BY JODI BENSON
Los Alamos

Thank you, Jim Rickman, for your excellent article about choosing a County Manager (“A Reality Check on County Manager Hiring”).  We have two excellent candidates: Tracey Jerome from El Paso, possibly one of the “outsider(s) and vagabond interjector(s) to get us across the rough seas of change,” and our own Anne Laurent, both of whom will do a fine job.

I need, however, to make a couple of corrections about the (yes, it’s pretty horrible) Kroger takeover of the south side of Trinity.  I think many of us have forgotten the Bush-era Iraq War, stock-market-speculation, deregulated crazy money, with everybody throwing money into real estate with the no-down-payment, ballooning mortgage —until suddenly—there was no money to throw.

This lack of money totally derailed the School Board/County deal with the Boyer Company for a live-work development as envisioned by the community-formed Comprehensive Plan.  

Here’s a recap:  LAPS and the County owned that huge hunk of land south of Trinity full of Quonset huts, squat, concrete, Cold War-era office buildings, tumbled-down maintenance shops, a junk yard, and the school bus barns surrounded by toppling fences.  Tourists driving into town didn’t know where they were or why they came.  Residents complained. (Me? I liked it—it fittingly looked like a Twilight Zone episode set post nuclear war.)  At the same time, we needed new schools. For a while to get income, in order to make a bit of cash, the LAPS Board and superintendent had been selling school land cheap for allegedly affordable housing.  The 2007 LAPS Board understood that a one-time-only, minimal cash-infusion with no benefit to school-employees’ need for affordable housing was not smart.  Instead, the School Board and the County struck a deal led by Board Member Joanie Ahlers to lease not sell the south parcel that they owned to a developer for long-term income for the Schools and tax revenue for the County.  

All the south side LAPS/LAC maintenance buildings would (unfortunately) move to (beautiful) Pajarito Cliffs.  The County would build those facilities.  

The County Manager and School Board sought developers who would construct the live-work environment that has long been a vision of the County Sustainability Plan.  After narrowing the finalists from the several proposals, the 2007 Board and LAC representatives took a field trip to Salt Lake City to check out their developments. After seeing the product, the Board enthusiastically selected Boyer’s “Trinity Place Mixed Use Development.”

Boyer had a plan. There would be the Kroger’s superstore, but also a retail/residential area along Los Alamos Canyon with the canyon views and landscape left open for access and celebrated like a riverfront or beach.  Boyer had the plan; they had banks ready to lend.  And then, as too often happens under a Republican administration, the economy collapsed. We recessioned.  Boyer pulled out.  

LAC and LAPS had already started clearing the land south of Trinity and building on Pajarito Cliffs. With that location, it should’ve been a resort hotel or state park, but with LANL in charge of all the land everywhere else, the County, despite citizen protests, puts stuff where it can. The good thing? The buildings are LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) certified.

LAPS needed the income expected from the development.  Nobody was bidding.  Nobody.  For a couple years.  Only when the economy began to recover (under Obama who, like Biden, invested money for community projects—you might remember Los Alamos got a bundle to clean up DP Road where now we have begun developing high-density housing with the caveat that nobody grows vegetables because of maybe still some rad contamination in the dirt), did anybody bid.  Only one.  And that’s how we ended up with a Kroger superstore and giant parking lot in 2014. 

Back to the County Manager.  It wasn’t corruption or incompetence on the County’s part—the Bush Administration’s and Republican Congress’, yes, but not the County’s.  Right now, both Manager candidates—our own Anne Laurent who has worked in the community and knows the history (“those who forget history are doomed to repeat it”) and Tracey Jerome from El Paso (who has dealt with an entirely different kind of border crisis than our border with LANL)—each are excellent.  We citizens would benefit if we used some LANL taxes to hire them both.