BY MAIRE O’NEILL
maire@losalamosreporter.com
This is Part Four of a series bringing you the comments candidates for Los Alamos County Council made at the September 29 virtual League of Women Voters Candidate Forum. The Reporter has received many emails about this series and it appears that the community likes reading the responses, which of course may be heard on the LWV video at
Los Alamos County currently has a minimum wage of $11.50 in accordance with the state minimum wage. As the wealthiest county in the state with a high cost of living, do you support raising the county minimum wage to $17 as suggested by the MIT living wage calculator?
Theresa Cull – Democrat
I think in order to attract people to support the small businesses up here we need to do whatever we can, and it can be increasing our minimum wage, it can be increasing the benefits given to people to support those businesses. When I was on the board of Sage Cottage Preschool we couldn’t pay minimum wage and attract people to work in a preschool. We had to pay at least what Santa Fe was paying so that we could get people to support the business. It’s a difficult answer because you know that by increasing the wages of the employees it’s going to increase the expenses of the employer, but I honestly think that’s the right thing to do. We need to pay people at least a livable wage.
Randall Ryti – Democrat
My short answer is yes and I think there’s a number of different ways we can start so one way the county could start is to make sure all the contractors’ employees are being paid that wage and I think that, as we’ve heard, there’s obviously a downside for the businesses of having to pay a greater wage. I think it’s important to hear what the concerns are. I think it’s also important to make sure people can live here so if wages aren’t supporting people living here then it doesn’t matter if there’s any housing because they can’t afford it. So I think it’s a matter of looking at this holistically and naturally. It’s a thing we have to support. So, yes.
James Wernicke – Libertarian
I don’t think $17 an hour is enough to live up here. As a Libertarian, I can’t tell people how much to pay – $17 an hour is not going to kill a business up here. At the same time $17 is not going to be enough to get workers living up here. I think for the most part our entrepreneurs are not like greedy. The local entrepreneurs are not looking to exploit their workers. That’s what certain big businesses in town do. So yeah, I think that people should be paid more than $17 an hour to be up here or we need to find other solutions like lowering the cost of living up here. I guess, to cut it short, I don’t support telling people how much they have to pay their employees because they’ll just not do business but I think any local entrepreneur is going to pay their workers fairly if it’s something their business can sustain.
Reginald Page – Republican
I do not support raising the minimum wage to $17 an hour. I think it’s a burden on local businesses here that can’t afford to pay that amount. I also agree that the businesses need the workers and that if they can afford to pay the additional amount be it $17 or $25 an hour they’re going to do that to acquire help. Currently the problem is, as James was mentioning, you couldn’t afford to live up here on $11.50 or $17 an hour. Part of the reason why McDonalds is closing at 8 p.m., Sonic has never got the people they need, Smith’s, a lot of businesses don’t have people around here is because the cost is extremely high. I think that’s part of the issue and we’ve got to fix that. We’ve got to find affordable housing for these workers so they can be here and live here. Most of them left during the pandemic and I haven’t seen them back and now we’ve got a shortage of workers here in town.
Gary Stradling – Republican
Well, that’s a lovely question but it’s too narrow. Since taking economics in college, I’ve been fascinated with the way that markets work and that is the basis for my proposal that we dramatically expand the housing in this community. All of our markets are terribly distorted and have been for years. We haven’t done anything about it. By having plenty of housing we will have people able to live here and able to work here. The housing prices will come down yet the new developments – we will have a broad spectrum of people who live here. Right now the spectrum of people should be like this in terms of low end and high end. Right now that is compressed so that only the high end can afford to live here. If we could be like Santa Barbara or Sun Valley or some of the other elite resort places that have to bus people in and put them up in dorms in order to have workers – that’s not how we want to be. We want to have a natural balanced marketplace where people can afford to live here, like to work here, can start businesses and be effective.
