The 42nd meeting of the 26th Albuquerque City Council convened on November 17, 2025, to address a variety of administrative updates, legislative proposals, public comments, and final actions. Councilors focused on fiscal oversight regarding the airport observation deck, electoral reform discussions regarding Ranked Choice Voting (RCV), and procedural clarifications on property disposition. Public comment heavily featured advocacy for RCV to prevent costly runoffs, concerns over the conditions of city parks, and updates on arts programs for the disabled community.
Good evening, everyone. Today is November 17th, 2025. The 42nd meeting of the 26th council will come to order. All counselors will be present this evening. Councilor Pena will be on Zoom but arriving momentarily. We're going to begin with a moment of silence, followed by the Pledge of Allegiance in English and in Spanish. Civic Plaza parking passes are provided for members of the public. You can obtain a parking pass from council staff at the table near the chamber's entrance. Members of the public, city staff, and the media have the ability to view this meeting in person and on live streams through four different platforms. Gov TV on Comcast Channel 16, the Gov TV website, YouTube, and Zoom webinar. The live streams can be accessed from most smartphones, tablets, or computers. Also, this meeting is closed captioned, and you may enable your closed captioning devices on your television and device at this time. The video recording of this and all past council meetings will remain available for viewing at any time on the city council's website. Council staff is available via telephone if members of the public need assistance, finding the videos online. Please call 505-768-3100 for assistance during business hours Monday through Friday, 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. The council will take a break at approximately 7 p.m. this evening if needed. With regard to decorum in the chambers, we want tonight's proceeding to be as civil and respectful as possible. Please do not make any personal attacks and please no applause, snapping, or other outbursts during the meeting. Upon the second or continued disruption, that individual will be asked to leave the chambers and if necessary, security will be asked to escort that person out of the chambers. Such removal from the council chambers will be effective for the remainder of the meeting. If continued disruptions occur, I may recess the meeting until order is restored, and if necessary, may clear the chambers of persons participating in the disturbance. The meeting will go a lot smoother if we are all respectful of one another. We will begin tonight's meeting with proclamations and presentations. Good evening. Good afternoon, Madam President, members. How are you? How are you? Do we have it? We do. Thank you so much. All right. So for August, uh, total business sector growth was actually 4.1%. And so if you were to look at the bottom leftmost column, you can see that. So that's all business sectors. Uh, when you don't count the hold harmless impact. However, for the month based on the 1.225 state shared increment growth was actually flat. Um, and that's largely due to a lump sum hold harmless payment that we received this time last year and off in August. Um, and so that uh makes our growth uh flat this time. And you can see that by the by looking up again at the far left column, the whole food is down 33% compared to this time last year. So that does bring our five or our cumulative growth to 6.8% for the year. Expected growth for FY26 is supposed to be 3.8% over the FY25 estimated actual. Uh so that does mean that there's still a little bit of cushion in there for our expected growth. Uh, let's see. Construction was the only major sector that saw a decline in August. Um, however, retail and other services did quite well, which is frankly nice to see for a change. Uh 9.4% and 7.6 respectively for those two. And then we can go over to cannabis. The next slide.