BY JAMES WERNICKE
Member
Los Alamos Local Business Coalition Steering Committee
The Los Alamos Local Business Coalition—an advocacy group for local entrepreneurs by local entrepreneurs—is hosting its monthly public forum tonight April 10 5:30pm at SALA. Tonight’s topic is County rules and interpretations. Find out more at https://coalition.losalamos.com.
Los Alamos is a testament to what’s possible when innovation and oversight work in harmony. It also serves as a stark reminder of what happens when they don’t. We’ve created processes to ensure fairness and accountability, but in doing so, created a culture where following process matters more than delivering results.
When we care more about saying “no” correctly than we do about saying “yes” to opportunity, we choose to make scarce the things that should be abundant. Affordable housing slips further out of reach. Businesses close or never start. The services we want become the services we’re not allowed to have. The bureaucracy that’s meant to ensure equity consumes the energy that’s meant for prosperity.
It’s not for a lack of caring or fecklessness, but we must face the fact that our devotion to process is a form of tradeoff denial. Just as climate denial pretends pollution has no cost, we must stop pretending we can have every oversight, every requirement, every safeguard without stopping the very progress we say we want. We cannot keep layering rules and expecting results. The weight collapses the vision.
We can do better. Instead of letting fear force us to ask, “Is this allowed?” we can lead with heart and courage to ask, “Does this help?”
Our County’s plans already speak of our community values—affordable housing, economic vitality, and community health. It’s time to demonstrate those values not in words, but in action. It’s time to see local entrepreneurs treated not as applicants to screen, but as partners to support. It’s time to redesign processes so that they are clear, swift, and flexible so our energy isn’t wasted navigating red tape, but channeled into building the future.
Los Alamos has everything it needs to thrive except, perhaps, the willingness to get out of its own way. Let’s fix that and be the kind of community that chooses to build, not because it’s easy, but because it’s right.
This article was inspired by the book Abundance by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson.