Meet Gallup’s mayoral race candidates
By Molly Ann Howell
Managing Editor
MARC A. DEPAULI
Civil engineer and longtime Gallup resident Marc A. DePauli brings decades of working on city infrastructure to his vision for Gallup’s future. For over 30 years, he has collaborated with the City of Gallup on numerous public works projects. His experiences have revealed to him how deeply infrastructure influences community development.
They also sparked his run for mayor.
“I thought, ‘You know what, I’m in the best position to negotiate the Navajo-Gallup Water Supply Project with the Navajo Nation and the Bureau of Reclamation,” he said in an interview with the Sun. “I’ve got the most history and the most knowledge, and that’s when I first started to think I should run for mayor.”
DePauli left his hometown after graduating from Gallup High School to attend the University of Arizona, where earned a degree in civil engineering. Then after working across Arizona and southern California, he returned to Gallup in 1993 and has been here ever since.
That same year, DePauli was hired by Sterling and Mataya Engineers and Surveyors. DePauli eventually bought the company and rebranded it as DePauli Engineering in 2000.
DePauli Engineering hosts an internship program for college students that has trained about 50 people at the firm over the past two decades.
However, while those youth receive training in Gallup, not many of them have opted to stay in town. Only about 20% of those interns found work locally while the remaining interns moved away to find work elsewhere. DePauli aims to bring that number up to at least 80% by setting up a city-wide internship program.
“What I’d like to do is turn that around to 80% staying in Gallup because they know there’s an opportunity for them here,” he said. “We’re gonna do that with numerous programs that are attractive. We can get the kids in with the private industry; I don’t care if it’s accountants, store owners, or construction workers, but I want these kids to know they have the opportunity to do that [here in Gallup].”
Besides his work with the engineering firm, DePauli serves on the Gallup Sports Commission going on 20 years and has been the chairman for the last 13.
During his time on the commission, they replaced all the grass fields in town with turf.
“As the chairman of the sports commission I recognize the need for athletics in Gallup for our youth. It’s probably one of the most important things,” DePauli said.
Tied right in with keeping young people in Gallup, DePauli wants to see more community development. One such plan of his aims to generate more growth in the city by increasing the city’s population by 1 or 2% each year.
To do that, he says the city must become proactive in their efforts to revitalize old neighborhoods and replace utilities such as cast iron pipes and sewer lines.
“A lot of what the city is doing right now is purely reactive,” he said.
DePauli’s plan for vacant lots is one way the city could do just that. In the plan, whenever a developer or someone else wants to build a house or a commercial facility in Gallup, the city would pay for any materials the builders need, such as concrete for curbs and gutters and asphalt for sidewalks.
Through this exchange, a contractor and developer association is then created. The organization would discuss standards and changes to building practices and regulations as a result.
Finally, DePauli believes that Gallup’s crime problem can be partially resolved by attracting more law enforcement officers to the city through plans to increase officers’ salaries and offer legal support to them as well.
As another facet of engaging local youth, DePauli would also push for the creation of an internship program with the University of New Mexico-Gallup for both high school and college students interested in law enforcement careers.
DePauli said whether he wins the mayoral ticket or not, he’s planning on stepping down from DePauli Engineering in the near future and transferring the ownership of the company to his employees in the coming months.
If he wins the mayoral ticket, however, working with DePauli Engineering and other engineering companies in Gallup to improve the city is one of his top plans.
TIMARIS MONTANO
When asked why she wanted to run for mayor, lifelong Gallup resident Timaris Montano said she put her hat in the ring because she was thinking of her grandkids’ future.
“My grandchildren don’t have a good future here. The way everything is going, it just doesn’t feel positive for children and there’s so many things that can and should be done that need to be done,” she said. “Everyone’s priorities are a lot different, and I feel like I have the knowledge, the experience, and the education, and I would do things differently than what’s been done in the past.”
Montano considers herself a “non-traditional student” who earned her bachelor’s degree in organizational communication from UNM two years ago with a minor in business administration. Before that, she raised her six kids for the past 30 years.
If Montaro is elected mayor, she aims to tackle the issue of unsheltered people, support kids, and give the city a seat at the table where lawmakers discuss water rights. Through her actions, she would reorganize the city government with accountability at the forefront.
“I would like to provide everyone, in every position, including myself as mayor, with goals to be able to produce pride, good customer service to the people, and most importantly, efficiently have a process that could help the growth of our environment,” she said.
Montano would also conduct a Strength, Weakness, Opportunity, Threat analysis of the city’s operations and develop a strategic plan for each department.
