On Monday, the Las Cruces City Council voted to deny sufficiency of a petition regarding Realize Las Cruces.
Ordinance #3090, better known as Realize Las Cruces, was adopted in February by the City Council. However, per the City Charter, “when a referendum petition is filed with the city clerk within 30 days following the adoption of an ordinance sought to be reconsidered, such ordinance shall be suspended from taking effect.” A petition was filed on March 19th, and required 3,240 valid signatures. With 1,950 valid signatures given, a letter of insufficiency was filed on April 2nd, which allowed fifteen days for the petitioner to file a supplementary petition and to obtain additional signatures on a supplementary form. A letter of insufficiency on May 6th added an additional 597 valid signatures, bringing the total number of signatures to 2,547, still short of the 3,240 signatures needed.
This left the Council with two voting options on Monday: to vote Yes and approve the sufficiency of the petition and compliance with the City Charter, or vote No and deny sufficiency of the petition.
Before the Council voted, nearly an hour was devoted to public comments, and showed the passions for and against Realize Las Cruces still ran deep. Sarah Smith, who was behind the initial petition to repeal the ordinance and instead have it put on the ballot in November, spoke first, and countered the 2,547 number of valid signatures given by the Council.
“The petition was signed by 4,671 Las Cruces residents,” Smith said. “From the beginning, the city has made the petition process as difficult as possible. We were not allowed to collect signatures electronically. We were not allowed to use an electronic copy of the 400-page ordinance. So instead, all volunteers were required to carry bulky printed copies of the ordinance, which was over 30,000 pages, to be printed at a cost of over a thousand dollars.”
District 2 resident Lucas Herndon, who was for Realize Las Cruces, took aim at some of the petitioners who spoke before him.
“The thing that I have to just be amused by slightly is the hypocrisy of a number of people here who, in other times, in other places, have called for stricter controls about who can vote, how you have to vote, what you have to show when you show up to vote—all of a sudden want a lot of leeway when it comes to who gets to sign their petitions,” he said. “They were given ample time, they were given an extension of that time, they were communicated with—and they didn’t reach the number.”
After nearly an hour of public comments, some of the Councilors defended their initial vote of Realize Las Cruces. District 4 Councilor and Mayor Pro Tem Joana Bencomo pulled no punches in her defense of the ordinance.
“What Realize will do is help create a diversity of housing that we so desperately need,” she said. “And if you’re against that, and you signed this petition because you are inherently against multi-family housing and a (diversity) of housing, going up in good neighborhoods with good parks, then I would ask you to reflect on where your segregationist tendencies come from.”
District 2 City Councilor Bill Mattiace, the only councilor who voted against Realize Las Cruces in February, defended the petitioners.
“I just want to say thank you to the petitioners,” he said. “I know it was hard work. And I have always been an elected official that would like the people to vote on it. And this decision, this change, is so significant, this code change is not just something that we (the council) should vote on. It should’ve been given to the voter. And that’s what I’m concerned with: that we had over 4,500 people that didn’t know about it.”
In the end, the Council voted 6-1 Monday to let Realize Las Cruces stand, denying the sufficiency of the petition, with Councilor Mattiace being the lone vote to approve the sufficiency.
In other business surrounding budget issues, the Council voted for a resolution authorizing the City of Las Cruces to accept budget adjustments for various city departments through an amendment to the city’s adopted fiscal year 2024-2025 budget. A resolution was also passed amending the fiscal year 2025-2030 Capital Improvements Program to re-roof Fire Station 4, in addition to a resolution adopting Municipal Adopted Budget for 2025-2026; and a resolution approving the Capital Improvements Program for fiscal years 2026 through 2031.
The next City Council meeting is scheduled for Monday, June 2nd.
