BY BECCA JONES
White Rock
While I can’t speak to the full context of the Hilltop project or the CB Fox redevelopment, since I don’t know the details behind either one, I can speak directly to Janet Lovato’s experience with the TimeOut Pizza building in White Rock, and her grant requests, because I’ve watched it unfold as a person hoping to host a complimentary business in her building.
She’s not some deep pockets developer swooping in with unlimited resources. She’s a local resident who looked at a vacant building sitting empty in our community and decided something needed to change. She saw an opportunity to bring real value and a meaningful quality of life improvement to Los Alamos County, and she took it upon herself to start the process.
This hasn’t been easy or cheap for her, and aside from the process itself being difficult to navigate, it has cost her a significant amount of her own personal funds just to get to where she is now, long before any grant money has come through. She didn’t cut corners or look for shortcuts either. She followed every single step of the grant program process, exactly as it was laid out, to help move her project forward the right way. That kind of diligence and personal investment matters, especially in a small community where projects like this can genuinely shape the character of our town.
Her project is a great example of exactly the type of small, community driven effort these grant programs were designed to support. If we want to see more local residents step up and take on projects that improve our county, we need to make sure the process actually works for people like Janet, not just for larger developers with deeper pockets and more resources to navigate the bureaucracy.
Los Alamos, we complain about not having things here, but we can’t get out of our own way and actually make things happen. Of course the county should be prudent with the things that money is offered to, but something like Janet’s project IS THAT THING. Please make sure the county knows that you support Janet’s project please don’t lump it into these large more bureaucratic projects.