BY DAVID REAGOR
Los Alamos County Councilor

I am repeating myself; 97 hours is what we do now (Friday COB). This is plenty of time for all the small items. We could add a day for that rare case when a Monday holiday intervenes.

The big items should be spread over several meetings!

As for meetings with staff, I meet with the County Manager at least once a month. I always ask about broadband, Mari-Mac and downtown White Rock. She will not give out any information that is relevant to incomplete negotiations. Not the names of vendors or any contract details. That is how government normally works. Los Alamos County may be a little more extreme than others, but contract negotiations are briefed in closed sessions, where we commit to nondisclosure to get the information, or never briefed at all. I even got kicked off the info call for the contractors on broadband. I just wanted to hear what the staff were telling the potential contractors, but the manager’s office stopped my link. It was a publicly announced Zoom call.

This year, the staff and former chair delayed the big controversial items until after the election. It was just blatant manipulation of the public. Many things we should have known about were not briefed in any closed session or private meeting. Then we had meetings in November overflowing with major decisions. The $9.8 million price of the Diamond Drive properties was disclosed to me in the same Friday agenda post that everyone saw. The appraisals for the same purchase were briefed at the Council meeting.

This kind of “here’s the price, project details, and the deadline is today” treatment is part of bureaucratic capture of elected officials by staff. They are not giving you real choices, just a reaffirmation of staff choices. This happens everywhere and at all levels of government, but it seems out of control in LosAlamos County. You need to understand this to understand what elected officials face.

Then you have back channel communications where projects like a conference center keep coming up after they appear done. A conference center killed the Marriott project, and now it appears to be part of the Mari-Mac project. At the same time we have a big conference center at Buffalo Thunder Resort and a small one at SALA Event Center. We can’t even host a national conference without many new hotel rooms, but the conference center is like a zombie in a science fiction movie, it keeps coming back from the dead and causing new problems. In an ironic twist, the conference center has interfered with hotel projects that could actually allow us to host conferences someday.

The lack of transparency reaches into every project, but the agenda deadline is not a major issue.