BY MAIRE O’NEILL
maire@losalamosreporter.com
The following are the answers candidates for Los Alamos County Council gave in response to questions about helping small businesses and what should be considered for egress from North Mesa if 85 more homes are added in that area. The questions were asked during the League of Women Voters of Los Alamos forum last Thursday and the answers are presented here in the order in which they were given.
How would you specifically help small businesses with rent, with space for small businesses and how to help with building codes to bring up rental space to current code and not penalize small businesses or shut them down with red flags?
Melanee Hand – Democrat
There are some programs that are available through economic development that help small businesses and I’ll just give you the acronyms. I think even in the voter guide for the primary I identified where you can look for that specific information but the acronyms are LEDA, ARPA and MRA and those are there to help us with a variety of different county government types of programs for supporting businesses.
Suzie Havemann – Democrat
This is a really important topic and as someone who was the head of the chamber of commerce, I was a realtor for 18 years so I worked with homeowners and property owners trying to improve their property and of course this campaign I’ve met with a couple of dozen small business owners here in town and there’s no doubt we’ve got a lot of room for improvement and a common thread is how hard it is to sometimes work with the county and to navigate the permitting process and inspection process. I think there’s also been a common thread of a sentiment that things have improved but I don’t think that there’s 100 percent consensus on that but if I were graphing it I think I’d see some improvement. I think what we need to do is remove silos. We need to remove obstacles – don’t hinder, actually assist. For example, when a business applies for a permit, this is all new to them. It might be, what county people do day to day, but small business people need hand-holding. If there are requirements that need to be met, those requirements need to be enforced consistently and equitably and then we need to hand-hold people and remember we’re all on the same team with the same goals.
Theresa Cull – Democrat
The programs that Melanee mentioned – ARPA and others are available to help small businesses with a variety of expenses. There’s currently applications that are being taken and reviewed by the county right now under ARPA. With regard to how we handle small businesses – again in my role in environmental safety and health – there’s a fine line between supporting and policing and we really our county to me more supportive and to treat our small businesses like customers not like the enemy, and actually help them walk through the process and facilitate getting their businesses up or compliant with the requirements. So I would want to work with the county to try and make sure that we’re more customer focused to deal with the latter part of the issue.
Randall Ryti – Democrat
We’ve already heard some of the specifics that are already in place. I mentioned something in my opening statement about making sure we have a one-stop approach to the county plus all those that support the county often under contracts with the county. I think that’s one specific thing I’m looking at. Another thing is making sure that the county has metrics. I would want to develop metrics for monitoring these programs and seeing if they are successful over time. So I think that’s another specific thing that I would like to see us doing. I think that also means this will have to be reporting to council, we have to hear that from staff. I think we have also heard a whole lot about outreach and I think that needs work also. We need to be present in the community and reaching out to the local business community. Something we didn’t hear was the Metropolitan Redevelopment Area in White Rock. So that’s an opportunity for the county to do some things that are not allowed otherwise so that’s an opportunity for the county to do this. In terms of code enforcement and red tags, that’s also a case where the county needs to be working with the business owners from the start to make sure they understand what the requirements are and that the requirements don’t change during the process.
James Wernicke – Libertarian
The first thing for reducing rents is to get LANL out of the business of dictating rent process. How you do that technically, that is a big challenge. You’re going to have to persuade them to improve their image someway. So being able to show LANL leadership that how it’s heard in the community and how pulling out – they can develop anywhere they want, it significantly impacts our local economy to the detriment of it. This is something where opening up the dialog with LANL leadership with the Community Partnerships Office – those kinds of things – working with LANL from that angle I think is probably as Miss Cull said, being supportive, not policing, not telling them what to do but trying to work with them from that angle to kind of move out. Stop doing contracts that develop in town, all those kind of things. Also just building more, increasing supplies, so when there are development opportunities like those lots sitting over on 20th Street, instead of giving them over to some big developer out of Albuquerque that really doesn’t have any skin in the game in this community, why don’t we put those up for public auction to local entrepreneurs that actually have plans to build mixed use developments and make it easy for the people in this community to develop this community. Those are ways to increase the supply, let local people own the property so they’re not dealing with ever-increasing rents. The relationship between entrepreneurship and code enforcement needs to be supported and cooperative.
Reginald Page – Republican
I think the first part of the question is the main concern. How do we get the buildings up to code? What do we need to do to be able to help these property owners out to get the buildings up to code so when the businesses come in to rent those spaces they’re not challenged with having to take out permits and getting shut down because the space doesn’t meet codes. I think working with the property owners is the first objective. You gotta start somewhere and I think that’s the first place you gotta start. You gotta get the buildings up to code, you gotta work with the building officers to get them up to code and then when you actually do rent these out, the people that are renting them to start their businesses don’t have a lot of challenges and red tape in their way. I think that’s the first thing you have to do. You have to work with these property owners. I know there’s some issues downtown right now with where the old CB Fox used to be, with bringing that up to code and the cost of that. We’ve got to work with them, whether it be incentive programs, tax incentives, whatever it needs to be to get them to update those buildings but also to give them help in the meantime. Otherwise these places are still going to be sitting here vacant another 10 years from now.
Gary Stradling – Republican
As I am out knocking on doors every day around the community, I meet quite a few people, a surprising number of people who are involved in small business enterprises and they talk to me about their day to day challenges and how they came into it, what they’re trying to do and how hard it is. I talk to people about doing contracting in the county and always I hear about how difficult the permitting process has been. So we clearly have a problem in the county. In the 40 years I have been here, I have seen many, many delightful businesses dry up and blow away – the bowling alleys, the movie theaters. The Hobby Bench was one of my favorites and so on. Radio Shack. Part of that is a national problem. I am not an expert in this. I will look to others who are more expert who have been working in these areas for a long time but I think this is a very important thing for us to be working on and in particular the county must not be a barrier to small businesses – it should be a facilitator. I love the image of the local police jumpstarting a car instead of a bulldozer dozing it off the side of the road. We should be the jumpstarter for businesses that are having troubles. We should not be working to find people in error, we should be working to enable them to be successful.
Please explain how egress from North Mesa will be considered for an evacuation if an 85 plus housing development is built as proposed on the McDonald property on San Ildefonso Road?
Suzie Havemann – Democrat
When I’ve been out meeting people while walking door to door, people who live in North Community and on North Mesa have definitely expressed concerns about this and my parents used to live on North Mesa so I understand from their perspective. I will say that concerns like this were raised when Ponderosa Estates was developed, concerns were definitely raised about this when Quemazon was developed and even after Quemazon was here – about ingress and egress. These concerns were definitely expressed when we had the evacuations for Cerro Grande and Las Conchas Fires but definitely the Cerro Grande. I think that’s something that has to be looked at – absolutely. But I think when you weigh the pros and cons like you have to do with any major decision, I think that the need for housing is very acute and so we’ve got to work together to figure out ways to work with our public transportation, our bus system, our road reconfiguration, reconfiguration of the roundabout if necessary. We’ve got to think about maybe the timing of the middle school needing transportation, same thing with Barranca Mesa Elementary, could be look at having a little market or a café or both, some little retain amenities up on North Mesa to minimize the amount of driving from the mesas into town. Anytime we can have success in minimizing traffic and congestion and burning fossil fuels is better.
Gary Stradling – Republican
I’ve been up on North Mesa recently knocking doors and I’ve heard from residents there about their concern – not so much traffic although everybody has concerns about the need to be able to get out of this community if there is a disaster. And as we’ve had the wildfires, it’s not just North Mesa, it’s everywhere. We are really necked down to a couple of small roads and during those kinds of evacuation events it is a big deal and I think that needs a lot more thought. With regard to 80 plus units on North Mesa, that is big but it is not a huge increase in the size of that portion of our community. As has been said before, we have to look at the traffic plan, we have to manage that and make it viable.
