BY KEVIN HOLSAPPLE
Los Alamos

The current MRA discussion about adding another “tool” to the “toolkit” for encouraging development to satisfy community needs and desires and the call for citizen input prompted me to provide input to the County.  Several friends encouraged me to share the input in an Op-Ed in our local media.  

Three tools already in the County toolkit are the Local Economic Development Act (LEDA), the Los Alamos Creative District, and the White Rock MRA.  All of these provide paths for the County to help projects that will help our community achieve our plans and goals without violation of the often-mentioned Anti-donation Clause to the State Constitution.  To my understanding, none have been effectively used in a project in downtown Los Alamos or in the commercial area of White Rock.  I am for the County using all of these tools to support projects to improve our commercial areas, but I fear they don’t know how to do that.  How can we move from having tools on paper to actually putting the tools to work?

The LEDA Experience

I spent time over the last year volunteering to help SALA apply for Local Economic Development Act (LEDA) funding from Los Alamos County to pursue an exciting downtown project that aligned with many goals and plans of both SALA and our community.  I have no financial involvement in the SALA business, but I volunteered because I saw it as the kind of thing we need in our town – a community-minded business willing to take a risk on making investments to help further community plans and goals.

I didn’t take this on naively.  Although I am a retired guy, I have considerable professional experience with the use of LEDA in our community and in trying to navigate County bureaucracy.  Before I retired, I worked on multiple LEDA applications and was the CEO of a company that negotiated the first LEDA deal with the County.  I expected an uphill climb and accepted that the County has little experience among its current staff with LEDA.  I was a bit surprised though at what seemed to me to be a lack of interest in the potential of the SALA project to address multiple County goals while demonstrating what has seemed to be a missing commitment to focus on helping small businesses to be sustainable.

I have several observations from being involved in this attempt to get the County to use the LEDA tool:

• The County had no effective framework or timeline for responding to the LEDA application.  What could have taken 90 days or less turned into nearly a year before being abandoned by SALA.
• The idea of public-private partnership seemed foreign to the County.  The application called for SALA and the County to make equal contributions to the project, share risks, and work together for mutual benefit. SALA felt they were unable to get much serious discussion of what this would mean and how it would work in the case of the SALA project.  
• Although the County seemed to agree with SALA’s views about how the project supported many of its goals and objectives, the discussions seemed to have little consideration of the project’s benefits. The focus was on how to address what seemed to be restrictive interpretations of vague “requirements.”
• County Councilors seemed to understand and be supportive of the project and formally approved working to get it done.  It was not clear that this understanding and support filtered down to the County staff.
• Bureaucratic requirements were created as SALA tried to finalize an agreement, often without any connection to the plain language of the County Code and State Law or any other specific legal requirements or standards that the County could or would share.
• SALA had the impression that County Councilors and others in the community were not receiving accurate information about the difficulties they were encountering in reaching a conclusion. The Staff would not support taking proposals for resolving issues to the Council for them to decide in a public forum. Misinformation about the status and issues was flowing back to SALA “through the grapevine.”
• Following the withdrawal of the LEDA application by SALA nearly a full year after it was originally submitted, there has been no outreach by the County to SALA to explore any other potential approaches to capturing the benefits of the proposed project.  Did the County not believe in the potential benefits?  If that is the case, why string SALA along for nearly a year and tell them the County believed in the project?  Why not have that discussion soon after the application was submitted?

So the LEDA tool in our toolkit needs work.  Yet we are talking about adding another tool to the toolkit.

The Current MRA Discussion

I have been reading the reports about current discussions to establish another MRA in our County with the idea that it will provide new tools and possibilities for improving part of the downtown.  It is great to have tools in the toolbox, but they need to be crafted to be able to be used for achieving community goals, there needs to be a clear operator’s manual for how they will be used, and there needs to be operators (staff) who understand how to use them.  Otherwise, we’ll continue to have what we seem to have with the LEDA tool that is already in the toolbox – a promising tool that the staff doesn’t know how to use.

As I understand it, there has been an MRA designated in White Rock since 2022.  Looking at the White Rock MRA may be useful to inform the current MRA discussion.  How has this tool worked out in White Rock and is it the same tool that is being proposed for downtown?  Has it enabled good results in White Rock?  

I suggest that the most important information needed to inform the MRA discussion is to hear what the affected property owners in White Rock and Los Alamos have to say about what an MRA would enable them to do that they can’t do otherwise and whether the MRA will make a desirable project on their property more likely.  What do we know about how Columbus Capital, the main property owner in the proposed area, views the usefulness of the proposed MRA?  

Is any redevelopment project that a property owner or a developer might undertake a good thing for the community?  Property owners are free to do whatever project they want within the bounds of the development code, but our community interests go beyond just seeing development activity.  In my view, our community needs improved retail options and less expensive housing — particularly for lower-income residents.  Note that job creation is not an important need in the current environment.  It is OK if developers want to build additional expensive housing, but I see no need at this point for the County to subsidize or incentivize doing that unless it also brings things that the community needs.

Will the MRA be established to enable and incentivize what our community needs, or will it just broadly try to support whatever a developer or property owner or county staff wants to do?  I can’t begrudge a property owner for any project they think makes sense and want to try, but that doesn’t mean that community support and incentives should be offered for projects that don’t address true community needs. 

One other concern I have about the MRA discussion is what I’ll call the “ability to walk and chew gum at the same time” problem.  The effort and attention drawn by the discussion of another MRA should not deter the need to address the effective use of the other tools in the toolkit and better support for small businesses in the community.  Efforts to achieve the County’s big-picture plans and goals need to stay in the forefront.  The MRA should be put in proper perspective – one more potential tool in the toolkit to help achieve those big-picture plans and goals. 

Finally, after completing the MRA survey that the County has online, it reminded me that it would be helpful to publish the raw inputs from citizens together with the County’s takeaways from the collective responses.  I have suggested this before.  I have completed several County surveys in recent times.  In my view, the County generally does poorly with acknowledging they have understood the input they have received and sharing the input they receive with the public.  It leaves me with the impression that putting out a survey or call for input is more about checking a box to say the public was consulted than it is about truly wanting citizen participation in the process.