BY KATIE BRUELL
Los Alamos

Editor’s note: Ms. Bruell is writing in her private capacity and not in her role as a Planning & Zoning Commissioner.

The first draft of PLAN Los Alamos, our new comprehensive plan, is disappointing. While it starts out with lots of talk about being innovative, taking risks, and getting un-stuck, when it comes to the details, there is almost nothing but status quo. 

Here’s what I’d like to see in the plan that I don’t:

• Specific recommendations about which zoning changes should be used to achieve the county’s housing goals (for example, allowing multi-family housing in more areas, decreasing lot sizes, reducing parking mandates, and more research-supported measures).
• Specific, measurable targets instead of vague language like “stabilize or increase”
• By-right development. This is a concrete change the county could make that would reduce the time and financial burdens on folks wanting to build more housing, therefore making housing more affordable and more likely to be built. 

(For more details on all of these, I highly recommend Stephanie Nakhleh’s Substack, We Can Have Nice Things.)

Instead, what I see is:

• A focus on “preserving existing neighborhood character;” ie, maintain the status quo, don’t be innovative or take any risks.
• Vague exhortations to use money to improve streets and trails (and to create a special fund of money to do so). Don’t we already do this? Why does the comprehensive plan need to direct the county to keep maintaining roads?
• A suggestion to turn open space into housing, which is going to be an extremely heavy lift in this town. Why not propose turning the golf course into housing? If you compare the number of users of the two, I’m sure open space would have many multiples more users than the golf course does. 

Calling the plan “innovative” and “risk-taking” feels akin to gaslighting when the recommendations are actually “gentle, context-sensitive infill.”

I applaud the plan’s authors for seeing that Los Alamos feels stuck when it comes to new ideas, and I hope that future drafts of the plan can reflect this desire for innovation.

Letters to the editor represent the opinions of the individual authors and do not necessarily reflect the views, opinions, or editorial stance of the Los Alamos Reporter. The publication assumes no responsibility or liability for the factual accuracy of statements made by contributors.