Randall Ryti – Democrat
I love on North Mesa so I am very familiar with the evacuation plans here. Depending on the nature of where the incident is there is one option where you would actually be sheltering at the soccer fields in place. As we know there is one pinch point and North Mesa is a cul de sac and we heard some different things about whether the fire department would come out here during Cerro Grande. I think that the way that the town is structured it’s an issue on North Mesa, an issue around the community in various neighborhoods where ingress and egress particularly during emergencies is problematic. We do have an emergency plan that is reviewed regularly. Of course with the latest fire I was involved in reviewing that and seeing what the options are for the county. We’re looking at a new development – that’s also key to what they should be looking at in the new development. There should be an analysis. There’s most likely a traffic study for routine traffic but they also should be looking at the consequences of an emergency – how are people going to get out, and I think people need to have that information. That is one of the things I have been promoting – making sure that we have that information out. I’ve been asking the staff to make sure we have the information out on the emergency options for every neighborhood.
James Wernicke – Libertarian
What I would say is don’t wait until the last minute to evacuate. The road infrastructure in this town is just not great. We were built as a secret government project. We were meant to be difficult to access. The egress is never going to be good. Look at what’s going on with Trinity right now. Every time we need to do repairs we’re going to have this going on. This personal responsibility – be aware of your community and what your community’s capable of. We can open up the roads in the canyons if we can work with the Pueblos to evacuate people that way, but still like when the Cerro Pelado Fire happened. That was my first encounter with a fire and I bugged out on Monday after following the reports the firefighters were giving and following the fire. I felt the risk level was too high for me so I bugged out with my family and I think everybody needs to take some responsibility for evacuating themselves and protecting themselves and realizing our community is never going to have good egress.
Reginald Page – Republican
I think the evacuation needs to be looked at if you add additional housing to this county. You definitely got to update the evacuation plan. I think county has done a pretty good job over the years of evacuating people for fires. I was personally here for the last major event when we had to evacuate and it was pretty orderly. People did a pretty good job. An analysis needs to be done anytime we add any more houses. I agree on this. You’ve got to look at how we can get traffic out of here as quickly and how safely can we do it opening up roads, one-way or whatever we need. I can tell you right now in the current configuration that our Trinity Drive is in, that I’m concerned about that, especially if we don’t open that up and make it one-way during an evacuation. So that’s something else that needs to be looked at. I think that there’s an inherent risk there.
Theresa Cull – Democrat
I agree with Randall that with any new development there needs to be a transportation study just to look at the roads and passability in the immediate area of that development. One thing that I’ve noticed with all three fires in this area is the Ready-Set-Go seemed to work pretty well. I think it’s as James mentioned, people left before they were told to go. A lot of people left on Ready. So there were very few people around. If we’d ever gotten to Go, I don’t think that we would have had the kind of issue that we had in our very first fire where houses were burning literally while people were still evacuating. And so I do think that the newer Ready-Set-Go might be helpful but I also think that people need to learn how to use roundabouts and I’m not being flippant. I do think people use them as a four-way stop rather than what they’re intended to be, which is a traffic-calming device. If we can teach people a little better how to use a roundabout, that might get the traffic to flow just on a regular day off North Mesa.
Melanee Hand – Democrat
First I would agree with Chair Ryti because I think that we need to update our emergency evacuation plans if we do have changes like that. I live on North Mesa and if I can’t get out I’ll probably rappel down the canyon. In all seriousness, we had that roundabout added and that significantly improved the back-up of traffic just for normal use and so using the round-about correctly is also a good suggestion from Theresa and the evacuation route that we open up – you go down Barranca by the shooting range and that was very effective when we had to evacuate before. I’ve been through two evacuations of Los Alamos so far and that was very effective and we did not have a big backup of cars or anything and it went very smoothly. No injuries etc.