over this meeting this afternoon i'm
happy to see everybody out in the
audience
special shout out to abigail she is
um
[Music]
shadowing me today for this afternoon
thank you for the well welcome okay if
you would stand so we can say the pledge
okay thank you we have jennifer martinez
pets of the week
good afternoon jennifer
good afternoon mayor pro tem and council
i am jennifer martinez with the city's
communications office
and today i have the ability and
pleasure
to first reintroduce you to one of our
pets of the week from a couple of weeks
ago this is apple apple was recently
moved into the public adoptable cat room
where anyone can come and hang out with
her apple is concerned that she has not
been adopted yet and has the folks over
at the ascmv now on a mission to help
her find her forever family that she
truly deserves if you remember apple has
one eye that is missing
and then we have spots spots has what
the ascmv staff describe as a rorschach
type of look so if you look into his
face he wants to know if you see him
being your next forever friend
spotz is calm gentle and great on a
leash and he can also sit on command
with such great traits spots is also
wondering why he is not in his forever
home he has his hopes up that this will
be the week that someone will come and
visit and we'll fall in love with him
too
remember the clear the shelters adoption
event continues through august where all
adoptions are 25
unless you're one of the first 170 to
adopt then the borman autoplex will pick
up the fees and if you want to try
something new this weekend you can head
out to the adopt a co-pilot day at the
war eagles museum in santa teresa that
event takes place from 10 a.m to 2 p.m
the address for that event is 80 12
airport road in santa teresa and if
you'd like more information on any of
our pets of the week you can call the
animal services center at 382-018
thank you mayor pro tem thank you so
much jennifer my heart goes out to all
the animals at the center although being
taken care of well
that center is over populated so please
take special note of the clear the
shelter
event that is happening through the
month of august so thank you jennifer
hi dr balladez
hi viewers how are you i'm welcome city
council good afternoon and these are
going to be your jobs of the week for
this week the city of las cruces
economic development department is
having a management analyst this
position is paying between 23 to 33
dollars an hour and it's going to be
closing on the 15th of august of 2022.
see las cruces finance department is
also hiring an accountant this position
will be open until filled and it's
paying between twenty three dollars to
thirty three dollars an hour there's
also a position available as a laborer
and this is with hunt fence company
paying fifteen dollars an hour closing
on the 31st of august of 2022 there's
also a maintenance mechanic this is with
liberty engineered wire products paying
between 20 to 24 an hour depending on
the experience and closing on the 31st
of august of 2022. last but not least
the there's a position open was a
respiratory therapist nurse this is with
oxygen therapy associates incorporated
the salary for this position was not
disclosed and it will be closing on the
29th of october of 2022. there's also a
reminder for the members of the city
council and the public in general and
actually accompanies that there's going
to be an education and healthcare career
fair this saturday august the 13th at
the plaza de las cruces right along the
time in which the farmer's market is
going on it's from 9 a.m to 12 p.m and
then as always for a full list of jobs
internships and volunteer opportunities
please visit employeem.com or government
jobs dot com forward slash careers
forward slash las cruces
this is a flyer of the education and
healthcare career fair it is going to be
at the plaza de las cruces at the same
time as the farmer's market so that if
you need assistance with your resume you
can contact our friends with new mexico
workforce connections there's a qr code
that you can scan from your phone right
there and again the reminder is in
august the
august the 13th from 9 00 a.m to 12 p.m
again the information for the friends at
new mexico workforce connections is
524-6250 that's their phone number and
they're located at 226 south alameda
boulevard in downtown las cruces thank
you mayor patel
dr bayatas is this your last time giving
us the my last jobs of the week and now
from now it's going to be chris favor
during the job show week thank you thank
you dr payatis because i was on the
phone i did and didn't get a chance to
say thank you so much for all your work
your exceptional work in the economic
development department you'll be missed
um and i wish you well thank you council
thank you everyone thank you for the
opportunity for working with you
thank you thank you
okay next up is 3.1 arms quarterly
update
i know richard is here
good afternoon
mayor pro tem council
city manager uh this is for the record
richard dayu with the alliance for
regional military support and with me is
john bailey who's our vice chairman
and so together we'll we'll go tandem
and provide you
a relatively quick update
it's taken us a few times up here to
learn our lesson to keep it as brief as
possible and allow you
to ask any questions that you have so
thank you again for this opportunity to
speak before you
i'm not sure who has the slide controls
at me
and you do richard it's there
there you go
okay
he's also my tech tech advisor
thankfully brian
there it is
there you go okay
and the up arrow would be
there
okay so with recent accomplishments
uh we heard hosted colonel venable in
fact mayor miyagashima attended that
reception i think
excuse me city manager and deputy city
manager also were there
this is a couple of months ago
and we had some folks representing the
local healthcare industries in that
visit that we had up up the street
and then we sent it we also briefed
senator ben ray lujan when i say briefed
i mean i'll be glad to go into more
detail but i'm keeping it brief no pun
intended
simply to get to the points to keep him
as well as the other legislators up to
date on activities that are ongoing
within the las cruces white sands area
addressing issues they may find
of interest and concern
and helping us and i'll get to that in
just a moment
on my closing comments as well and we
also briefed congresswoman harrell
recent announcements these are all
pretty important recent military
construction projects that have been
approved by the u.s senate
one company satellite fire station
at 6.4 million
a las cruces substation also at 6.4
million and a missile assembly building
planning and design at 3.6 million with
that i'll turn it over to john to
continue
so some additional
accomplishments we've had we hosted
general paul funk who's the tradoc
commander in charge of all training
throughout the united states army
out here we recognized new mexico state
graduates we had them come out and talk
to the cadets and the pms
out there we worked the las cruces
school district to involve them in the
army scholarship
and opportunities with cadet command
we've committed to four 250 000
scholarships for the year of 2022 and
2023 we're really working very closely
with the schools to make sure that they
understand what's out there in terms of
army scholarships rotc
the the academies those type of things
with it so we really want to work that
uh virtual bedcom recruiting meeting
with las cruces area high schools really
talking about how the uh the medical
profession can be uh helped by the the
us army connected medcom to the unm
campus
we participated in new mexico land
commissions meeting to talk about
encroachment and make sure that we
continue to keep encroachment issues up
on their their radar and we hosted life
skills program with wismer white sands
missile range service members on vehicle
maintenance with sergeant major of the
army retired dan daly so we had him up
at white sands to talk to
young soldiers about how to take care of
their vehicles
and i'll turn it back over to richard
no i'll do upcoming activities sorry
about that we didn't plan this out
upcoming activities preparing for
project convergence 2022 that's the
largest army uh exercise in the world
it's going to be mostly on the west
coast involving the navy but there'll be
some things happening in white sands
that we're making sure we're engaged in
strategizing with local regional
economic development directors to
support industry day for the the white
sands 2022 project convergence
potential partners that we're working
with are mercia valley
economic development alliance
economic development alliance the city
of las cruces donna ana county and the
state of new mexico economic development
new mexico office of tourism and the el
paso convention and business bureau to
make sure that people that are coming in
understand what's here in the las cruces
areas we're preparing to host an
industry day with
raytheon technologies in las cruces high
schools talk about stem
cypress international has actually met
with and is talking to the airport on
how they can enhance some of the
opportunities they have with both the
navy and the air force as well as the
army
and we're planning for a usa national
meeting in october it's the 9th through
the 12th we encourage las cruces to send
a representative with us we'll host
meetings with senior leaders as well as
industry leaders throughout the united
states out there we're hosting
the vp for dell technologies
for the stem initiatives we're bringing
the army g9
for partnerships out to talk to las
cruces to determine how we can do some
intergovernment
sharing with white sands and las cruces
and this week we're hosting the army
software factory leadership at nmsu
and we're also doing a luncheon and then
they're speaking to one of the high
schools about the stem initiative and
what the software factory brings to
to the process richard thank you
so continuing
and by the way to the last point that
john just made this
visit that we're doing friday here in
las cruces
is in partnership with the
las cruces chamber of commerce and deb
deb moore
proactively we're pursuing continuous
improvement of regional military medical
capabilities which is part of that visit
we had a couple of months ago was the
commander at beaumont that was the
underlying
reason for that visit
staying engaged with army futures
command and air force works air force
works is the
the component that's identical pretty
close to identical to what the army
refers to as army futures command so
looking at future capabilities
and that effort because of the
relationship that white sands also has
with holloman and ford bliss
all these are closely tied together
advocating of course for white sands
range capabilities
this is a side note and has nothing at
all to do
with arms specifically but i just
recently had the privilege of hosting
general little eric little
as i interviewed him on a radio show for
npr
so he could talk to the community
about what they're doing he and the
command sergeant major about some of the
initiatives they're pursuing at white
sands to help educate the community the
local community as well
and of course we talked about preventing
encroachment which is an ongoing issue
it happens in all of our military
installations but we're mostly concerned
about the ones that surround our area
particularly white sands missile range
and continue to advocate for and improve
air service at las cruces airport john
mentioned that with andy hume andy i
wasn't able to be on the call last week
but andy was on a call
with our consultants in dc that you
helped
fund cyprus international and he sent me
some slides i'd be glad to leave behind
some of those slides for you those came
through after our deadline to submit
for the report but i'll provide this to
you and i believe i don't know if andy's
here today or not
oh there he is so if you need andy can
probably speak to these issues but
they're trying to work with him to help
him
identify not only what opportunities but
what obstacles lay before him in order
to get that additional growth as it
pertains to service with the defense
industry
as well
so i'll skip down and just touch on
the issue about engaging and encouraging
our political leaders to advocate for
white sands
so i've already spoken with the county
with
county manager macias as executive
assistant he has tentatively blocked his
calendar
for our trip to washington
in october october 10th to the 13th and
we want to encourage the city council
and the mayor unfortunately he's out of
town but i've already emailed him the
dates it's important that we have as
much representation as we can get from
the las cruces area as we go up to
washington to meet with defense
contractors
and meet with
army leadership during the annual
association of the united states army
symposium it's a worldwide symposium
held every single year in october
and it's
really a convergence there was a film
many years ago called a gathering of
eagles
uh none of you are old enough i think to
remember this movie but but it it's it
is the gathering of eagles all
of the high-ranking officers in the army
are present and it's a great opportunity
for us to
show a combined
coalition of presence between las cruces
alamogordo and el paso to be up there
and show them that we're working
together to try and improve
the environment and encourage them to
then assign new military
programs and units to our installations
uh so i'm just
wrapping that up and then upcoming
actually the end of this week early next
week
we have gabe camarillo who's from this
area who is the under secretary of the
army visiting and we'll be bringing him
up here details to follow
those are all the slides we could do and
as quickly as we could do them
now we are here to answer any questions
that you may have i only ask that you
keep the simple
the question simple for us
thank you um robert and john i
appreciate that um richard and john um
councilor flores thank you counselor
thank you madam chair and thank you mr
ayu
dayub
so
i'm happy to hear about the scholarships
for our students
and uh
i have a question you mentioned that you
are in partnership with the greater
lescott assist chamber of commerce is
that correct yes ma'am okay in fact we
are in the midst right now although
gus couldn't join us today guest
rodriguez our chairman but he has been
meeting with debbie
and they have agreed in principle to
having a signed memorandum of
understanding that we work together to
support one another and we've taken each
other's word
and so this this week's event that we're
doing is in fact in partnership with
debbie moore in the las cruces chamber
great thank you
and by partnership do you does that
include the trip to washington d.c she's
yes she's invited to go with us to dc as
well okay yes ma'am and um
so when you talk about encroachment at
wismer
wsmr white science missile range what
who's encroaching you
the government
or the city or the counties
we'll
do this question in tandem so the
encroachment we're concerned about is um
both on a
city county
state can you get closer i'm sorry yes
ma'am so we're concerned about city and
state and county encroachment and that's
it's really building things within a
five million mile radius of the
end of the white sands land
and that can affect the training that
goes on there is the more encroachment
that happens the less training and the
less things that can happen with it so
we really try to maintain at least a
mile buffer we prefer a five mile buffer
on that to keep everything uh working
through that so it's it's things like
understanding what's going on with
fillmore canyon and some of the call up
areas that we have uh up on the northern
side of the the white sands range it's
making sure that that we're looking at
what lane what how that land is used and
making sure that we don't encroach on
the military side of the house
okay so when you say we don't encroach
on the military side who's we
city state
county private
aren't those boundaries already uh drawn
up
there are drawn up but as you get closer
to those boundaries sometimes they move
into those areas and get into that five
mile radius and then who's they who gets
into the five-mile radius
or the municipality
they are bound by the the land that they
own why
i'm just curious why is it a concern if
there's
if there's boundaries and and white
sands has been there i mean i think i
grew up hearing white sands all the time
so
why i mean i'm just
curious great question
councilwoman flores so just to kind of
articulate a little further on this he
mentioned fillmore canyon okay so that's
on the installation
there was a period of time not very long
ago when there was some concerns about
interference in terms of their ability
to transmit communications
with a private sector looking to
operate on similar
wavelengths that would have intruded
and
placed them in
a risk factor for accurate
communications that's just one example
but here's another example i mean
security
security security security okay but
here's another example as the population
in las cruces and the area grows then
you might have developers coming in who
want to build homes or apartments which
is good right we need more housing but
we don't want them so close to the
installation
that it causes then the residents who
move into those units
problems because there's interference
from the military side as they do
training exercises that could then as an
example we had a similar situation a few
years ago at fort bliss where there was
a developer going in we were able to
work with the developer to have them
back out of that area and provide a
wider buffer from the edge of the
property line
so that when they were running tanks at
night at two o'clock in the morning on
training exercises the people who were
buying those homes wouldn't be awakened
and interrupted
as a result of that so that's just a
couple of simple examples of the
potential for
so is that something that arms does
it's it's we don't actually do it
our role is to ensure that those who are
looking to do those things are
understanding what the rules of
engagement are for lack of a better
choice of words and let them know what
the risks are
and so we work with them sometimes the
military comes to us to alert us of
concerns sometimes the civilian
community comes to us
to alert us of their concerns and so all
we try to do is connect them with the
right individuals within the department
of defense department of army so they
can communicate with each other and we
can avoid
unintended consequences
and so i'm just curious what developers
have you worked with successfully to
date well we haven't worked with any
developers in las cruces because no new
developments have been planned that i've
seen or they've made us aware of that
are in close proximity to the fence line
but we've had to deal with some
developers in the el paso area
and it's worked out just fine so we meet
with like the
the builders association the apartment
association
great
okay and um
so you mentioned um that there are
military programs
at the installations
um my first question is what
are the military programs and
um
where are the installations exactly and
what exactly do you do about that it
seems like all of that would be very
uh
inside
the pentagon
yes they are but the programs themselves
the the generic names and titles for
those programs are not classified what
they do is classified and certainly not
shared with any of us as civilians
john may want to further articulate on
on these some of these programs but just
to remind everybody white sands missile
range
their mission command
is the army test and evaluation command
which is not too far from washington dc
and
they direct the activities that are
pursued
at
white sands what kind of testing they do
what kind of weapon systems that they
are testing things of that nature that's
what we're referring to okay it just
fascinates me that because you are a
civilian group right yes ma'am yeah but
again they they're able to have
clearance and all that sort of stuff not
at all we did many years ago when i had
clearance the commanding
general wasn't even in the service yet
so they they denied me of that but as i
mentioned on the radio show i just did
general little was able he and his
command sergeant major melendez were
able to talk to the community
on a very high level just in general
about what they're doing the kinds of
programs that they're running so there's
never a concern about security
okay well it sounds very james bondish
to me but all right thank you very much
gentlemen and thank you madam chair
thank you so much councilor flores
councillora beta thank you mary protein
