and all places in between—to meet at a common table and share ideas as equals.”
Sometimes town hall recommendations take on a life of their own. Successful politicians, including our current governor, have learned that New Mexico First town hall reports are the useful for gathering public policy ideas when they are putting their campaign platforms together or forming strategies to govern.
On August 22, New Mexico’s two United States senators will headline a gala celebration of New Mexico First’s 20th anniversary at Sandia Resort. They can take real satisfaction in knowing that something very special has sprung to life in New Mexico—something that has even become the envy of our otherwise self-assured neighbors.