Melanee Hand – Democrat
I guess I’m experiencing this right now because my husband’s small business here in Los Alamos is having some challenges with finding workers and we’re finding that it’s very difficult to pay them what we were paying them before the pandemic. We can’t get workers. We’re looking at options to have workers to commute and we’re having to pay more or else you just don’t get workers. And of course that’s going to impact the cost of the product that is sold to customers so customers really end up paying more money and that could possibly drive way customers because they could find something cheaper and also challenge us for competing work because if you’re competing for contracts, a lot of times it’s lowest price technically acceptable. So there are a lot of complex issues to decide whether or not you automatically change minimum wage higher so I think that needs to be considered – the impact on small businesses is tough.
Suzie Havemann – Democrat
My answer is yes. I think the county should pay its employers and ask its contractors to put in the process and requirements to pay its employees a living wage and if that minimum wage needs to be $17.50 an hour through analysis then that’s what it needs to be, but it’s more than just the wage somebody takes home, it’s the whole package of benefits so that they can weigh their total income relative to the cost of living here. So we need to look at the whole picture. I can say that working for a small business here for a long time we had an office administrator who was priceless and she was always tempted to seek employment at the Laboratory and that’s kind of the elephant in the room because the Lab pays really well and has great benefits. It’s almost if you can’t beat them, join them, so we felt we were competing with the Lab more than anything else so we paid well. So I also am cognizant that if the county were to also pay better, then that’s going to put some pressure possibly on our small businesses, the retail sector, UNM-LA, the schools, the hospital, etc. So there’s got to be some ways that we can all work together to figure this out so that we can solve our workforce issues, quality of life issues and of course that will include housing supply and transportation and utility costs – the whole package.
Do you have any concerns about the integrity of the voting process in Los Alamos?
Randall Ryti – Democrat
No.
James Wernicke – Libertarian
No.
Reginald Page – Republican
The one problem I have and it’s to do with the state in general is unfortunately they don’t require ID to vote here and you can walk in and vote as long as you have somebody’s name and address and that’s all they ask for. Personally, I’ve got an issue with that but that’s at a state level, it’s not at a local level so yeah, I think there are some issues.
Gary Stradling – Republican
I believe everybody who is qualified to vote should be able to vote. I believe that every vote that is cast should be recorded. I believe that no one should vote or there should be no votes that are false votes. I think that everybody in the system should be comfortable and confident that our voting process has integrity. There’s been a lot of questions in the last couple of years. I’m not going to go into the national ones – but when the County Clerk offered us an opportunity to come down to the county offices and review the inspection of the voting machines and ask questions, I took that opportunity and had a lot of conversations with Naomi, asked a lot of questions. I am satisfied largely, that our local county process has integrity but I’m very concerned that there is hanging questions nationally and really want for us to examine the whole voting process and make sure that those criteria I set at the beginning really hold, that we can all be confident that the voting process has integrity.
Melanee Hand – Democrat
Yes, I believe that our Los Alamos County voting process has integrity and I always present my ID when I vote so if some people aren’t I don’t know what’s happening there but I always present my ID.
Suzie Havemann – Democrat
No I do not. It concerns me when concern is expressed because I think that erodes the confidence in our representative democracy and I think all of us want to make sure that we’ve got integrity. I prefer a system where we encourage voting, we make it as easy as possible to vote, we welcome voting so that people feel that they’ve had a say in who their elected leaders are and then they feel more confident that their elected leaders are always wanting to earn their vote and represent them and be their voice with the government that they’ve been elected to serve. I don’t have any concerns and I would like to actually instill a culture of confidence in our Clerk’s Office and our voting process.
Theresa Cull – Democrat
I have no concerns within Los Alamos, at the state level or nationally.
How do you protect our trans and queer youth?
James Wernicke – Libertarian
That is a good question. I really think we need to foster and encourage a culture of anti-bullying. This isn’t just for LGTBT community but across all identities and I think this really has to be on the people of Los Alamos to stand up when people are being bullied, to have the courage to do something with it – to stand up for those people. This problem goes so big. Like, the mental health issue in Los Alamos is just insane. We cover it up. I think it’s because people don’t want to lose clearances and things like that but we have a serious mental health issue going on in this community and it’s like a social thing. A lot of us are like shut-ins, we’re not very social. We just have to do better as a community that is open and inclusive and welcoming and understanding and willing to listen to each other.