and thank you for the presentation um i
along with council flores have a few
more in-depth questions
um just looking at how frequent do you
give updates to our federal delegation
go ahead
so we try to talk to the federal
delegation
scheduled at least quarterly
but if there's things that pop up we
actually have direct lines with their
office staff and we talk to them on a
regular basis as we need to when we go
to dc
one of the things we absolutely do in dc
is make sure that we actually sit down
in the office with the representative
and walk through a lot of the things we
do but we talk to all the
office staff on a regular basis
scheduled quarterly but i would say we
probably talk to them at least monthly
okay thank you
if i may in addition to that we conduct
a virtual brief every single month for
all of our arms partners
and each of them while they're staffs
because the representatives themselves
the electeds are usually in dc
or on the floor voting on something but
their staffs are invited every single
month
so they're able to get updated from us
as well as to pose questions to us if
they have any issues that they're
they're concerned about
and how many usually attend these calls
it varies monthly just depending on
their schedules but we usually have one
representative from each of the new
mexico representatives
as well as
as
it relates to this area we also of
course the mayor is invited the city
manager is invited
the county manager is also invited and
then we have representatives from
ontario county also participating okay
thank you
and i'm happy to hear that you are
working on coordinating with our
chamber of commerce i had the privilege
of being able to attend
their event to dc along with mr
andy hume as well where we went and did
briefings
with the military delegation as well and
i am curious on how you coordinate
with that organization as well to make
sure that
they're getting informed since you're
having these frequent meetings on issues
that you've already briefed these
delegations with
and
then what other items need to really be
covered
excellent question so
if i may begin
i had a similar question
posed to us by the county manager's
office as they're planning to go with us
to d.c in october but the question was
phrased slightly differently it was
how is the trip that we take at arms
to washington differ
from the trip that you take as a
community delegation to go up and
advocate on behalf of the las cruces
area and white sands and the the
relatively short answer to that is
when we go
we are
moving up there to meet specifically
with the pentagon leadership
so that we can discuss what kinds of
initiatives are going on at white sands
what kind of growth is occurring in the
city of las cruces how we as a region
are working to support them and ask them
what kinds of opportunities they see on
their horizon whether it's immediate or
near-term future
that we can
encourage them to to relocate missions
to our installation here in this case
white sands
so that's the primary purpose of our
visit up there when we go in october in
fact the legislators themselves
unfortunately because of the way
ausa schedules this annual event almost
always falls at the same time that
congress is in recess so we're unable to
meet with our legislative leaders at all
is strictly department of defense
as well as defense contractors
so imagine
you have roughly
30 000
about 30 000
military leaders
in d.c for this three and a half day
symposium
so all the defense contractors it's like
magnets they're all there
basically meeting with their customers
so it's a it's a rare opportunity for us
to be able to do this in one visit
versus having to go back and forth on a
regular basis to meet with those defense
contractors and sell them on the region
as to why they should have
either a bigger presence in las cruces
or if they don't have no presence at all
why they should have a presence
i hope that answers your question yes
and what promotional materials do you
use then to
help advocate for the region and how do
you coordinate it even with our economic
development from our partners to
the city itself so we usually have a
we we take a powerpoint presentation we
also have handouts that we build in
conjunction with the lustrous chamber
the city the county whoever's coming
with us we try to make sure we
understand what their concerns or issues
are so that we can list those out or
what their opportunities are
part of what we do as we're when we're
up there is we're talking to the
pentagon
and a lot of times what happens in the
pentagon is they hear things through
newspapers tvs various things like that
so it creates concern for them in the
area we understand the area doesn't have
enough housing
and we go up there and dispel those by
bringing data with us from the housing
department or economic development that
here's what kind of graduating
people we have here's what we're doing
with that so we dispel some of those
concerns that they may voice to us by
making sure we have information from the
chamber from economic development on the
county side and the city side
thank you
and what do you feel are the three top
um issues right now
within whisper
okay in case i'm wrong john will correct
me
but i in no particular order no
particular order i would say education
is almost always number one
sufficient and affordable housing is
number two
and and
quality medical care number three
the only one i would add to that is with
the education is the workforce
wismer as a whole in their civilian
population has a very aging workforce
and we're working very closely with nmsu
to help develop the type of engineers
with clearances they can start
immediately at that so those are
probably the four top things that we
work with on whismur on that okay do you
work about um we heard a lot of concerns
about workforce but as it relates to
supportive staff for
um everything like child care centers
was one of the top concerns and it
seemed like it was a concern across the
board so workforce is a concern across
the board
um what we what we're really focused on
what we've talked to general little and
sergeant major about is their civilian
workforce the the issue we're running
into in the civilian side of the house
in their
stem type opportunities is a lot of
those folks are of retirement age
so literally their biggest concern is
that 50 of their staff could drop their
papers to retirement and walk away and
we don't have 50 of those people to
replace them
so that's why we're working very closely
with nmsu
and even utep to in their engineering
department to get these focus on how we
develop these students with the right
skills and the biggest issue we have is
how do we develop the clearances and
we're working with both wismer
and nmsu to develop programs in their
college they require a clearance that
kids can get in their
sophomore year have their clearance go
through the program when they graduate
they have a clearance and can move right
into a white sands type job
but we're seeing issues in terms of
across the board
day care is is definitely an issue
trying to find the right
workforce on that there's there's
workforce issues across the board but
the workforce that we're really focused
on is the technical that allows white
sands to do what they're
they're tasked to do on their technical
side
okay thank you um and then
you've mentioned a few times that you've
been talking with the county manager are
you looking to seek funding from them as
well as you're having these
conversations they are funders of ours
just as you are and across another part
of the lower part of new mexico and
otero county we both have otero county
and the city of el magurdo as partners
along with u2 and el paso
thank you
and with the projects that you've listed
on here how many are you all taking the
lead in primary and how many are you
just um with support
that's a number i probably couldn't come
up with right now unless i just made it
up to be honest with you
we we take the lead
on very few of the initiatives it's
important to note that our our focus is
narrow
john alluded to that when he said you
know in terms of workforce that we're
working as it pertains to the needs at
white sands
the workforce shortage
as you've already described is across
the board in almost every discipline but
that's not our area of expertise so we
try to stay focused in our areas but to
answer your question
almost everything that we're working on
we're in a support position
but we take that information we take
those challenges deliver that to the
lead organizations in the federal
government
including our elected leaders to get
their support when it's a monetary issue
when it's an assignment issue then we
simply go directly to the pentagon to
the department of army to speak to them
about the needs and the opportunities
that white sands
has to offer
so with respect to one of the projects
that you listed on here as a support
partner was i believe it was helping
educate
high school students about it so what
type of role then do you play since i
know recruiters probably have a large
portion to that they do just to
reemphasize what richard said what we
really do is we're dot connectors so we
understand the army has an issue and we
try to find the right people in the
civilian side that we can marry them
together and solve those issues kind of
connecting those dots with it so in the
recruiting standpoint work very closely
with it it's the el paso recruiting
command which includes all of las cruces
all the way up through alamogordo is out
of the el paso recruiting command so we
work with them we meet with them weekly
to understand what their their tasks are
where they're going and how do we make
sure that
we help support
their recruiting efforts in terms of
stem steam initiatives various things
like that within the las cruces school
district
and can you be specific on how that help
is done like are you connecting teachers
and classes with them are you how are
you
supporting these beyond the the active
listening so so what we do with them is
we actually work with we bring together
the superintendent the school district
we bring together the steam or stem
coordinators for each one of the schools
and we engage them with the
conversations through tradoc through
white sands missile range but all of
those are built around
getting students to understand that
there's more to the army
than guns and bullets
that there's a lot there's 150
military occupation specialties within
it and most of those have nothing to do
with
active combat their their doctors their
uh lawyers they use various things
throughout the the uh army so we we
actually talk to the superintendent
connect them with the recruiting command
to bring in the the skills that are
needed for their schools one of the
things we're currently working with
with colonel venable is to bring in
medical doctors
from william beaumont to teach classes
in the high school
in their uniform and answer questions
about how did the army get me to where i
am what am i doing with that that is
something we're directly coordinating
with
through
recruiting command but we're directly
working with colonel venerable at
william beaumont and the superintendent
and the medical folks medical
magnet folks to get those type of things
taken care of
okay thank you you're welcome and i
guess i should mention councillor graham
and i will be speaking for the women's
equality day over at wismer
i'm sorry you're going to be speaking on
a women's equality date yes when is that
being held
we'll have to check ourselves okay
how about how about if you do this we
wouldn't mind sending us an email
letting us know about it sure you can
send me so we can if you reach out to me
i'll be sure to respond great okay very
good thank you thank you mary protem
thank you councillor abeda um i have a
question um
it relates to um
you'd spoke about encouraging
counselors county commissioners
related to
how to advocate for whismur
do you have talking opponents
specifically
that we could
utilize as we are
in the community advocating
not just with our federal delegation
state delegation but constituents and
other partners yes ma'am we've actually
provided to the city uh it's been
several months but we've provided the
city to talking points
that are available to you i can i'm
happy to send them again
so that you can have them all of you at
your fingertips and then we try to
update it
we're not able to update them all
quarterly but but the general messages
in and those talking points remain the
same
and i think will be helpful to you
uh it's we refer to them as elevator
speeches because
you know you want to keep their
attention in anything more than about
two minutes
and the attention span is gone so we
keep those it's like a little paragraph
okay all right thank you so much thank
you
yes counselor florist thank you
um
and again thank you for your
presentation um i'm happy to hear that
you added steam
uh in your outreach with this with the
with the schools
um it's an a attitude stem
science technology
engineering and math
and the a stands for the arts and i
think that
the arts have a definitely a place in
every aspect of our lives and
it might be a good way to recruit
the artistic
um
the artistic students thank you very
much thank you madam chair
council flores just to emphasize that um
the army has some of the best talent
musical talent
artists uh you name it in the the arts
section in the world um if you've ever
got a chance to see some of the
performances that
the army does if you come to ausa
national the convention their whole
opening ceremony is done by
soldiers and it's singing performing and
and they recruit quite a bit of that so
the a part is very important within the
the aspect of recruiting
thank you so much for your time your
and and for the presentation always
really helpful
thanks
thank you for your continued support
next up is sustainability quarterly
update lisa larock
good afternoon lisa hi you have your
entourage here with me you
[Music]
hello mayor pro tem council and staff
my name is lisa larock i'm the
sustainability officer for the city of
las cruces
and today
we'll be providing a update on
sustainability focusing on
transportation and the climate action
plan
so although one might think of
greenhouse gas emissions and that is
important in creating this plan we also
considered community value impacts
and
and those are will also be included in
the presentation today by my colleagues
so
i will go back to greenhouse gas
emissions for a minute and
i wanted to
give you an overview quickly to say that
when we did our inventory we found that
53 of the greenhouse gas emissions for
the whole
entire city of las cruces not just the
municipality
came from transportation people driving
around in their cars
within the city limits
and our goal is to reduce
the greenhouse emissions by
in transportation when we factor in
population increase and that will become
more challenging when we think about how
the census has increased our numbers so
much
that this graph shows you all of the
major strategies that we are addressing
the blue bars show you the uh the
progress we hope to make by 2030 and the
orange bars show you the progress that
we hope to make by 2050.
in the red circle is the are the
strategies that relate to transportation
and i have asked my colleagues my
entourage
to to present uh
today and let you know about first jenny
hernandez
is our suspicious
i don't know that word sustainability
specialist and she'll talk about
prioritizing active transfer
transportation
and mike bartholomew is helping us
discuss public uh the public transit
system in the context of climate action
plan
and then last gen
josh galvin
will talk about the um
the
fleet and
public
ev
trans
the
fleet and the public charges that we
have around the city
and all of these projects have been
going on for more than a year
and each of these strategies has been a
really heavy lift and it will require
more policy changes and infrastructure
investments if we're willing to commit
so i
even though it sounds like a short
presentation it was a lot of work and i
appreciate all my colleagues for helping
so i'm going to turn it over to jenny so
she can go from
here thank you lisa
good afternoon jenny good to see you
uh hi um
sorry lisa
i was gonna do this and then she threw
me off she was sweetened in for me
[Laughter]
mayor pro tem counselor
staff as lisa mentioned i will be diving
into our first section here which is the
prioritization of active transportation
oh jenny hernandez sustainability
specialist
and so as lisa mentioned
there are different components of the
climate action plan having to do with
transportation so specifically for our
alternative transportation cap goals um
it states that we our goal is to reduce
the miles traveled by 12
so what that means is replacing miles
driven by biking so say instead of
driving to work you bike to work or
you're running to the grocery store you
bike to the grocery store versus driving
and
so that's what our cap goal says but
that's really difficult
in some cases because there's some
challenges and barriers that exist and
the first one is that in order to get to
that 12 percent
sometimes the things that we need to
bike to have to be a convenient distance
for us to be willing to bike to them and
so here on the right you'll find
an image of what our current active
transportation looks like
and you can see that some of those
places right it's a little hard to see
in this picture but for example
if you are
um
trying to get to one of the grocery
stores some of the main streets to get
there are a little bit harder to to
reach and
that um coincides with continuous
pathways right so not only does it have
to be a continuous i'm sorry a
convenient distance for us but in the
way for us to get there has to be
continuous so we don't have to
jump around going through different
avenues or if say for example i don't
want to go on a busy road i can take a
different avenue to get there and so the
our proposed atp which was adopted in
2018 once
we're slowly making progress on it and
once it's achieved that's going to
really give us the ability to to achieve
that and so here's just kind of an
overview of where the atp stands
i'll make a caveat that that first one
125 miles of street bike lanes that's
only on street
bike miles and i'm sorry bike lanes and
so before the atp was adopted we had 7
73 existing miles and since 2018 we've
installed 13
bike lanes from the atp that were
proposed in the atp and overall the atp
atp proposes 52
new
bike lanes again this is only on street
and so
going back to the idea that it has to be
convenient in distance and continuous in
pathways the atp is really going to help
to get us there and then you'll notice
at the bottom this is for multi-use
pathways so that includes
on trail pathways shared pathways and so
we have 27 existing and there are five
in that are
in the works from that are funded from
the go bond and we have
there isn't a said goal of expected kind
of like our 52 number from the atp
but um there's definitely going to be
more to come which will help again with
getting us to a continuous pathway
another one of the challenges is that it
has to be pleasant for bike riders right
and what we mean by pleasant is
enjoyable so
say
like i was saying if you wanted to take
an alternative way to get to your
grocery store like riding along the rio
or under shaded trees um that would be
more enticing for people to
replace driving um to biking and then
that it's safety that it's safe and
comfortable and what we mean by that is
obviously safe safe for the biker right
with our protected bike lanes green bike
lanes and things of that sort but also
in terms of comfort and when we talk
about comfort that's really um thermal
comfort so
sometimes it gets really hot and that
might deter people from biking
so how does all of this have to do with
climate change and how we can really
achieve this goal so the point is that
we know climate change is exacerbating
our extreme weather events and so we
know that it's only going to get hotter
it's already very hot
in the past we've had one month
of over a hundred degrees
and three days over 105 and that was in
the past and where we're heading is by
2050 we'll have two months greater than
100 degrees and three weeks greater than
and if things continue as they are by
the end of the century we'll have three
months greater than 100 degrees and six
weeks greater than 105 degrees and so if
we look at that in terms of again zoning
it into us
this is um the ambient temperatures of
one of the hottest areas in the infill
and so you can see the lowest
temperature is 104 which is still really
hot and the highest is 112.
these are ambient temperatures now
imagine the surface temperature right so
the surface temperature can be up to 150
degrees fahrenheit and greater and so
how that impacts um
how we get to places right like
obviously if it's this hot i wouldn't
want a bike if it was 112 degrees
outside
and so we
have done a survey we had done a study
survey in the past to get people's
perceptions of heat and 33 percent of
those respondents said they do not bike
because of the heat
that's only second to i don't bike
because i don't have a bike
excuse me and so
there are
many solutions to those barriers that i
talked about in the beginning and um
they're often most effective
when we do more than one and we do them
together
and so an example that we recently did
is we've installed our first screen bike
lanes and these bike lanes are special
because not only did sustainability do
them
i'm teasing no it was definitely an
effort from public works and
community development
and ourselves but what's really cool
about these bike lanes is that it is an
asphalt emotion emulsion you can't say
that word emulsive there you go
emulsive seal coat and what it does is
it has the technology to reflect the
heat back off so instead of
absorbing that heat it's reflecting it
up and it allows it to reduce the
surface temperatures from 10 to 12
degrees so that goes back to that image
right imagine writing in the infill and
it being greater than 112 plus the
hotter surfaces this really helps
relieve some of that surface temperature
and there's also several benefits
besides that to this sealcoat is that it
increases the road the road's longevity
so because it's reflecting it back it's
not absorbing that heat so it doesn't
expand as much and because it's a
sealant it really helps in not reducing
some of that moisture so when it rains
again helping its longevity it also
increases safety
if i don't know if any of city
councilors have seen the green bike
lanes yet but what's really neat is if
you drive by there at night because the
light reflects on it it reflects it back
and so it makes it brighter so it helps
with safety
google actually did one of these pilots
in their parking lots and they found
because it's so bright they don't have
to use as much light so they actually
saved millions of dollars in electricity
because they were able to modify how
much lighting they're using
and then again
it helps with really
making you want to bike versus
driving right if it's if you're making
conditions nicer and so the point being
that
per lisa's graph earlier we could get a
lot of bang for our buck by doing these
methods and so if we want to achieve the
12 goal we really have to start thinking
about and and designing with um
with keeping these things in mind right
with doing it purposefully so that we
can get encourage people to
bike versus drive to to some of these
spots and so i'm going to pass it over
to josh who's going to give you an
update on oh no to mike sorry
to give you an update on the
transportation
goals thank you
good afternoon mike
good afternoon
you didn't plan for the height
differences
[Laughter]
so good afternoon council i was just
going to give a little update on a
couple of
trends going on in the transit area
right now
in the climate action plan the public
the use of public transit goal was to
increase it by 20 12 percent by 2030
and that was
that goal was largely touched by the
community values that
lisa mentioned earlier in the
presentation
um
the two graphs to the left show our
ridership patterns over the last uh
since 2018 fiscal year 2018 through
fiscal year 2022
as you can see that
there was a slight decline
starting in 2018 and it looks like it
was continuing to decline
on our fixed route ridership to 2020
if if you were to look at it on a
month-to-month basis prior to the
pandemic starting we were actually
looking for a very bumper year in 2020
had the pandemic not occurred you'd
probably see that graph going up more to
the 600 000 uh trips per year on the
graph
then of course the the pandemic hit and
it
changed a lot of things not only in
transit but in the lives of everybody
the bottom graph shows our dial ride
ridership
it was had been pretty steady it
declined quite a bit in 2020 again
because of the pandemic
and even though the pandemic started
pretty much in the last quarter of
fiscal year 2020.
much of the ridership we have on dial
right is our senior transportation that
would go to the senior meals so i would
say like 70 of our rides were seniors so
a lot of the uh
services that they went to were no
longer available so it really
had a noticeable plunge in 2020 also our
dial right clients are
a lot more of our vulnerable population
in terms of
vulnerability to the coven
one of the things that covet has shown
us
as a result of covet anyway is there's
been a lot of changes in just the
dynamics of
ridership on public transit
largely in
education and labor practices there's
more people working remotely or they're
working shorter work weeks now so they
would use public transit less in
education again there's more
that they're using online learning so
there's less need to
commute every day to in a college
situation
in terms of shopping a lot more people
were using taking advantage of delivery
services
so there wasn't the need to go to all
the stores to buy your clothes
even getting groceries could get
delivered at home now
there's also a change in the expectation
of transit users
what they what they want from transit
services
sometimes it's not a matter of just
throwing more bus routes out there their
transit users want something that's
more friendly that they can use gets
closer to where they live and they can
access it more easily
so there's a lot more interest in an
on-demand services
previously i was before the council with
our short-range transit plan update and
we're looking at the prob about in
january doing an experiment with the
micro transit service that in certain
parts of town where the ridership is a
little bit lower because it is a longer
walk to bus stops we're going to be
working with microtransit in that area
so that's a type of on-demand service
that should increase the the ridership
we're transitioning as you know to
electric buses
we've got our order in for our first
five electric buses they're going to be
going into production for those buses on
september 2nd and this is a with byd in
lancaster california is where they're
getting built
we also have in that contract and a
an option to purchase seven additional
electric buses
we did apply for the fiscal year 22 low
no applications through the federal
transit administration and we hope to
hear
if we're going to get the funding from
that application in the next week or two
we're hoping to hear the results of that
if we get all we ask for we'll be able
to purchase the additional seven buses
that are the op on the option in our
contract
so what this uh chart is showing is kind
of a comparison of the
the savings and in costs too that will
not only in dollars but in terms of
greenhouse gas emissions uh that we'll
realize was moving our electric buses to
uh
uh from diesel to electric buses
so uh
with this
uh is showing that uh
our 53 000 miles put on buses in a
typical year
we would use 138
this is for 13 buses is that correct 13
buses 138 000 gallons of diesel fuel
and would use 640 000 kilowatt hours of
electricity
uh the cost of that diesel fuel over the
over the course of the year is over half
a million dollars
with the charging of the diesel buses a
lot of the charging can occur at a very
low rate at night but there's also other
charges there's riders on some of the
charge rates that will pass electric
charge so
this would estimate roughly at
five cents per kilowatt hour it would
cost us 83 000 a year so that's 85
percent less expensive in terms of the
power we need to to move the buses along
and as far as greenhouse gases uh
with the diesel buses it's over 13
almost 1400
metric tons of greenhouse gas emissions
that with the purchase of the electric
buses can get
be reduced
significantly like by a quarter
more more than a quarter in 22 and by as
we get more electric buses and as the
uh source of the electricity from el
paso electric uh goes more to green
renewable sources of electricity we can
get down
in the plan by 2040 to zero
tons metric tons of greenhouse gases
and with that i believe i've covered
everything and i could move it move to
okay move on to the next one
good afternoon mayor pertam council
staff
hello good afternoon uh it is my
privilege to be here um i will be
presenting on our fleet transition
i guess i should introduce myself my
name is joshua gallivan i am a co-op
here for the sustainability office i've
been working here for about three months
and it's been a privilege to be working
along my co-workers on these very
important projects so i'll be giving you
a brief
a brief update
on
first the fleet ev transition
so we have assessed 650 vehicles that
were
provided by fleet our fleet data and it
break down breaks down as follows
uh at least 51 percent of this fleet
will be replaced by 2030. 535 of these
vehicles which is 80 of this fleet is ev
capable this means that there is an ev
alternative
on the current market that matches with
any respective vehicle
um 20 of the fleets are currently
unavailable or unable to be converted
into an ev this is because these are our
heavy-duty vehicles like f-250s that
currently
are not there are no developed ones on
the market but
i see things from general motors that
say they have committed to making a line
of heavy duty vehicles by 2035 and
we will see how
how that updates
and additionally we have received an
analysis from epe
regarding our city fleet charging sites
so what this does is it gives us a seed
for to begin to be able to
upgrade our
ev sites to be able to accommodate for
the the charging for the upcoming ev
vehicles
and while these evs are adopted into the
city fleet there are some peripheral
things that we need to accommodate for
as with with incorporating anything such
as we do need pigging back off the last
point we need to order these chargers
and install them and look into even the
farther future when we incorporate even
more evs to
plan for those charging sites as well
and according to our fleet manager luis
vela we our mechanics will be trained in
uh being able to
operate or not operate to
maintain
these these vehicles because they are
manufactured differently
and
of course with any new type of vehicle
our staff will need to be trained with
some procedural changes with these kind
of vehicles it's it's not that big of a
deal but there is it's a different way
of charging they feel a little bit
different
and
we additionally we do plan to create a
framework through a city manager policy
uh regarding at-home chargers because
some of our workers do have to take
their vehicles home for their their job
duties and we will need to provide a
framework regarding
um
just what that would look like
uh these changes in our vehicles and the
infrastructure will be impressive
and it is our belief that this new city
standard will also uh positively affect
the losses glass cruises community in
the narrative of evs
because if our staff is um
experiencing with these uh electric
vehicles
hopefully they'll be sharing it with
their friends their families and it will
further normalize how we see evs
and so we will move on to our public ed
charging
if i can
and so alongside the the ev transition
in general for our city we are
approaching a year since the
installation of public ev chargers
across the city we currently have eight
charging stations in seven different
locations which makes up 16 charging
points or ports
uh our average energy usage or
um
yeah is is growing by month and we're
totaling about 2 300 sessions since
the
start in september
and
some
quick facts that i think are important
are that in quarter two alone we had 182
unique drivers
we
gave 27 megawatt hours of charging in
total which if you aren't privy to
uh electricity that equates to about 81
000 miles of of travel that we have
given and
737 gallons of gas
every charging uh session averages about
14.8 kilowatts which is about 45 miles
of travel
and it costs the average session a
dollar and 70 cents and we have saved 19
408 kilograms of ghg emissions
and to help
you better grasp grasp what that looks
like
what an electric charger can do
you can compare it to traveling 100
miles
for most vehicles that's about four or
five gallons maybe a quarter of your
tank
um
and that would cost you about 16.65
uh with natural gas and the gas prices
do change and they're changing really
quickly now so that's an approximate
value
an eevee going 100 miles it would cost
you about four dollars and 50 cents at
one of our public ev chargers
and so now as we have been moving oh
sorry now if we as we have been moving
along in the electrification of our
fleet and the public ev charging it has
become
abundantly clear that it requires an
entirely different frame of mind to
tackle some of these issues
electric vehicles are not a new idea but
now more than ever there is a push on a
lot of fronts to
better incorporate
uh our
electric vehicles and we already knew
that transportation contributes to a
vast majority or not majority a vast
amount of our greenhouse gas emissions
and it seems that policy is starting to
catch up
so by installing our public chargers
across the city
which are circled here in red on this
map
we are now confident that ev adoption
does have a heartbeat here in las cruces
our charges are being used and
increasingly so by month but it's really
important that i stress that this is the
beginning of a really a much faster
change
our state and national legislatures as
you might know are pushing more policy
than ever to expedite the efforts to
clean up the climate and the energy
so
and with that comes the economic side
via vehicle manufacturers are committing
more money than ever to develop their
own lines of zero emission vehicles or
low emission vehicles
and all of this calls back the idea that
we need to recognize
um that we need to shift our mindset a
little bit than how we traditionally see
our our vehicular transport
because a lot of change is coming
and to prepare
mayor
pro tem and council
we as staff are as dedicated as we know
you are so as we prepare for these
changes we are looking at
how people are using our ev chargers
this is a simple one but
in the future when we if
we can use what we already know from our
existing charging data and patterns to
maximize how we plan future iterations
of of public ev charging
another big one is we must now raise our
awareness to el paso electric rates in
the same way that we charge our homes
with ep electric
we are with this electrification of
vehicles we now use
electricity from epe it can electric
charging can provide like sorry can
provide great amount of savings for
any charging consumer city or personal
but if it's not managed correctly and
used at the appropriate times it can
quickly lead to a situation where the
charging is much more expensive than
than needed
and
also a driving factor
for how we are operating is what policy
that we need to respond to
so
if you are not aware we a few months ago
in may we adopted the clean car rule
here in new mexico which
we will now follow i think we are one of
15 states that will follow in the
footsteps of california
and what that will do
is
we are adopting their vehicle emission
standards for new
manufactured vehicles
and also for
the dealerships here in the state will
need to sell a certain percentage of
zero emission vehicles and they will be
responsible
for populating the market with more ev
vehicles more choices for evs
and lastly i'm i'm sure you see this
everywhere in the news but the inflation
reduction act which
as of this morning has passed the senate
vote
um
is the biggest push by the federal
government so far
among a long list of rebates that will
help owner homeowners upgrade their
houses with clean um energy
now ev vehicles will qualify for a 7 500
tax rebate
that can be used on the spot when you
buy your your electric vehicle
and
as evs get cheaper that rebate stays the
same so as
we become more enhanced and the evs
become more normalized the evs will get
cheaper
the adoption will inevitably go up
and so we continue working on to meet
our goals and we will respond
accordingly to these developing
circumstances this legislation
and they're happening fast so
mayor pro tem and council we thank you
for your support as we continue to work
towards our objectives for
our climate thank you
thank you
we can now open for questions and
comments
thank you so much appreciate that i you
guys turned on your lights really fast
who were the first ones i was still
writing i don't know this is a hot topic
okay i'm going this way that okay so
councilor graham councillor vincomo
cancer flores thank you
thank you mayor pro tem and thanks
everyone for
really cool presentation
um
going back to um
the bike
heavy portion
of course
um really happy to see uh the discussion
of the green lanes i think that's been
that's been popular both amongst the
cycling community which i count myself
part and
just in general
i
just thinking kind of at the micro level
but so i think that can be important
when we're thinking about how we're
going to encourage i mean
speaking even personally like i love
being on my bike there's pretty much
nowhere i'd rather be except up here in
the die yes of course
but yeah it it can be
no
but yeah we have to make it as appealing
as possible um and that starts at my
door
leaving as a cyclist and
wherever i'm looking to arrive and one
of those little micro things is bike
racks
a safe place
for me to
leave my bike and i can feel sure that
i've locked it up if i've done my part
and locked it up it's going to be
waiting for me when i get back
and i think that is
that remains a significant barrier i
believe
[Music]
everyone on sustainability new
construction
does by city ordinance have to include
bike racks is that correct
uh mayor pro tem councillor graham
i am not a hundred percent confident
that
it is a yes but i believe so um i think
so too i feel like i've i feel like i've
heard that i
have two um but i can i can talk to our
um bike coordinator active
transportation coordinator robert
messenger and get you a confirmation so
that's a great step forward
but and maybe maybe a rhetorical
question or a question for all how can
we encourage
existing businesses in existing
construction to step up and help out
in active transportation
so yeah i'm not i'm not necessarily i
should i should not frame that as a
question we need to find ways
to get existing businesses
to to get more bike friendly
mayor pro tem council graham absolutely
i think that's a wonderful suggestion
and i heard lisa write it down i forgot
my notebook but um we'll definitely talk
to robert to confirm with you the new
construction question and then okay
great that's a great suggestion
okay wonderful
um
my other question i think
i believe our fleet manager is here in
the audience as well yes thank you
again maybe maybe a little too much on
the micro
level but
the training of
of our mechanics and our technicians to
be ready for the ev transition
has
has been i know you've spoken on this
before and i'm just wondering if you can
provide any insight
on that and where we're standing with
that or barriers to that or how can we
help
uh good afternoon mayor pro temp
members of the council
councilman graham
for the record i'm your fleet manager
louis vella
so we're talking to donahana community
college
they were going to have something
together put by
supposedly was going to be by this the
this this fall semester but it looks
like it got pushed to the spring
uh the people that came and gave us the
hybrid training are still putting
together the the ev training for us and
we got to get them down here to train
our guys here at the shop which is more
cost effective
i'm trying to go to a ev conference in
san antonio september 15th so i can get
more information for on the fleet side
of the house but that's kind of where
we're at now with the training and the
and right now there's only one
technician in the city of las cruces
that's an e that's ev certified wow but
is there enthusiasm from your crew from
getting that training would you say are
people interested in making
yes so right now what i'm doing is going
on going as a kind of a volunteer basis
okay and uh
100 full disclosure you know obviously
it's it's good they're going to want to
it's going to be want to be tied to pay
because it is more it is a little bit
more dangerous and a little bit more
technical we're getting away from the
internal combustion engine
we're getting away from
you know lubrication the standard way of
we've been doing business for the last
100 years or so so it's going to be
completely different technology
hopefully we can exhaust the warranties
like i had stated before right
right now we're having issues with the
ford dealer here and here local ford
dealer in las cruces they're just
overwhelmed they don't have enough
technicians
and so we're kind of we're using the
ford dealership in el paso as well to
help us out
uh but that's kind of the challenges
we're having right now with the evs okay
that's i had no idea that you're
mentioning this is an entirely this is a
big risk factor for the technician i
think that's that's really interesting
to hear um and i also uh just want to
continue to express my support
to city leadership
i love our commitment to
training training up our own people who
are interested in making that transition
and i think that's absolutely one of the
strengths of our city is that we are
committed to the professional
development of the people we have
existing
so i'm glad to hear that there is some
interest in picking up these new skills
um you know rather i've
i've seen you know reports of other
places where technicians who you know
are just kind of getting pushed out the
door and say oh we'll just bring in
these new people who already know how so
i'm happy to see that we're committed to
helping our people learn if they're
interested in the transition and that's
it thank you mayor pro tem thank you
councillor graham councillor ben cuomo
thank you mayor purtem thank you all so
much for
your presentation i'm excited that we
are doing this on a quarterly basis i
don't think i have any fleet questions
um
but i did have a couple questions um
similarly oh actually um jenny you
talked about the miles
the goal to reduce miles driven by 12
percent
how will we know
when that has happened
um
mayor pro tem counselor
ben como that's a wonderful question
we
um
this was that's exactly what we were
trying to do in figuring out there's
there's two components to that that's
really tricky is one that
we
currently
um
can't really track
increased ridership right so
we that's really tricky for us we wanted
to kind of report like oh we have 20 new
bike riders this month right
so that's one thing which is really hard
to do the second thing is exactly like
how
can we say
we know for sure that
i
biked five miles this week and therefore
i reduced my carbon footprint or
greenhouse gas emissions by xyz so
that is really tricky um
but
there is i can't remember it off the top
of my head but basically in our
greenhouse gas emission inventory is how
it calculates it is by
the number of
miles biked is correlated to a
coefficient of gas
used in your vehicle and that's how they
came out with that 12 so it's like a
national average and that's where that
12 developed but to your point that's
still really hard for us to tell and how
are we going to track how many people
have increased bike usage but also where
they're biking to and for how long right
the other component to that is we do
have and i forgot to mention this
we have census data that asks
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how many people bike to work and the
2020 shows that in our population 1.7
of our population bikes to work which is
very very small right but to your point
we don't know how long their commute is
so we can't translate that into
gas miles saved
but again it's based on national average
and
so that's really tricky moving forward
and i've talked with robert messenger as
well it's like how can we kind of work
on that and i know that mark miller and
a slew of other people are actually
trying to figure that out and present
that through their open gov project that
they're working on so that'll be
exciting to see but it is tricky within
itself and i know lisa wants to add
something else
one thing that is an option for us is to
use
um
have a bike share program and that way
we would be able to see how the metric
would increase because that all of that
data is tracked so that would be another
way for us to be able to do it and it
would provide
more
transportation
options for those people who don't have
them obviously i love that idea lisa i
would love to see like a cost estimate
of of that for the city and
um would it have to go through a private
uh business or could it be public
um
mayor pro tem councillor ben cuomo
we already created an ordinance to allow
a business to come in
and pay for
the use of our streets and sidewalks so
it would cost us nothing
what is the
somewhat of a hurdle is that those
companies would like to have the
university participate too because they
would be a large constituency
initially nmsu wanted to do scooters and
not bikes and
because that was what the demand was and
after a six-month pilot they
decided that
it was
not a good match for them and they have
a generation and they haven't rethought
the shared bike proposal we have not
broached it with them there's been a
turnover of
staff so it would be
a good idea
i would i would definitely like to see
us try that again i think it's a very
good idea for folks who
don't have a bike might not have the
opportunity to have a bike but i also
know there's a lot of great
bike shops in town that we could
potentially also partner with on
something like this
um
jenny what i'm curious what other
much
friendlier
bike
biking cities are doing in terms of
have you thought about that like going
to other cities and seeing how they're
tracking some of this information mayor
pro tem um counselor ben cuomo
absolutely there are
many cities yeah who have very good
practices um
the ones that our
transportation coordinator robert
messenger kind of
that we go back and forth with and even
for our green bike lane installation we
use some of their guidelines is well
first nacto is the nationwide kind of
bike guidelines and they have cities
within there that they point out to case
studies so austin is a really good city
and denver those are the ones off the
top of my head that have really good
bike programs and what most of them is
is protected bike lanes
green bike lanes and lots of multi-use
shared paths but also
the barriers that we've listed so that
things are
condensed into nature where you can go
to the grocery store really easily and
then that they're continuous right that
i don't have to be getting on the
sidewalk off the road on the sidewalk
off the road because it's really
dangerous but it also obviously would
deter people from wanting to ride
somewhere thanks jenny um on the topic
of green lanes i just have to say that i
got a lot of feedback on those and
people love them
um they're very very popular um and i
think um
you know cyclists and bikers are feeling
listened to and i think it's very
important i'm curious if we have
additional green bike lanes planned
how many miles and if not
how do we make that happen
mayor pro tem at councillor bencomo
we
sustainability do not because the
funding that we used to pay for the
green bike lanes we was just for that
pilot program
so we don't have any
current funding for additional ones but
in
[Music]
deciding where to put the green bike
lanes we had we came up with a list of
25 priority bike lanes that are bike
lane ready for the green paint and so
it's a matter of if we could allocate
funding to do more we have a list that
is ready to go for that but us
sustainability doesn't have the funding
for it got it i think um teshiro is a
great
next one so just
put that down on your notebook
and and to throw that in lisa made a
great point um
the the 25 priority list that we came up
with we set a criteria of like seven or
eight different elements and one of them
is
our urban heat island effect so
obviously how hot it is because of the
green paints capabilities but also
lmi so low to moderate income was the
second one if it's in a low to moderate
income area
how far is it from from schools how far
is it from food deserts
what is the walking proximity from like
the national average right um
and then there was obviously the more
logical ones like
what's the
um condition of the street right what is
the actual
um i think it's called pmi i don't know
i forgot and then um
is it going to be resurfaced within the
next couple of years and and things of
those natures but yeah that we had we
set up a criteria so we weren't just
pulling
great thank you for that
um i know that
this was a couple years ago now um there
was a meeting upstairs before there was
even there was like the beginning of the
design of the new multi-use go bond
trails and there's a lot of conversation
at that meeting i remember about
could we use different kinds of material
to do the multi-use trail so that it
wouldn't increase the heat
the heat period
um
and i know that public works looked at a
lot of different materials and a lot of
them just were not feasible or perhaps
ada compliant lots of different things
are we able to use this kind of paint on
multi-use trails
mayor protem
counselor ben como
it depends what the trails are made out
of if it's asphalt absolutely if it's a
combination of asphalt and concrete
they are
just now working on a
sealant for concrete but it's not ready
and so if you were to use the asphalt
sealant that we used on the concrete it
would actually make it hotter
um so you you have to be careful um so
they're actually like the
um company that we went are in the works
to doing a concrete sealant for that
purpose is to do sidewalks
and multi-use trails so it just depends
what it's made out of
some schools put it on their playground
for the kids but
because it was concrete and so it just
depends what the makeup of it is okay i
guess that's a question for david unless
you know i definitely don't know
and um asu
and so there's a lot of worries about
obviously because it's a new technique
right if how well it does work and asu
conducted a study specifically on the
paint that we've bought the company who
used it and they studied it for over a
year and that's where the 10 to
12 degree they saw a reduction in
surface temperature of 10 to 12 degrees
and they
their city is now
allocating a specific budget to do cool
roads
oh interesting i mean i wonder if this
is something we can
re-look at the complete ordinances the
complete street ordinances and
include this for future development of
new streets to just this be at the
forefront and not an afterthought i
think would be
an excellent idea for the future and
then um just my last question um is for
josh and forgive me josh i
could not hear your last name so i'm
just going to call you josh um thank you
for providing information about this new
pretty historic climate legislation i
sort of was reading most of what you
presented but i'm curious if you have
any analysis on whether
there will be funding through this
legislation for municipalities to make
improvements on
on this particular topic
uh mayor pro tem counselor ben como are
you talking about the inflation
reduction act yes uh
i would be lying to you if i said i did
know the specifics of municipalities
it just came out yesterday so i'm not
sure right so i was only familiar with
the the upgrades to like personal homes
right and and and vehicles but
do you have any
that's okay i i would just be
interested to know that if you find that
out in the next couple of weeks as more
information comes out
um it's a pretty significant investment
um
so i
i would hope that there's funding that
we could leverage for municipalities so
mayor pro tem councilor ben cuomo there
is a host of
funding that will also be
augmenting certain grants that we
already have so some of it can be used
for municipalities the one thing that is
most significant is that 40 percent of
all funding has to go to the justice 40
purpose which is to help lmi communities
great thank you all so much thanks mayor
pretend
thank you councillor bin komo counselor
karen
um
thank you all for your presentation i
really appreciate hearing from you and
i'm excited to think about how we can
keep working on these i have a couple
questions specifically well first i have
to give some context
speaking of denver i just had the
privilege of going to a conference in
denver which was related to
local governance and there i took a bike
tour where we drove from downtown to the
broncos stadium where they're getting
rid of all the parking lots because
parking lots are trash and no one wants
them in their community
and so we rode on bikes electric bikes
from via bike share on green lanes
it was about three and a half miles i
think i don't know my electric bike
wasn't working so it felt like 40 miles
um but
but
i say all of that to put the context in
this conver the the conversations that
were happening at this
convening that we that conservancomo and
i attended were really focused on equity
in particular um in all conversations
related to alternative forms of transit
and so
i want to echo the idea of increasing
capacity to ride bikes
i think a ride share
a bike share program would be really
powerful and useful and certainly i saw
it working really well in denver
and then the but the other part
of that conference that i really took
home was related to transit in
particular public transit so my
questions i think are really for you
probably mostly mike i i
um
i know that public transit is in our
community kind of underutilized but
uh thinking about the workforce thinking
about the changes to the workforce
thinking about the changes to people's
capacity to drive which i think are
becoming less and less frankly um
while i appreciate our conversation
about evs that's not most people's
reality right now
most people's reality is struggling to
make sure that their car works and
that they can put gas in it
so i'm curious first sort of where the
possibilities are to increase ridership
we heard a lot about fair free transit
and denver was having a fair free
transit month and which included you
know us going from the airport the whole
way to our hotel
with no cost whatsoever which in denver
is quite a quite a stretch and
and we were able to do that but also
related to our upcoming evs that we're
having our ev buses
i heard a lot about the
new interface of people
collecting fares and the way that that
actually makes
the work of the folks who are just like
many areas
there are fewer bus drivers and their
jobs are harder now
as harder than they have been before
because of
a myriad of factors heat
people yelling at them
no place to go to the restroom a myriad
of things related to that but one of the
factors was people yelling at them about
fair so i'm curious where we are on
fairfree and then where in the in the
new evs that
that are
that we're purchasing do we have
how are they set up are they going to
have a fair collection station are they
going to have the drivers be interfacing
with folks not interfacing with folks in
what level are they being designed in a
particular way to that sets us up to
potentially have a different
interface with clients in particular
as as far as going fare free uh if
i think i've mentioned this at a
previous council meeting if we were just
looking at fixed route service we have
the capacity it wouldn't be much of an
issue to go go fare free right away
uh with the way the federal ada
requirements are though is that we
there's a ratio that we have to charge
on our paratransit so if you you can
charge no more than twice a
fixed route fare
so if the fare is free on fixed route it
has to be fair uh fair free on our
paratransit service as well so that's
where the dilemma is for us is because
we don't have the capacity until
if if we were to go far free we would
need more drivers and more vehicles to
meet the demand on the on the pair
transit side on the demand response side
one of the things that we're looking at
with the
microtransit service is having a
software that's
perhaps more efficient than what we're
using in mixing rides that are both
those that are eligible for ada and
those uh are using a as a demand
response service like on the east side
of town where we want to start our
demonstration project
and
it's going to take a little bit of
measurement to see you know how much it
you know we're going to need in terms of
vehicles and staff to man that and
everything as well
so
you're right with the drivers that
they've got a very tough job out there
fair collection is is difficult um
as far as
i foresee that we're going to have some
sort of fair collection for a while but
we are
we have actually had a discussion with
staff this morning looking at other ways
for how can we help people that really
need fair free
to make it easier for those that have
fair free so so for example working with
some of the social service agencies that
provide bus passes for for their clients
is making it cheaper for them to buy
a pass for example that doesn't have
right right now our reduced fare passes
are
based on disability and not necessarily
income so maybe looking at
with some of these social service
agencies giving them the latitude and
set that into our fair tariff structure
to negotiate a lower price for them to
buy bus passes that they can distribute
to low income
for a low-income individuals that don't
work through uh social service agencies
uh
we were discussing uh adding to our fair
tariffs some uh some reduced fair breaks
as well in the uh
that are income based we just have to to
uh come up with a criteria of how we
determine who's eligible based on income
for for uh reduced fare
so those are the big i mean if it wasn't
for the paratransit dilemma it would be
really easy to implement uh fair free
service it's uh but we gotta we
we don't want to put ourselves in a
situation that we can't meet the demand
on our demand response site on the
paratransit side because we don't have
enough drivers and we don't have enough
vehicles to meet the demand
i'm going to just put it out there again
i really think fair free is the future
and i hope we don't invest any more
infrastructure in creating new means
testing for people to ride public
transit i don't think that's a useful
approach to increasing transit sort of
portability so i
i'm going to continue to advocate for us
to push to whatever we need to do to
whatever added costs i hope that we can
see sort of what those look like so that
we can move toward it
because i just think increasing public
transit access improves workers
situations it improves
our climate situation i think it's it's
an imperative that i really believe that
we that we have the capacity to to do i
know that it's hard but i think we can
do it so i'm gonna
keep on advocating for that so
um
so
but to the last question are there gonna
be fair sort of what for the new evs is
there going to be infrastructure that's
focused do we have to buy
extra things to collect fares to add to
those
well we yeah we'll probably still have
initially we're going to have to have
fare boxes in them but there are other
way other payment methods too uh through
apps
that doesn't require necessarily
carrying a paper bus pass around or
paying with a coins at the farebox and
everything to make it easier for the
customers that's one of the things we're
looking at with the
uh implementation of micro transit
because i'll probably be the way that to
go with p that will be the way not
probably that will be the way to go is
is using app based payment systems to
to uh
pay for the fare on
evs i i i don't think it's an issue
whether it's an ev or any other kind of
vehicle
it's uh
in terms of collecting fares
i think as you said you know
keep an eye on seeing what we can do to
make the the service itself
fair free for for the customer and i
think
again it is going to be addressing the
problem on the on the demand response
side the dial right side i think if we
can get adequate you know
adequate handle on what our demand is
that we have enough vehicles and enough
drivers to meet that demand then that it
will be easy
to go to fair free
yeah and i focus on the evs because i
don't want us to be investing in new
infrastructure that's based on something
that probably
is not the future
very so
when we get new vehicles i would say if
there's an extra cost to
add the fair collection thing then i
think we could avoid that cost so
um that's why that specific question and
that's a relative i mean as far as the
equipment go in terms of the cost of a
vehicle it's a relatively minor
minor cost of the vehicle
so okay thank you i appreciate y'all's
presentation and
uh thank you
mayor protam thank you councillor crane
flores
thank you thank you thank you
and and thank you all for your
presentation
um
the you know i'm looking at
a global warming and all that's climate
change and all the words that we use in
connection with the
environmental crisis we find ourselves
in
but
in so far as
having evs i know i've been reticent
to to get one and then the cost factor
now is exorbitant so
uh but
um
doesn't you can't go very far
and we don't have charging stations
up and down highway 25
or
interstate 10. you know i'm looking at
the major connectors to other parts of
the us
and canada
and mexico so
i'm just um wondering if the city is um
the city that
you all you know the people who are in
charge of getting things done we just we
just
you know sit up here and
tell you what we're dreaming of and set
policy
but um
what do you all attend
national or international conferences
where
there is a real
discussion
about the possibility of having more
charge stations throughout major
roadways
and are there any incentives from the
federal government
to do this sort of stuff
i it just seems that if we just drive
around town
you know we're okay because of the
charging everything i think the city is
doing by the way and thank you for all
that work
is wonderful but how do we
you know how how can one travel to even
albuquerque
or
tucson or phoenix
um
you know i just i'm just wondering about
that
and i have other questions too thank you
lisa
mayor pro town councilor flores
i think one of the experiences that i've
had i too am a wishful eevee wannabe
driver and hope to be there soon
but one thing i've discovered just by
fielding people's questions like this
that there are actually
more fast chargers than we're aware of
there's one in trc there's one in
socorro there's several in albuquerque
and several in santa fe
i don't
i mean just in terms of that corridor
and there's equally some in deming and
and further
it isn't
one at every corner for sure but there
are uh
right now
the
governor has purchased many ev fast
chargers and is planning on putting them
along those major corridors that you
described there's also
a
el paso electric has funding to support
the upgrade of the grid and to offset
the cost of the installation of the fast
chargers so
there is more and more movement in that
area could you go camping for you know a
weekend and feel good not yet
that's
but i th one of the lessons i think that
we all have learned here is that
this stuff takes time and you i mean
we've been working on this for a year
trying to get all the data
we've gotten information on the grid we
still have another
six months before we're going to have
the chargers installed so
it we just have to
realize that this transition is coming
and that everyone is
plugging in no pundit yeah that's a good
pun um
to to uh you know do their part in this
process and so
i just
um
one thing i've heard um i haven't been
to national international conferences
but i am a
podcast-a-holic
and
i mean
what i've heard is when the chip problem
is solved in another year this is gonna
everything's gonna explode and so
um i'm anticipating that i wanna be
ready for it great thank you so much so
um
so
there isn't a sort of uh
you know the only thing i can think of
in terms of being international is the
um
the united nations uh conference on
climate change
and that's the only venue i think that
really discusses um
this international approach
but
or is there and and that that's just my
question i know there's countries like
indonesia there's you know they're
islands so they say they need airplanes
and they can't
whatever do without airplanes so we're
going to have the gas or the fuel
situation with us uh until our planet
just you know falls and bye-bye i'm very
pessimistic
pessimistic because
um
i think that some of this climate change
has been in the making for so many years
i mean you know back in 1970 when earth
day came about that all the
awareness started to come about
so
anyway i'm just
yeah so i do have a question for so when
will the buses be ready by the way
you say there's five
that five have been ordered and seven
more possibly are might be available
mayor pretend counselor for us we're
anticipating them to be delivered in
april of 2023
they'll probably come one at a time
during the month
and will our mechanics be trained by
then to take care of them yep that's
what we want to do we're going to
actually
have people come over and we're also
wanting to send some over to their
lancaster uh facility for training over
here prior to the vehicles arriving here
and actually the vehicles could be ready
a little sooner but part of we're also
trying to coordinate the delivery of
these vehicles with the completion of
the construction of the charging station
at the new transit operations and
maintenance facility right because it
would um
yeah it wouldn't be very good if that
facility wasn't built when when the uh
when the buses come so that's that's the
meeting point yes and and thank you mr
bartholomew and then the next question i
have is
has a city ever considered having
trolleys i know this tucson
has this wonderful transportation system
where people just hop on hop off
and um
because i and this is something
um that comes up every time you present
i mean i always bellyache about
the routes and i you know i lived in san
francisco in sacramento where you had no
choice but especially san francisco
have no choice but to hop on
i mean the trolleys now are just you
know
tourist traps
but
but there's still a lot of public
transportation the old
electric cars you know
but
i um
so
has the city considered that mr
bartholomew and so far and those could
probably be
and those could probably be
electric
and i know that you know i'm thinking
about having something down lowmen which
instead of you know getting from the
east side to the west side you know
again have to go through university and
then come back up
so has that ever been considered
we haven't really considered trolleys
per se i know our our tran our previous
transit plan uh
we would like to improve the frequency
of bus service along the lowman amador
corridor a little bit
trolleys are really about the same price
as a bus if you're talking about a
rubber tire trolley not a
with a track in the ground or anything
those are much more expensive
a lot more infrastructure issues
but we're really trying to focus on
with the resources we have kind of
improv improving the the fixed routes we
have with an overlay of the the micro
transit to improve the the movement
and the amount of time that you have to
wait to to get a bus or to get from
point a to point b on the bus with a
combination of those two systems it's
just that cities like savannah savannah
georgia has a fantastic system also
where people hop on hop off um
so and then my question for josh
for uh galvan is your last name right
yeah
what's your last name it's close enough
gallivan oh gallivan yeah oh so it's not
gallivan okay
so um
so you you said that um
new mexico has the clean car state
but we don't follow it
or did i you said something about new
mexico being a clean car state
but that we don't follow it no mayor pro
tem uh or am i
i'm not sure i i was talking about the
new mexico clean car rule i'm not sure
if
i'm not sure where i said that but oh
um so
okay then maybe i didn't hear correctly
so i'm really sorry about that
um so anyway again um
there's no micro macro type of planning
in any of this we're not linked up with
uh anything else
no
we just for what yeah
i apologize i'm not the fountain of
knowledge that i should be
nobody is thank you
mayor pro tem councilor flores the state
is working
it has a working committee that is
planning the distribution of
chargers throughout the state on the
corridors and then going out to the
rural areas so there is a concerted
effort amongst
different representatives oh so that's
what it was okay thank you lisa and
thank you josh mike jenny thank you very
much thank you very much for tim
thank you councilor flores councillor
avita
thank you mayor pro tem
just a quick comment uh going back to
the green bike lanes
you know i just had a public meeting
that we're going to do road repairs and
a water line replacement on university
avenue and i'm really happy to hear that
you are making a list
of
possible priority areas i'd love to see
that ranking so far so that when we're
looking at different types of road
repairs i would hope that in the future
it would be lovely to be able to
link up those projects and see how we
can incorporate it in the budget when we
do these types of
kind of replacements because i know on
university is an area that has a lot of
ability to have a high level of bike
bikers and walkers
mayor pro tem counselor beta the list
that jenny's put together
are
ones
that are
totally suitable for having the paint
right now
so you don't even have to wait for a
weight uh road repair
very nice
well um i would
but really like to see that list um
so that you know it makes me think if
we're doing something in the district if
i know that we're going to have this new
fresh road and we had
one of the main concerns that we had
from an individual was that about bike
safety and i know for me even seeing the
green lanes actually was just a visual
cue for me to pay more attention to the
surroundings as well
so thank you and thank you mary protem
thank you counselor beta councillor ben
coleman thank you so much i just have
one more follow-up question for mike
mike can you tell us the current um
your current capacity for transit how
many bus drivers do you have how many
are you understaffed
and then for dial or ride how many
vehicles do you have currently
on the in terms of the staffing we're
still needing
i'm trying to remember what we last like
i think we need about
uh
five or six drivers on the fixed route
side and
[Music]
three
two or three i believe on the on the
paratransit side in terms of our pair
transit dial ride vehicles
there are
uh
20 vehicles in the fleet right now i
believe at peak
when we have the most out at any one
time it's 14 to 15 of those vehicles are
out
at one time out of those 20.
okay um
oh shoot i was going to ask something
and it escaped my mind um
how often are you
looking to recruit drivers
in terms of
you know
add placements and those kinds of things
um
we've been pretty much constantly trying
to recruit drivers for
a couple years now i don't think we've
ever been fully staffed so we're always
we have our ad up
we have our city ad out there we do
occasional facebook postings too
that we have positions available uh we
don't really have an aggressive
advertising campaign or anything for
drivers yet
but
that it's pretty much ongoing all the
time there's there's always turnover
yeah absolutely yeah absolutely i
definitely um given that
wages recently went up i think would be
a great idea to try to do another round
for
bringing on some new drivers i do
remember do you have the numbers off the
top of your head for ridership for
dial-a-ride
on a monthly basis um well pre-pandemic
it was running about 54 to 56 000 trips
per year on dilroy and i think it's
last i looked it's around in
for 22 i believe it's in the upper 30
000 somewhere in there trips per year
we're doing it it's picking up it got
in the peak of the pandemic it was down
below 30 000 trips okay and correct me
if i'm wrong i may be getting these
mixed up but i think the last time you
provided numbers for
revenue that fair provides for transit
fixed rights was 13 of your budget is
from fairs and seven percent for dialer
right or do i have that backwards
yeah it's it's that's about right yeah
actually for dial a right our our fare
recovery is less than five percent okay
on the pair on the dollar right it's a
lot more expensive to provide those
trips okay thank you so much
thank you councillor benkoma and mike i
have a few questions
so
you have
you're in need of five to six drivers
but you also spoke of
not being able to go to zero fare for
fear or concern that you may not have
the the capacity
have you ever done a study um i know
there's been several consultants that
have come in
i mean how do you know that
it'll be
so there'll be so many people wanting to
drive because i ride the bus because
it's zero fare i mean
and and couldn't we do a small
experiment
and move into zero fare and the reason
i'm asking is i'll say this publicly
resilience leaders is coming to you
asking you for a zero fare
for youth and someone should have come
to a meeting last week
i don't know if that happened i was out
of town
but it it's going to happen and i'd like
for you to be ready for it and so and
how do we mitigate that how do we
ease the tension and concern about not
being able to
make that
make that happen i think we need to do
this sooner than later and there are a
lot of folks that are advocating and
pushing council to do this
again the problem is more on the dial
right side so yeah there's no issue
with our capacity we have the capacity
on the fixed route side that's not going
to be a problem with was fair free okay
and with youth in particular
uh there's not really that many youth
that qualify for dial rights so it
probably wouldn't have too much of an
impact on the dial right side
of the of the equation
as far as fair free again you know
again as i mentioned earlier that what
we
need to is
to really get a
handle on what the demand is going to be
because if we go far free then we have a
choice we have a situation where
we'll have some people uh
that may have been using fixed route
service which isn't door to door to nbn
or curb the curb
and they'll say well i can get i can
schedule a ride and get door-to-door
service basically for the same cost for
free and so that's what's going to be
pushing more and more people over to the
to the dial right side off of uh it's
it's
better service for them so that's why
we're looking at
mixing this micro transit in there
that's going to have a little bit more
efficiency in scheduling people that
we'd like to co-mingle our paratransit
and our and our
micro transit
so we can do trips with both some of the
vehicles may not have to be as large as
our dial ride vehicles we do
we will always have that requirement for
accessibility but the nice thing about
microtransit is that when a client sets
up their profile and everything we're
going to know if they need uh an
accessible vehicle so we can dedicate a
success an accessible vehicle to that
particular trip
i didn't mention we we talked about uh
electric buses a lot there are a lot
more electric vehicles on the smaller
vehicle side on the paratransit side
just starting to come into the market we
do have three
pair transit vehicles that we very badly
need as replacement vehicles that are on
order but they'll probably be the last
of the gasoline-powered
vehicles that we get
and we'll be looking more at electric
vehicles in the future even for the
dial-a-ride side
the biggest problem whether they're
electric vehicles or gasoline vehicles
right now is
because we use federal funding for
purchasing of our our revenue vehicles
there's a buy america requirement so
unfortunately right now there's a lot of
the
vehicles especially the smaller vehicles
on the
market that don't meet that requirement
of 70 i think it's like 73
domestic
content in the vehicles
so
that's part of the delay there's a big
delay in getting any kind of smaller
transit vehicle right now sometimes two
or three years after ordering to get the
vehicles right now
mainly because
uh
the people that build these vehicles
can't get enough domestically made parts
to meet that 73
that they need
and so the really the ways to get around
that is just hopefully in this country
there will be more uh
more domestically made products in the
future that will need it or we may have
to if we're really desperate for
vehicles we may have to be looking at
non-federal funding for the vehicle so
we're not under the
requirement of the buy america
thank you thank you
and then last is the question about the
apps going to the app to purchase
tickets and
when what do you have a time frame on
that uh we're going to be we want to
experiment with that with our micro
transit uh maybe
maybe not even initially there is a
requirement
uh
that we do have to vet any type of way
money is is collected even through an
app and everything through the i.t
process that the city has so we can
protect the
the consumer that is buying
uh
buying these things over the internet
basically and so there is a process that
we have to go through to make sure that
everything is compliant there so we're
working with it on that
so do you have a date
uh
well we we hope to have some sort of an
app
as far as purchasing fares
we don't i don't know if it will have it
then or not but we hope by january we're
going to have an app to at least
schedule the trips and if we can work it
out that we can start collecting fares
that's awesome for this is for the
demonstration project we want to do with
microtransit and paratransit thank you
thank you mike those are all my
questions any others okay
thank you all lisa are you is this a
okay thank you so much for a very um
um well thought out presentation very
organized appreciate that lisa
thank you mayor prochainment council i
want to give props to luis vela and mike
and robert messenger um and some other
folks who've been really instrumental in
getting this together so it's nice to
have this entourage
thank you luis mayor pro-tem jenny yes
lisa before you just really quickly i'm
sorry lisa i
um i'm hoping that maybe next quarterly
update we can specifically discuss
community solar
can i make a request
sure
thank you
thank you okay next up is economic
development partnership updates
elizabeth peters welcome elizabeth
okay
good afternoon mayor pro tem and city
council my name is elizabeth teters and
i'm just going to be introducing the
economic development partners
as part of the service agreement we have
with each of our partners we ask that
they present to you
every year their metrics and how their
year went
so we're going to start we have four
partners total
film las cruces farmers and crafts
market of las cruces in the downtown las
cruces partnership
we also have the messiah valley economic
development alliance
mr lopez couldn't be here today so we've
already scheduled for him to be
presenting
mavida's year end on october 10th work
session
and with that i'm going to turn it over
to mr john stepp for
film las cruces
thank you elizabeth
my name is jonathan sepp i'm the film
liaison for film las cruces
film las cruces is a 501c3 nonprofit
organization with a mission to promote
and develop the film and entertainment
arts industries in dona ana county and
southern new mexico
in april of this year film las cruces
left our home of about six years at the
wia building and we are now only a three
minute walk from the plaza de las cruces
our new office space can be found at 221
west griggs
film las cruces currently has two
full-time staff members
and one full part-time employee and a
flourishing internship program
during the last fiscal year we have
added two staff members and increased
our intern capacity
andrew harda is a long time independent
filmmaker here in the borderplex and we
are very lucky to have him as our
associate film liaison
julie thompson specializes in non-profit
accounting office management and swag
bags and is our director of operations
the efforts of film las cruces are
championed
through our volunteer board of directors
led by new mexico state senator jeff
steinborn and arts department chair of
donaiana community college matt burns
our board of directors meet the second
wednesday of every month at 6 pm
and these meetings are open to the
public we encourage anyone with an
interest in our mission to attend
las cruces experienced record growth in
all sectors of film until intelligent
production activity in fiscal year 2022.
from 70 000 short films to 70 million
dollar feature films
film las cruces continues to provide the
highest level
of support and film liaison services to
productions looking at our area and
filming in our area we will dive deeper
into the economic impact statistics
throughout the presentation
throughout our service agreement with
the city of las cruces there are five
key areas that we focus on this is the
development execution and implementation
of a promotional program handling film
permits local film workforce development
listing of all support services
available for film productions and site
location within the city of las cruces
this dashboard shows the metrics set out
by our service agreement and where we
landed on june 30th the production
permit bar is incorrect and should
display a 266 percent increase in our
annual target
part of our service agreement asks that
we maintain an equal or greater amount
of funding from outside the city of las
cruces for fiscal year 2022 we were able
to match 80 percent of those funds
conforming to our reporting requirements
within the service agreement we
submitted a workable plan to achieve
this goal and have succeeded
for the upcoming fiscal year 2023
with that i am very excited to dive into
these statistics with you
so for fiscal year 2022 the city of las
cruces saw over 10 000 worker days 325
production days and a direct spend of
7.9 million dollars
film las cruces continues to i apologize
wrong slide
let me go back
prior to this fiscal year ending we
worked with davin and brian over at
movida to determine the city's gross
receipts tax impact from the film and
entertainment arts industries the
numbers used were about 20 to 30 percent
lower than we ended up with
even with our conservative year-end
estimates the city of las cruces is
estimated to have received 120 thousand
dollars in gross receipts taxes
production inquiries are the heart of
what we do at film las cruces
this is how we get productions
interested in filming in our area get
some of our crew and vendors
into the industry and working and
providing their services or goods
and then of course once we get them
attracted to las cruces they come down
for location scouts
throughout the year we sent out 73
location packages 79 crew information
resources and 48
vendor information and had 28 location
scouts
film las cruces continues to maintain a
thriving social media and web presence
through 182 posts we manage close to
half a million reach
throughout the year
and the the facebook post i chose to
highlight
was because of the type of opportunities
this industry brings this one particular
job posting uh paid one thousand dollars
to a local kid to act for less than six
hours with no previous acting experience
required
our office coordinated 32 filming
permits for productions filming in the
city of las cruces
film permit requests often have many
layers and require many
multiple city departments to provide
input
we would like to provide
we would not be able to provide such a
high quality film permitting process
without the support of city leadership
there are countless city staff that go
above and beyond
to assist with our efforts but i'd
especially like to thank danya soto
this type of governmental support is a
major reason why we are seeing
this level of production activity as
well as producers coming back with more
projects after experiencing what it is
like to film in las cruces
we continue to work with a wide variety
of educational programs through the city
of las cruces the film technicians
training program over at dona ana
community college creative media
technologies department at the community
college creative media institute in
mexico state university the bridge lcps
and many of the charter schools in las
cruces and dona ana county
and then of course i mentioned our
burgeoning internship program and
currently there are about 297
las cruces residents in our crew
directory
and on the slide to the right
i was able to capture about three cmi
students that were able to work as
background extras on the feature film
chupa
this is a new statistic that i have
started to track taking a look at the
crew lists and call sheets that we
receive for all of the film and
television productions that come to our
area this is the percentage of local
below the line crew members local las
cruces below the line crew members that
make up the entirety of the below the
line crew for each of these film and
television productions that come to our
area and we are seeing a growth in those
numbers uh an area where you may not see
growth is squealer and bad ombres but
those production had quite a bit of
overlap
film las cruces continues to advocate
for our local film work film workforce
in a variety of ways this includes
monthly workshops advocating for a
southern arm of the nextgen media
academy maintaining support and
assistance to the creative campus
steering team working alongside iot
local 480 on local
local union crew growth participation in
the department of defense skill bridge
program and a monthly filmmaker's
hangout called the wrap
andrew hada hosts monthly online
workshops with topics like how to get
your first day on a film set navigating
insurance as a film crew worker
the topics we focus on each month are
collaboration between our office and
local filmmakers they tell us what they
want to learn about and andrew works
through his connections and mine to
bring these workshops to fruition
the wrap is a new monthly filmmakers
hangout that started in collaboration
between the rio grande theater and film
las cruces this is an opportunity for
our local filmmakers to showcase
whatever they're creating whether it's
music videos commercials documentaries
broadcast pieces we invite anyone in the
city of las cruces or doniana county to
come share their work at the rio grande
theater and these are monthly screenings
that we will continue to work with at
the rio grande theater on
one interesting portion of the wrap that
we have included and will continue to
include
is a town hall style forum so for the
first 30 minutes of this event we invite
anybody
from the community filmmaker or not to
come and ask the film office questions
so that is something that anybody can
come do from 6 30 to 7 and then if they
would like to stick around they can
watch some of the awesome content that
our locals are creating
our film friendly vendor program
finished the year off with 114 local
businesses in las cruces this includes
everything from barricades catering
services picture cars and many other
types of goods and services
our location database currently contains
629 locations and is the leading driver
in garnering interest from prospective
productions
i can't thank you all enough for your
continued support of the growth in the
creative economy here in las cruces and
i stand for any questions
thank you
i appreciate your presentation um sorry
concert crown concert gold concert and
come
okay i'll go first
thank you john for the great
presentation and for all the things i i
just want to sort of
well first of all i once starred as a
pig in space and an infomercial that was
eight hours long and i only got paid
fifty dollars so
i'm really excited about actual economic
development as opposed to exploitation
of kids who look like pigs apparently
i hope not i really hope not
but i did just want to point out the
next gen academy i it was great to see
you at the event that the governor had
here i was wondering if you could just
talk a little bit more about what that
is
um it seems like it's a really big
collaborative project and it's going to
increase what i think a lot what what
i've sort of heard from folks is that we
need more local talent ever growing and
so i'm wondering if you can just talk a
little bit more about that um because i
know it's a pretty new and exciting
development so
i turn it over to you absolutely uh
thank you for the question council koran
um so
you're correct one of the biggest issues
we have always faced with attracting
film and television productions to our
area is the amount of local crew that is
available
cmi cmt fttp have done a great job in
training these crew members but there's
always more that can be done
in the previous new mexico legislative
session the new mexico film office
coordinated assisted to coordinate
about 40 million dollars to invest in
what they're calling the next generation
media academy uh thankful to our board
of directors and state senator jeff
steinborn
assisted us in getting involved in those
conversations and convincing them to
create a southern version of this
initiative
and in all of these different kind of
conversations that we have with the
creative campus and what's going on
currently with dona ana community
college they've been able to
work on a joint agreement to have some
type of facilities that are next to each
other at the creative campus on the
arrowhead center at new mexico state
university
i think that's as much as i can speak to
at the moment as what that will look
like but one of the exciting
pieces of the nextgen media academy
south will be the bilingual training
focus
that's awesome thank you so much that's
really exciting thanks john
thank you council grant councillor bin
como thank you mayor putin thank you so
much mr seth for that thorough
presentation i mean there's been a lot
of great news statewide in the film
industry so it's really great to um
to
be experiencing that similar thing here
in las cruces i certainly hope to see
stranger things on the list next year or
something me too um
i do have a question two questions for
you that you did not touch on and one of
them i had emailed you briefly about
before and i'm curious if you have any
update on how you all at film las cruces
are thinking about
better coordinating with local
businesses and residents in areas where
filming is taking place
i don't remember at this point when it
was but i had a business owner on madrid
contact me about
the street being shut down
um and there was no access for people to
get into her business for quite some
time and so i'm just curious as you know
we begin to grow and how we better
navigate those kinds of circumstances
right so that we don't
negatively impact the folks
in the area while we're experiencing
such good things so i'm curious if you
all have given any thought to to that
absolutely and and one of the things
that came out of that conversation was
specifically adding that first 30
minutes to the monthly meetings over at
the rio grande theater to allow for
these type of conversations to happen in
a public forum um in addition to that
i'm using downtown las cruces kind of as
a
not necessarily a playground but a way
to flesh out some of the best ideas to
get some of that information out
so we're working with downtown las
cruces partnership chris favor
various other community members who have
email lists to start getting this
information about the potential use of
those areas
and how to stay up to date with all of
the different changes so recently there
was a potential to film in downtown las
cruces road closures um and so i'd
gotten that potential request and within
an hour i had notified all of the
various people who have these email
lists that can share it out
to the public and to the people and
businesses that would be affected
and that quickly changed into something
that was a much smaller impact and we
were able to solve that issue with
notification letters and
speaking more towards the notification
letters that is something that our
office is making sure that it happens in
a timely fashion and making sure that
they include our film office's
information on all of the letters that
go out
and so that is an opportunity for
community members to reach out to us
with any questions that they have or
navigating
the process on their own because before
the production starts oftentimes there's
opportunity to
to air out these concerns and work
together to find what is going to
impact these businesses or these
community members
as little as possible and sometimes
making sure that they're monetarily
compensated for any impact that they do
face but it is very difficult to do that
after the fact so as city councillors
and working with your constituents i
would appreciate it if you could share
with them you know reach out to us if
you ever get any type of notification or
letter or see any type of film activity
in the area that you even if you weren't
aware of it it's ongoing uh give us a
call we're there 24 7. uh i don't always
like to say that but our that our office
phone number hits all of our cell phones
so you can get a hold of us any point in
time day or night we pick up the phone
thank you so much for their quick
response then and then um working
through this process i think that's
going to be that's going to go a really
really long way thank you thank you my
last question i mean it might not be for
you it could be but it could be for ifo
or chief
dominguez i've just noticed that
pd has been involved in some of these
i'm assuming closing down of streets and
some traffic navigation i'm curious how
much time is pd spending on some of this
or what is like our internal
policy when it comes to
a film set and the use of
officers
mayor pro tem constrain cuomo most of
the
the officers that work these these movie
sets are doing it as an outside
employment okay so they're being paid
individually by the movie uh production
company got it that's super helpful
thank you so much
thank you
council graham counselor florence
thank you so much
thanks for this great presentation
and
i guess more of a comment but also
probably a little bit of a question
i'm really happy to see how much we've
improved on our local talent being used
because i believe when myself and
counselor karan
first came on we we went over to was it
was it chupa yeah we got to go over and
hang out behind the scenes and i believe
even at that time just a few months ago
it was still a kind of northern new
mexico heavy
workforce and we were talking about how
much we were committed to bringing more
southern new mexicans into the fold so
it seems like progress has really picked
up on that
recently
what are we doing right
so i think i've said this last year you
know it's continuing to do what we're
doing um continue to spend as much time
as we possibly can
staying involved in these conversations
with the decision makers so the people
who are doing the hiring
andrew and i um are very active in our
communications with the producers with
the department heads all of these
different people hiring and making sure
that they are aware of the resources
that we have to plug them into our local
talent so that is absolutely a key
driver in seeing some of those
percentages increase in the amount of
las cruces talent as compared to
northern new mexico or outside of the
state of new mexico
and then the next driver of that is the
education so you know we can put all of
these names in front of these decision
makers as we are able to uh but then
they have to close the deal so there's
many different areas like the monthly
workshops that we are putting on or the
coordination with local 480 to bring
their workshops down here
our efforts to assist the creative media
technologies department the creative
media institute and just advertising the
type of training that they have to give
these decision makers in their hiring
process
understanding that when they hire our
locals they're going to get the work
that they need out of these employees
out of these workers
yeah that's that's so good to hear i
feel like this is one of the well this
is definitely one of the target
industries from the new mexico economic
development department for diversifying
the state's economy
and i think it's one of our best
opportunities to keep our local talent
local and i think just in a
in a strange sort of i know this would
sound a little like kind of weird and
out there but i think having people who
are local working these films just puts
a heart and a passion into it this is
their home this is their landscape and
that really communicates through in the
projects
that are coming out of here and i do
want to say hi to andrew hi andrew
one of my coolest former students ever
um and a great example of keeping
local talent and local brilliance local
so
good to see you
thank you
thank you councillor graham councilor
flores thank you madam chair
and thank you john thank you so much for
all your work
it's been a struggle at times but boy
you've really taken off and thank you
jeff
senator steinborn
for all of your efforts and your
your vision
and
and john your vision and hard work but i
think that some of the local
talent
or i i believe it's
[Music]
some crew people have to be union
and um so
but the union is doing a good job of
um
of training people
locally
and then having them become union
members is is that still a practice
absolutely so i i believe what you're
talking about is the process from what
they call the overflow list into getting
those union days to be able to apply for
um union membership so it's another one
of those chicken or the egg things you
know how do you get union days to be
able to join the union
for the local 480 specifically you need
30 union days to be able to
ask to join the union and the overflow
list is part of that process and one of
the things that i'm noticing within the
local 4d union membership is
a greater allowance of accessing that
overflow list when they are in southern
new mexico
great thank you so much and again can't
thank you enough
for all your work it's i know it's been
challenging at times
but the fruits are definitely
the result of all your work so thank you
thank you thank you thank you thank you
huh
what i was saying well we're not done
yet oh no no no no i that wasn't my
implication at all i'm sorry if that's
what i implied but i just want to thank
you for your continuing work and thank
you again senator senator steinborn
thank you madam chair
thank you councillor flores
again john thank you for
your presentation i have a couple of
questions
welcome uh
senator steinborn to the chamber good to
see you
um
um one of my questions has to do with
um
your office space
did you move did you say that and i'm
not paying attention yes okay so we were
paying attention
yes we did so we are no longer at the
wia building across from pioneer women's
park we are off of uh griggs so we are
caddy corner to uh zaffiro's
caddy corner tour zafiros
okay
all right very good i've seen the
signs so i wanted to verify um
the second question is
around the sound stage
we had some money specifically for the
sound stage and have
had some
stalls and starts and i just wanted an
update on that
absolutely so
i'm not sure how much of an update i'm
allowed to give but i guess one thing i
could say is there
might be some potential to use those
funds in the very near future
very cool i've been hearing that for a
little bit so just anxious probably
about a year
well we've been yeah i've been here for
six or seven years and yeah
i've heard more specifically can't tell
you can't tell you so i thought i'd ask
and just
because we have that money graciously
from
many of our legislature
legislative folks and they ask every now
and again and
we don't have anything to report to them
so is there a time frame
in terms of where we could hear more
i'm not too sure on that i think
elizabeth teters is going to help me
with that
mayor pro tem elizabeth teters again
again i'm going to be super cryptic as
well uh but i will say that
we're hoping to be able to bring
something to city council for approval
in the next
oh i'm not even going to give a number
of months in the next few months to you
as a use for the funds
great that's good to hear thank you
elizabeth and then john um for the
coming year art so are you on a fiscal
year to year like january to december or
fiscal year july to june
mayor pro tem candidate so for our city
reporting and county reporting we
operate on a fiscal year july to june
okay as an organization uh we uh operate
on a january to december okay so what
are your um priorities for the the
coming year what things would you like
to see um happen
one thing i would definitely like to see
to happen is to be able to not be so
cryptic about some of these exciting
things we've been working on for what
feels like a decade now um
so going back to the
amount of production days that we see in
a year i certainly would love next year
to be able to report 365 days of
production days in las cruces that is
definitely one of my personal goals
within the office
and then
increasing the percentage of below the
line workers and
keeping some of our keeping all of our
best talent here in las cruces and then
of course attracting some back uh
cmi cmt for many years has produced some
of the best talent uh in the film and
entertainment arts industries
that new mexico sees
and
even in addition to that there's a
county initiative that we're working on
and we're trying to steal some of the el
paso crew members
to sunland park santa teresa
and thinking of other ways to increase
our crew capacity we're already seeing
some of that we've seen a couple crew
members move to sunland park those that
want to be close to their families in el
paso but become a new mexico resident so
that they have a certain level of higher
ability when productions do come to our
area
that's great tip that's really great to
hear i know when i first started on
council
one of the things that we you know a
couple or three councils
had really stressed was mitigating the
brain drain right and i really
appreciate counselor graham's um
commentary about about that and you know
the city really has focus on paid
internships the apprenticeships
working with you as you build your
scholarship program for the training
that happens
um i think all those things are really
important especially if we're moving
toward diversifying right our economy
did you say anything around that that
program
that you're training up folks um
that was something that was happening a
few years back has that continued and
how successful has it been and what more
might we do to add to that absolutely so
if i hear you correctly i think you were
asking about our internship program and
within film las cruces
yes yes but we there was also a training
right that if
if and i know um senator um steinborn
um you know was recruiting people uh to
to build sort of a scholarship program
for people to participate in that
training
program is that still in event
absolutely so uh so i i i know what
you're talking about now mary pro tem so
that is the scholarship that film las
cruces sponsored at the dona ana
community college specific to the film
technicians training program and as far
as i'm aware there's still
active funds that are contributing
yearly to a set amount which i believe
is two scholarships a year
with the amount that we initially funded
into this scholarship program
okay thank you thank you i appreciate
that any other questions
nope seeing none john appreciate you
thank you thank you good luck and i look
forward to seeing you
in the near future not be so cryptic yes
okay and next we have the farmers and
crafts market with miss karen bradshaw
[Music]
see if i can figure this out
good afternoon
my name is karen bradshaw and i am the
manager for the farmers and crafts
market of las cruces
now elizabeth show me how to do this
this is just
perfect thank you all right the market
at this time has 159 permanent vendors
108 temporary vendors
we have 58 musicians of which 15 of them
are under the age of 18.
we have multiple non-profits that rotate
through the market monthly
animal services center for
the messiah valley has returned to
having their adoptions at the market
again and they recently had a microchip
clinic
our vendor numbers are back up to
pre-copied
capacity we
and with the passage of the new mexico
homemade food act
last year that has helped us bring in
more baked good vendors we are bringing
in more farmers and crafters as well
let's see
our advertising budget has increased
we are still continuing to distribute
the rack cards
we have
two facebook pages one for our vendors
and one for the market itself as well as
instagram and a website
we were using adams radio to promote
weekly we have switched to bravo mike
but we are constantly using uh radio
ktal lp 101.5 the las cruces community
uh radio has been started broadcasting
weekly at our saturday morning markets
back in march
they did decide to take the summer off
but they will be back
in september
and they broadcast for an hour on the
corner of las cruces and main street
and they provide information about
events happening downtown local
musicians
they promote the market itself as well
as the downtown merchants and it's just
it's been a lot of fun to have them to
add them to our repertoire
obviously the bulletin's the best we
were
number one in six categories
uh second and two and the runner up into
we continue to do the snap ebt double up
food buck program through the state of
new mexico
and our numbers as you can see have
increased again this year
and we are
continuing to push the program
wic is coming down
from the
ladies with the human services they have
set up a table with us every saturday
right now and actually we'll process
people right there on site to get them
onto the wic program as long as they are
signed up with them
there is a special program that we're
doing right now that we were chosen
by nmfma the national
new mexico farmers market association we
are a doubled up double down community
and
the state has a special program through
a special grant where
anyone who uses their snap pro their
snap ebt benefits at the farmers market
it automatically gets doubled for free
through a grant with the state of new
mexico so if someone wants to use twenty
dollars of benefits off their card
we automatically will double it and they
will then receive forty dollars to spend
and use at the market to buy fresh
produce
and baked goods
meat
we have multiple vendors that qualify
for this program so there's a lot of
selection for them to use their benefits
there
but as a double up double down community
right now there's a promotion going
around
our office manager miss amanda
has been putting out
five dollar coupons
they've been provided to the senior
centers
to the food pantries to the libraries
and the little library pantries and
stuff
we've just been pushing them around the
entire city and people can come
and they get that five dollar coupon and
any of the farmers will redeem it for
fresh fruit and vegetables
and it's just to try to push and get
people to understand that they can use
their benefits at the farmers market to
get access to fresh local produce
and that's it
questions
thank you so much
i appreciate you for being here and for
your presentation counselor flores thank
you so much
ms bradshaw
um
i just
have a
question that this might be irritating
um well i think i'm irritating a lot of
people most of the time anyway
so um
i'm just wondering how um
how is the
say grt tracked and how are the
uh sales tracked especially when it's um
a cash uh purchase or sale
oh you're talking are you talking about
the uh gross receipts
yeah grt yes receipts and just uh that
sort of stuff i'm just wondering how
that works
um
yeah that well our vendors are actually
individual businesses so that's not our
area we do not track that type of thing
we are required to ensure that they are
compliant once a year we
they are required to provide proof of
compliance
with the state of new mexico and that
they have been paying their grocery
seats
and so you say it's not really your area
but then they have to show proof of
compliance so how do how how does that
those how do those two meet
i would actually have to um
all right i guess the easiest way to
explain it is new mexico tap has
if you go to their
first page
and scroll down there's a thing for
businesses and you have the ability to
check
your business tax id number status
and our vendors and we we help our
vendors there's a lot of them that
need help sometimes doing this because
this is paying your grocery states how
this works
especially new vendors they don't
realize that they are required
if they don't have sales they're still
required to report gross receipts based
on whether they're a monthly a quarterly
or a semi-annually
but you can check your status with the
state through this
one section in the new mexico tab
and it's just a matter of entering in
your business tax id number
your zip code
and then your
depending on how you registered it it's
either your security number the last
four digits or the last four digits of
your um ein
and then that
goes through the
their site and it'll show whether you're
compliant or not we do not know what
their numbers are
we do let them know that they
we would like them to when they do
report
that they use the tid
number and not the lost the city of las
cruces number because that money does
stay here and helps the downtown
district
but
as to exactly how much everyone reports
or what they reports we don't know we
don't have access to that so it's on the
honor system correct so okay i always
wondered about that but uh but we do
like i said we do require and it will
show whether they're complying or not it
actually comes up if they're not in
compliance it's in big red letters not
in compliant
and that means that they have not been
correct or there's an issue with their
account
the state last year
changed how they changed their entire
system where the reporting oh yeah
we spent
we had
vendors who actually could not access
their account
and
there were a lot of bugs in the new
system
hopefully all of that has finally been
ironed out so that um
when we get to the reporting time
because we have them report in february
that way because everyone is required
to be up to date
on their gross receipt reporting come
january 25th
and it takes the state's website about a
week to fully update
so come february 1st through february
28th or 29th if it's a leap year um our
vendors are required
to provide us with the proof that
they're compliant okay
and then um the other question i have is
um i've seen
um items being sold i i there's one
particular vendor who's absolutely does
beautiful work it's just amazing what
what she does
um
and uh
and and i just happened to ask her this
is amazing you do all of this and she
said i do she's and her husband was
there and he said yep she does that
um and she went on to describe how she
how she does this work
she said by the by that
that there are vendors that
aren't entirely truthful about because
my
my understanding her understanding is
that
everything at farmer's market is
produced by the vendor
and
she mentioned
i wasn't asking but she just mentioned
sorry
she mentioned that um
dang
no it's okay i'm used to it um
what you are saying i am used to it yeah
um you're saying that the defender is
implying that someone is someone is not
really making or producing the items
that they're selling so is there any um
so and that and that is the premise of
the farmers market that person who's
selling is creating or growing or
correct all that and no ma'am um
all of our vendors
are required to provide proof that they
do make it
so we actually have photos on file
and if if there is any questions raised
concerning the process or whether
they're not making it or not
then they are required to submit to a
site check
so we will they actually have to prove
if questions come up and they cannot
provide us with
the necessary proof that we request then
we will actually schedule a site check
where we go to their home
um their their workshop and we will they
have the show to show us that yeah we do
make it we do grow it
great well thank you so much miss
bradshaw thank you very much
thank you concert florida's counselor
abetha
thank you mayor pro-tem thank you so
much for the presentation i was
particularly interested in the numbers
that you had regarding
people using their snap benefits and
everything and so i'm curious
as you've seen your vendor levels kind
of even to
pre-pandemic
how do you go about
i guess for a lack of a veteran choosing
who gets to have a space
at the
at the market and how do you balance
food versus crafts
we actually do not
have a
limit
where farmers or crafters are concerned
so we don't set a limit on that
it has been discussed because some do
feel we are craft heavy
however
we also feel that
we have we should not infringe on
the promotion of business
everyone that comes to you know that
wants to be a vendor should at least
have the opportunity to try and the
market will
choose who survives and who doesn't
[Music]
anyone who is a farmer
who is one who provides us with produce
agri the agriculture and everything it's
an automatic end
that's guaranteed we are farmers market
first
we are not yet
at the point of restricting crafters
it's possible someday we might come to
that point
but no farmers will always
have the top priority that's the way
fans are butts
that's great to hear
and then with your
if you have 159 vendors what is the peak
capacity of the market
that's difficult to say
because of the fact of space size
most of our vendors are 10 by 10s
but we do have
some vendors that are 10 by 20.