“In order for us to grow economically, we have to do an analysis of our system and how it is working,” she said. “Right now, it’s not working.”
When it comes to the city’s unsheltered issue, Montano said she wants to keep unhoused people away from highly populated areas, such as Safeway, Marshalls, and Albertsons.
“We could train them to stay away from those stores,” she said. “In the meantime, let’s identify them. Let’s be able to help them get into where they need to be after we identify them.”
Montano said unsheltered adults and children alike would benefit from housing-first programs, such as Salt Lake City, Utah’s The Other Side Village. The Village is a tiny home community that serves as a solution to the city’s unhoused population issue. Unlike similar programs across the country, The Other Side Village has a human-first policy.
This means they don’t care whether a person is sober. The only requirements for someone to live in a tiny home as part of the program is that the individual has to be “chronically homeless, meaning they’ve lived in a place unfit for human habitation for the last 12 months continuously or on multiple occasions; they must have lived in the Salt Lake City metro area for at least the past year; individuals must complete an assessment and consent to a background check; and finally, they mustn’t be sex offenders or have committed aggravated assault.
Montano said she specifically wants to set up a youth center where young people can learn a range of skills, including crocheting, sports, robotics, engineering, and business.
“If we don’t have a program that helps these kids now, where do you think they’re going to go? We’re continuing the cycle over and over and over again,” she said. “And we haven’t got to the root of the problem—and that’s working with our youth; giving them hope, giving them ideas, giving them dreams.”
She did credit the programs that already exist in Gallup — such as Big Brothers Big Sisters and the Boys & Girls Club — and said the community needs to continue supporting them.
LYNDON TSOSIE
At 19 years old, Lyndon Tsosie’s mother issued an ultimatum to him: find a job or move out. He began work as a stamper at a local jewelry production center, a move that set him on the course of his life’s work.
Now, Tsosie said his transformation from a raucous teenager to an award-winning silversmith and business owner helped him see the potential for change in Gallup, enough so that he has put his hat in the ring for the mayoral race.
Tsosie explained that he wanted to run for mayor because he doesn’t like how the city currently operates.
“I really, really dislike the buddy-buddy system with the way the current city government is doing business as usual,” he said. “It’s over and over and over. You don’t see progress here, you don’t see the bonds that are issued for infrastructure working.”
Tsosie says he has thousands of photos from all over Gallup of streets with overgrown weeds growing over the curbs. He said the curb appeal in Gallup is a major problem that deters potential tourists and new residents from visiting or moving to the city. And he says the city has the money to fix the problems.
“Gallup is not that broke,” he said. “It was time for me to run and put my hat in to hopefully make change with the backing of the community and the neighboring communities.”
Tsosie’s passion for community is reflected in the years of work he has put into his side projects. He serves as President of James & Tsosie, Inc. and owns The House of Stamps, where he sells traditional Navajo-made stamps and hosts seasonal Navajo stamping workshops, including for senior living communities.
Then several years back, Tsosie created the non-profit The Lyndon Foundation, which began accepting students in June 2023. The Foundation helps Diné youth learn about silversmithing and aims to propel the minds of young Native American students toward opportune careers in the arts to become self-sustaining.
Besides cleaning up the community, Tsosie also wants to help the city conserve water.
Within his first 100 days, he plans to push an initiative to encourage everyone in Gallup to conserve water. Whether by fixing a leaky faucet or toilet bowl, or asking the city to fix a leaky waterline, Tsosie said even the smallest fix could save the city gallons of water.
“If we actually do that, if we can push that initiative to the community, we can save over 100,000 gallons of water in a few months,” he said.
Tsosie also wants to improve the city’s wastewater treatment plant.
“We’re in 2025, if we can shoot a satellite in the air and get high speed internet in a second, how come we can’t fix the water treatment plant? I don’t understand,” he said.
Another facet Tsosie wants to improve is the city’s overall communication with the public.
As mayor, he plans to pass an ordinance requiring all city councilors to hold a monthly community get-together in their district so they can listen to their constituents along with holding public monthly meetings with each district himself.
Tsosie said there are even more items on his list besides the ones already mentioned, but he also wants to spend time talking to constituents and asking them about what they want to see from the city’s government.
“I want the community to be involved and then put their ideas down on paper so that we all come together as a collective to hash these problems out, so that we all benefit,” he said. “The end result is we benefit economically, socially, and physically with our town. That’s not going to happen overnight.”
The city will hold primary elections on Nov. 4. The winner will take office on Jan. 26.
To locate your polling place for the upcoming election, visit the Secretary of State’s website at https://www.sos.nm.gov/voting-and-elections/.
