Apr. 10—Lunch wrappers. Cigarette butts. Bottles. CDs. Old tires and car parts.

Those are some things Debbie Birkhauser and other residents of the Plazas on Old Pecos Trail Homeowners Association have seen on the side of Old Pecos Trail from drivers waiting to merge onto Interstate 25.

“It just seems like a convenient place for people to unload what they don’t want in their cars,” she said.

Plazas residents do their best to pick up the litter, and on Saturday a group of about 15 will take part in the Great American Cleanup. Birkhauser, who on Wednesday was picking up supplies from Keep Santa Fe Beautiful’s headquarters, said the homeowners association will have coffee and burritos for those who participate and hope to make their neighborhood cleaner and more attractive.

“We think it’s part of our civic duty,” she said.

It was that ethos Mayor Alan Webber encouraged at a Wednesday morning news conference where he announced a number of ongoing and upcoming initiatives related to city beautification.

“The safest and cleanest way to keep Santa Fe looking great is for everybody in the city to make it their city, too,” said Webber, encouraging Santa Feans not to litter and to report issues to the city’s constituent services department.

The initiatives discussed by Webber and other city leaders, including Parks and Open Space Division Director Melissa McDonald, Public Works Director Regina Wheeler, and Constituent Services Director Isabella Sharpe, included graffiti cleanup, collection of abandoned shopping carts, abatement of nuisance properties, filling potholes and other parks and public works improvements.

Webber also discussed an ordinance that is scheduled to be introduced at Wednesday evening’s City Council meeting, which he said would improve safety in the city by making it illegal for people to sit or stand on medians that are less than three feet wide.

“That is a really dangerous situation,” Webber said, noting the high rate of traffic deaths in New Mexico.

The ordinance appears similar to a proposal from Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham during this year’s legislative session to crack down on panhandling. The idea was criticized by advocates for the homeless and was ultimately not brought forward, although Lujan Grisham has said she is strongly considering calling a special session focused on public safety that could include the topic.

Michael Coleman, a spokesperson for the Governor’s Office, said she had no involvement in Wednesday’s news conference. Coleman was not aware of the median safety ordinance when contacted Wednesday by The New Mexican.

At the news conference, Webber praised Lujan Grisham for being a leader on beautification efforts statewide.

“We’re a beneficiary of that and want to be a really good partner in leveraging all of those efforts together,” Webber said.

The relationship between the mayor and the governor has been on the rocks publicly since the publication of a deposition in February in which Webber implied Lujan Grisham advised him on how to address controversy over the Soldiers’ Monument in 2020. She responded Webber’s comments were an “egregious mischaracterization” of their conversation and criticized him in language rarely used to describe members of the same political party.

“There is an obvious leadership problem at the city of Santa Fe,” Lujan Grisham said in a late February statement.

Lujan Grisham, a Santa Fe native, has previously signaled she is unhappy with the appearance of the state’s capital city. In the fall, the state redirected $1 million in capital outlay for city parks improvements away from the city, which could not access the money due to its outstanding audits, before reversing course. More recently, Lujan Grisham allocated $5 million in capital outlay the city did not ask for to make upgrades to Fort Marcy park.

“She really felt that was a priority she wanted to put her personal mark on, and I appreciate it,” Webber said at the end of this year’s session.

Councilor Pilar Faulkner said Wednesday she and Councilor Amanda Chavez plan to introduce an ordinance regarding beautification efforts. Faulkner said she did not want to comment on the specifics of the proposal because it is still in the drafting phase but that it addresses “graffiti, litter — that kind of stuff.”

Webber said the money for the beautification efforts will come from the operating budgets of the relative city departments. Specific initiatives include a “pothole palooza” to patch potholes throughout the city.

During the last two weeks of March road crews patched almost 3,000 potholes; during the last two weeks of April crews are scheduled to mill and fill sections of roadway too degraded to patch, Wheeler said. She encouraged residents to report potholes to the city through the constituent services portal so crews know where work needs to be done.

A similar call came from Sharpe regarding nuisance properties, which the city has started making more of a targeted effort to address.

“This is a situation where your complaints are really helpful,” Webber said.

Carol Branch, executive director of Keep Santa Fe Beautiful, spoke briefly to encourage residents to participate in the Great American Cleanup, a national event that encourages volunteers in cities across the country to clean up their communities every spring. The Santa Fe event is hosted by Keep Santa Fe Beautiful, which also runs the Toss No Mas cleanup in the fall.

“We are anticipating the most successful cleanup ever,” Branch said.

The cleanup has a stable of dedicated volunteers throughout Santa Fe, some of whom have been participating for many years. That includes Mike Friestad, who said he’s been taking part in the cleanup and Toss No Mas every year for about two decades.

Friestad, who lives on Rio Vista Street near the Santa Fe River, said he was walking his dog Chica along the river and would come across tires, shopping carts and other junk in the riverbed. Not long after, he learned about the cleanup and signed up, and has been taking part ever since.

Friestad wears a high-visibility vest when picking up trash and said he occasionally gets mistaken for a city employee. He said some people might look at the trash and ask why the city isn’t doing more to clean it up.

Friestad’s attitude is, “Why don’t you go down there and clean it up?” On Saturday, he’ll be doing just that.