BY RANDALL RYTI
Los Alamos County Councilor

In the last month or so the Los Alamos County Council has considered some controversial proposals. The item that generated the most public comment was the potential purchase of two vacant lots on Diamond Drive and a nearby commercial building. I had thought the purchase was worth considering because it could help the County realize a long-term goal for a social services hub. Even though I have been and continue to be a supporter for a social services hub, I was concerned about replacing commercially zoned land for institutional uses. Ultimately, there were too many objections from the public to make this a viable opportunity. Most people commented that the price we would have paid was too high, which was ultimately the deciding factor for my vote.

There has also been some discussion about how Council makes decisions, prioritizes fundings, and engages the public. Personally, I read all the emails that come directly to Council and try to respond to all emails. I also read letters to the editors and comments on social media posts. We also have public opinion surveys that are conducted every two years as well as surveys for special purposes, like the Comprehensive Plan almost 10 years ago. The statistically based surveys as well as open surveys provide valuable information on how the County staff, management, and elected officials are doing to address community needs and concerns. The community surveys conducted in 2020, 2022, and 2024 all used the same national research company. Thus, we are starting to get information to establish trends and comparisons to other communities.

Among the custom questions posed in the 2024 survey was to indicate if the public thought the 22 Council priorities should be a high, medium, or low priority or simply should not be a priority at all. Three priorities had substantial agreement in the survey that they should be a high priority:

 Effective efficient and reliable services, 80% high priority
 Housing, 78% high priority
 Local business, 77% high priority

As part of the Council and County senior management strategic planning session held November15, 2024, we did a forced ranking of the 22 priorities, which were renamed objectives. There were some minor changes to the objectives, but they are basically the same as those developed the previous year. This ranking created the following top five among the 22 objectives:

 Housing
 Local business
 Effective efficient and reliable services
 Communication and engagement
 Downtown revitalization

So, the public and the Council/County have very similar priorities, and this should be helpful moving forward to better evaluate potential projects. With an emphasis on communication and engagement we can look to projects where engagement was successful and where it was not. The process used to site the new Fire Station 4 is an example of a successful engagement. Regular updates on long-term projects like community broadband will also be helpful.

As I mentioned previously, the community survey provides a comparison to the slightly more than 300 other communities using the same research company. Most of the questions are benchmarked broadly. There is a lot of useful information in those comparisons. The research company makes some simple categories of these results – similar, lower, higher – based on the positive responses (excellent or good, not fair or poor). I was interested in our percentile ranking, or what percentage of the other communities had a lower score. We asked 140 questions and Los Alamos County scored very highly in some areas and low in others. For example, we scored better than about two-thirds of the communities for public safety related questions. We scored better than 80% of the communities for public works and utilities related questions. We scored low in other areas including the 10 governance related questions, only scoring better than about one-third of the communities. Our two lowest scoring governance
questions were:

1) the overall direction that the County government is taking and
2) acting in the best interest of the community.

While we scored low in governance questions, the results were slightly better than in 2022. Clearly, we can do better if we acknowledge what has been working for engagement and make a commitment to regular updates to the community in the local traditional media and other information sources used by the public.

Let’s work together over the next two years to move forward to address community priorities. If you have comments on this column or suggestions on how to improve communication and engagement, you can email me at randall.ryti@lacnm.us or the entire Council at ~CountyCouncil@lacnm.us.