Gary Stradling – Republican
I like James’s answer. I think that we have many people in the community of a wide variety of exceptionalities. In my own group of loved ones, I have people who have autism, bi-polar depression, who are gay, who have ADHD and other things. We put a lot of effort in the Americans With Disabilities Act to provide access to people who have certain kinds of handicaps. I think that everybody should be respected. They should not be singled out. They should be facilitated. Everybody should be treated fairly. Certainly, nobody should be bullied.
Melanee Hand – Democrat
I believe that we need to continue to develop a culture of understanding, recognition and acceptance of people who are different in all sorts of ways and that we need to offer tolerance and protection through organizations and other types of community programs.
Reginald Page – Republican
First thing, is through educating at home. We have a lot of different cultures, a lot of different people that come from different countries and everything right here in this small little town, but personally that education of how to treat people starts at home. I personally grew up in the 80s with an uncle that was gay and you know, all my friends – we hung out with him. Nobody ever had a problem. It was due to the fact that every one of those people was educated on how to treat other people. You have that personally, that divide comes from the internal workings of the home and you have to begin there first and so by teaching kids how to treat other people, not bully other people, and personally I raised my kids that way because that’s the way I was raised. And I believe that’s where it starts today. That’s how you stop what’s going on.
Suzie Havemann – Democrat
I think this is an important question. I think one way to approach it is to ask the queer and lesbian and gay community how they feel we could help in making sure that they are not discriminated against. And I know we have a DEI task force and I’m very glad we have that. I’ve been following that a little bit and I’d like to learn more. I would like to continue supporting that. I think we could work with the YMCA and the Teen Center and the Family Strengths Network because I think they interact with our youth quite a bit and we could learn from them. I think we could also learn from Special Olympics. I’ve been involved with Special Olympics off and on for various reasons and they’ve had to contend with some of the same challenges and some of the programs they’ve got at the state level are just amazing and they’re fantastic and they’re built on inclusion and respect and learning so there’s mutual benefit for non-Special Olympics athletes and others who don’t have special needs. So it’s kind of a win-win. So I’d like to really focus on that. And I really think that we need to, while it’s important to think that it starts at the home base in families, not all families are equipped to model that for their kids so I think the onus is also on the county and the community to help in that regard.
Theresa Cull – Democrat
Let me just say this. It’s not tolerance, it’s acceptance. It’s not a handicap, it’s who someone is. It’s who they are, who they grow up to be. You’re not going to change them by shoving them into a closet so the best thing to do is to educate the community to participate in events like Pride Week, to actually welcome with open arms anyone who says that they’re gay or thinks that they’re gay or is saying that they need to transition because they’re not in the right body. Education is extremely important. Banning books in the high school is not education. Banning books in libraries is not education. We need to make sure that our teachers are allowed to have a welcoming and open space for some of the students who don’t know who else to turn to. The same with our medical specialists – they need to be able to provide the level of care that’s needed. As a gay person, I will say that it was very different when I was growing up than it is today. It’s different now – it’s better in some ways but there’s still a lot of discrimination out there.
Randall Ryti – Democrat
I was at one of the concerts and some youth came and asked me this very question and it was more what the county was going to do but I think it’s important for us to think about this individually and as a role as a community leader what we’re going to do. And I think certainly showing up and being available at events like the Los Alamos Pride and indicating your support that way. Making sure you make yourself available to be educated is another important thing. From a county perspective we do have the Teen Center currently and it is a safe place for everybody and I think that’s another thing that’s really important and those are all the things I look to. I don’t look at his differently personally versus as a councilor. It’s important to meet people where they are and to understand where they’re coming from and not be judgmental. That’s how I would attempt to support trans and queer youth.
Watch for Part Four which includes answers to a couple of questions and closing comments from candidates.