obviously our we have food trucks that
are up to 30 feet plus they require 10
feet on either side because of the fire
marshall clearance that we need to have
so it's difficult to say what full
capacity would be
we do have areas we have not yet gone
into and utilized
rough estimate i mean we have 159
permanents
but i still have almost an entire block
that hasn't been claimed
south 200 block where the new america
school is
i only have three permanent vendors
signed assigned there
however i have a lot of attempts that
use that area but we still have room
okay great thank you
and then i guess just a comment but
whenever i'm asked about what's there to
do in las cruces
the farmer's market isn't the first
thing that i usually tell them i said
are you coming on a saturday go to the
farmer's market and i know it's highly
regarded obviously you've
had a lot of awards about it but it is
a great event
um to go to as well not only for locals
but for those visiting our city so thank
you thank you
thank you councillor abetha i agree it's
such a wonderful place there's always so
many people it's really lovely to see i
wanted to ask a question really abby's
question
about um the junior vendors
and your relationship with them and how
many do you have and where are they
located and are they every saturday
kids can
yes kids can is there every saturday
they have two 10 by 10 spots where they
use up they have up to four vendors and
of course um
they rotate their vendors
as to who comes i think they can come
once a month if i can remember correctly
and i actually
will be receiving this week more
applications
from them
and there will be an orientation for
more junior vendors next week
lovely thank you so much for doing that
i
it's so awesome to see them they're such
great
um entrepreneurs know their craft and
can speak to it you know very very
easily and it actually has made it
easier for the young ones to to join the
market because the state does kind of
prohibit
if you're not 16 you can't get a
business tax id number yeah
so it makes it out some parents just
don't want to be bothered with that so
doing this through kids can
it helps the kids come in
you know they get to do their art
uh make some money
so it's nice yeah it's
it's really near and dear to me and when
asked to judge i always say yes you know
during that they have a a time
once a year
where you're able to judge and and give
feedback about their product and their
presentation and so i i i go often and
and
it's it's really amazing to see those
kids and i've been able to do it year
after year and you just see the
improvement um and it's nice it's really
nice to see so thank you for doing that
appreciate you very much any other
questions
okay cena thank you thank you
thank
you okay and last we have jennifer
kozlowski
good afternoon um as she said i'm
jennifer koslowski i'm the executive
director for downtown las cruces
partnership and i know some of you met
susan
susan cabello but i also want to
introduce her as she is now officially
our director of the arts and cultural
district so it's a really big deal and
we're very excited to have her in this
capacity although she's been doing it
for two years already
so let me get over to where we are as
always i like to start with what our
mission is and it's very important that
we always refer back to our mission even
in our board meetings at every point we
can because it is to create a signature
business destination that celebrates our
region's rich cultural heritage local
arts and culture and contributes to a
thriving sustainably sustainable and
economically vibrant downtown every time
we come up with a project we always look
at it through this lens is it going to
be helpful for our program is it going
to be helpful for downtown is it going
to be good for las cruces is it going to
be good for the people that live in our
district as well as the people that come
to our district
i want to tell you guys that we have
been accredited once again by new mex by
new mexico main street as well as main
street america it's a pretty vigorous
process we have to meet quite a few
goals and our performance standards are
not easy but we have reached them again
and so i'm quite proud to say at least
while i've been here for the fifth year
in a row we have met all of these
standards
this is a quick overview of the
reinvestment impact main street america
programs around the country have had
through main streets in the united
states
as you can see they've put 1.5
5.7 billion has been reinvested locally
and the way they get these numbers is we
do quarterly reporting at the state
level as and the state turns it into
excuse me main street america in order
to see how this works and if we've used
grants to rehab buildings if we've had a
building owner come in and say i want to
put this much money to rehabbing for
let's say a restaurant that moved into
the district
we always try to take this into account
not everybody gives us those in that
information
but we try to be very conservative on
our reporting so we're not
overvaluing some of the things that
might have happened but as we go through
you'll see where we've actually done
pretty well this year for downtown las
cruces partnership
right now we show that we
as of the end of june we show that we
had 13 new businesses
open in downtown and when i use the term
downtown that is to you guys that is the
tid
district as well as
um our arts and cultural district it's a
with the layover of the acd and if you
know what this means that means layover
um so we tend to i i sometimes just say
the
the downtown meaning the whole thing but
in our districts the acd as well as
downtown proper these are the businesses
that have opened in the last year
we also have three new pending projects
excuse me four pending i should have
changed that three restaurants have
contacted us to open into some locations
within our district as well as a group
looking to open a nice fitness center in
our downtown which we're really
hoping that one's going to work what
we've seen over the year with these
business open we've seen 59 new jobs and
about 2.58 million in in private
improvement this is building owners
business owners as well as
property owners putting back money into
the district in order to revitalize
their buildings their space
in order for us to
in order for us to get more businesses
downtown
we've we have clocked in 37
3 700
volunteer hours this year which has been
really big for us it's been one of our
best yet
we have new board members and they are
truly a working board this time around
it's really awesome to watch partake and
be a part of things and really really
come at this
full steam ahead
and with that we've seen about 139
volunteers per our events as well as
things that have gone on with even in
our office computer work telephone work
things to that nature
these are our deliverables and
accomplishments for this year
as you guys remember we did not we did
not skip chili drop during covid we did
a virtual one and we think that was to
our benefit because we did have our best
chili drop today the band was amazing
the crowd was amazing
the way the downtown community thank you
the way the downtown community really
worked together it was it was every part
of it i can't say
um
there wasn't a cloud in it although it
was rainy that night and susan are very
very nervous i want to say at 11 o'clock
we were 10 30 11 o'clock we were
sitting in boneyard going oh god oh god
please you know you're throwing a party
and no one comes well people came and it
was amazing they had a great time
again i think it was our best to date
according to the newspaper we
approximately 4 thousand event goers um
at that point we didn't have a way to
track it now with the sufa data
that's coming back we should be able to
track this better with the amount of
people that come to our events
um we have updated and build a new
website um we did that with a lot of
help through with our board of directors
as well as chris favor with the city
we provided the district with technical
assistance grant resources and other
economic incentive
opportunities one of the big things we
do every year is a district we
distribute an annual survey
and we tend to get um spammed a lot once
we do it so it is a little bit difficult
but susan and robert
cruz are director our board excuse me
board director sat together and they
figured out
the
areas of increase and so if you look at
this you can see that what people really
want or most likely to come to downtown
it's going to bring them downtown is
entertainment and events
the thing that we get back the most is
people want more family friendly events
and so to me that explains that we need
to figure out different ways that we can
utilize
the plaza in
more beneficial to families as a whole
instead of just events at bars where
people could come on down for certain
events certain
party type holidays
anything you want to
so we were really surprised when we got
the data back
so this graph comes from the
quantitative portion of our survey so we
just ask people please state your name
for the record i'm sorry i'm susan
cabello
we did we asked people what would bring
them downtown more often
we were
so these show this is just people
sometimes people just have a list so
it's not one answer per person
necessarily um the things we saw the
most often like jennifer said is
entertainment events dining retail
security
also the issue with homelessness is
lumped into that we thought that would
be much larger
that it was amenities as anything like
water fountains restrooms more shade
those kind of things so you can see it
kind of goes up
as lack of interest past that like i
said we were really
heartened to see that people really want
to come downtown to experience things
and to have
an experience
and that means
as you can see not only enjoying
downtown but hopefully also spending
money
and putting money back into our economy
we it we increased our marketing and
promotion this um this year we put a lot
of dollars and cents behind it but also
a lot of thought process and um plan
from with our growth go
sorry go thrive b campaign and i hope
some of you have seen it i know i did
report to
the prc committee and you were able to
see some of our stuff that we'd put
forth
but it has been we've seen a really good
turnaround with it with people visiting
our website
and it's really done
it's really brought our community
together our downtown and our acd
together of things that how we
how we actually promote our
the other businesses
um
we attempted a lease rate survey to help
both property owners and tenants we did
not get feedback unfortunately we had
many people that said they would take
the survey said they would go forth
through but we only got
five people
turn in their survey and this was a
survey for us to find out if if our
merchants downtown felt that they were
paying proper rent and leasing and if
the the property owners were renting it
at were leasing their spaces at a proper
rate
um
one thing that we have heard is
sometimes leases the leases are too high
in the downtown area so this is
something we're trying to do in or in
order to find out a little bit more and
again unfortunately we didn't get good
feedback so we're going to try it again
this coming year but maybe try a
different way of reaching out to our our
district businesses
the other thing is we we released this
year how to blogs and that was a really
good driving force on our website
it was how to open a business how to get
my
permit how to just very very
things that we've learned is people
don't know what they don't know
okay rain
people don't know what they don't know
and so when they walk into our office
and they want to open up a business you
know we have a little list of questions
that we ask and with this these how-to
blogs we saw that that was that was very
helpful for
people interested in opening up in the
downtown district as well as arts and
cultural district
we
since we have our deliverables with you
we haven't broken up through our arts
and cultural district as well as
dlcp proper so these are specific to our
acd things that we were able to build on
and um move forward on this past year um
ventanas vivas is always a big favorites
when we decorate the windows for the
holiday season in downtown
we are actually getting ready i believe
next week to start our first meeting to
get ready for ventanas vivas for this
holiday season
susan
was one of the things we started during
covid was the artist in residence
program and it is a play on artist in
residence it is not the idea of how we
all see an artist in residence but she
was able to develop a program that we
were able to still work with our artists
in our district and really get them to
be again a part of a process a part of a
program a part of our community you want
to give a little sure um susan cabello
for the record uh our artist in
residence program has traditionally
featured six artists per year and they
are artists who live and or work in our
district so we're celebrating the
artists that are already there instead
of bringing somebody else in
this year i thought it was more
successful even in the first year we
learned from our first year that we were
doing a series of three videos and that
was two videos too many
people only watched the first one so for
each artist this time we only had one
video
through social media alone we saw that
21 000 plus people had viewed these
videos so we feel that it has probably
the biggest reach of any of our programs
and something that people are excited
about and something that we are excited
about expanding on
this year our tagline for the acd is so
we are really kind of delving into our
district to find out what makes southern
new mexico southern new mexico and
really feature those artists that
show that and display it in their work
so
okay i'll keep going
so also this year we worked on the
generations community writing project
which is a project that pairs
writers in different generations to work
together and to read together
that was part of lit fest this year and
we'll get to that just in a minute
also jennifer and our board chair robert
cruz worked really hard on completing
the first phase of our walking tour
that is in the mesquite historic
district
they've we've recorded narration of both
english and spanish
the tour is available also on our
website
just through social media 472 people
have accessed it
we learned through our kickoff party
that perhaps we need to retool this a
little bit
we don't have it in the app we had it
on a phone and then so we had people who
had like paper map and a phone and then
they didn't know kind of how to put it
together and then we're a little bit
worried about them listening to the
audio part in traffic so um maybe like a
little bit
like honing in on how we deliver that
product
and adding a few more properties
hopefully this year
um also like i said we did our lip fest
which is our first
event it is a literary arts festival
we keep saying if anyone has a better
name for this event we are more than
open to it
so what we did is we
really listened to our
clients downtown our businesses
they said that they maybe didn't want as
many uh plaza events they wanted some
events that brought people directly into
their business so we created this
using what we called mini events so we
had programming that was free at the rio
grande theater
we had different mini events hosted in
our businesses downtown
one of our favorites was the levita
project did once upon a drag queen where
they read two different they read books
to all ages
also part of this project we got a
devastali grant we have a mural
that's a community mural i think the
picture of it is at the end we have a
local
excuse me artist coy lowther who did it
for us it is amazing
she went above and beyond any of our
expectations both on the composition of
it the quality of it and just how well
she interacted with the community
we were
i was just thinking that she was gonna
like kind of help people do it
she actually set up a
stand behind it so people could be
making bookmarks and other literary
themed things while they were waiting um
to work on the mural it was pretty
fantastic she did a great job
um jennifer
going sorry going with the coy lowthers
thing we see that we had over 250 people
actually put their names put their quote
their initials on to this community um
mural that kind of made it a little more
special knowing that it was truly truly
a community project
oh my name for the record is jennifer
koslowski
um we are ongoing projects going forward
since we are in our sec coming into our
second year of a two-year
contract with the city is we are going
to continue with our downtown retention
recruitment and recovery projects
our property business inventory of the
tid in the arts and cultural district we
were able to really push forward on this
this past year
it's a living breathing document so it
is consistent walking talking and
calling our businesses within our
districts to make sure that they're
still open to see if the owners are
still the same to see if the contact
people are still the same if there's
anything that they need from us
by way through us directly or if they
actually need something from the cit
something from the city but they don't
know who to go to or how to get to those
and um we're also we also have our one
on one technical assistance
opportunities and that's our us working
with new mexico main street and the
revitalization specialists that we can
bring them down to talk to businesses
specifically we usually have them as our
guest speakers at our quarterly meetings
so that gives them a large place where
they can meet with different business
owners at that time
we have our how can we help diagnostic
tool on our website it is a survey that
if someone has uh has an issue with
something um they can type it in and it
gets directed to susan and myself right
away and we can tell we could find out
at that point maybe they just need our
help and or they need help writing a
grant maybe they need help
with
economic development at state level
maybe they just need to know elizabeth
teter's name it really helps us get
people from just coming straight to the
city in some aspects and just for things
that they don't necessarily need to
come up the process with that they can
come to us and we have those answers
we do a monthly business spotlight video
program i would suggest that you go to
our facebook pages is a facebook page as
well as our website they're wonderful we
really get to highlight it's about a two
to three minute commercial for our
downtown partners um
they really come to life and um it just
makes you so much
at least for me i it makes me so proud
that we get to do this every day and we
get to have these businesses in our
district um we do the annual community
survey which we just showed you the
answers with and then we'll continue to
work with destination downtown to
oversee the expenditures of our state
state of new mexico appropriated funds
and capital outlay projects
what you're going to see new in our
22-23 year is we are adding writer's
workshops to our repertoire
do you want to give them a quick on
there um susan caballo for the record so
for uh when we were doing our
generations community writing project
our writers came to us and said we
really like this project and we really
want to know how we can work together
more and maybe kind of learn how to
cachet this into paying gigs
right so we're like yes creative economy
that's exactly what we want to do so
this year we are hosting a series of
writers workshops and they're going to
be once every other month for about two
hours the first part of the workshop is
going to be how to publish especially
how to publish in the digital age um
people like me who are older who went
through my english training about 10
years or so ago
it was mostly all print media there's so
many other ways you can publish now so
we really want to highlight that and
kind of connect our writers with those
resources
um jennifer
um one other thing other things that
we're having is we we're we're trying to
focus in on our on the people we need to
reach and um so one of the things is
we're going to be surveying our
arts and cultural district and guy
with a tool to see what they want to
learn again going back to similar to
what
jonathan said was talking about is
what do you guys want from us as well
what do you want to learn we might think
we have the know all and end all to be
all on some things and then our
community comes back and says that
wasn't helpful so we're doing a survey
to see what they would like us to focus
on in regards to the creative economy
workshops
and we will be moving forward on our
merchant program as well as our
quarterly meeting
enhancement program and we've listed our
four meetings for this year will be
one on branding and marketing so it's
clarifying your message will be
activating your community updating your
business plan and mapping the future of
your business and the last one will be
safety being a good neighbor and that's
something that we did learn through this
past year is safety is always top of
mind with our merchants but how we work
with each other and how
how we help them help each other as in
that feeds back and helps themselves as
well
we will be
widening widening our range of technical
assistance for new mexico main street
this year
we will be
in introducing what we call
spit ball sessions and again if you have
a better terminal that you were good um
they're ideation sessions where we will
have hours open we're always open you
know from nine to five but if someone
really wants to come in and talk to us
and walk through their business plan
walk through something so we can sit
there and we can really discuss you know
from soup to nuts what's going on
we will be doing a marketing assessment
and void analysis coming up to help us
target our businesses in downtown and
we'll be targeting to see how this helps
outside of southern new mexico
being what types of businesses should we
be bringing into downtown that
reflect our downtown
we also dlcp will collaborate with
sector specialists to sit in on our
meetings to provide business support and
will be expansion as she said there will
also be the expansion of our walking
tour through a new mapping and recording
program
these are so if you see up here in your
right hand corner this is the mural the
mural is on koa's
um
and it is
the the thought behind it i'm actually i
won't let you cause i'll mess it up
about the thought behind um susan
cabello for the record so
koi lowther our art artist came in um
with this concept drawing of water
and we're kind of like i don't get it
right we're in the desert i don't quite
understand and the more she talked about
it the more we really fell in love with
this idea that the downtown is the life
water of a city that coast has been the
life water of downtown for years and
this was her idea of giving a thank you
back
so
everything on here that is in black and
white is stamped
and a lot of it is like individually
stamped so we had stamps where you could
put your name or a quote or something on
there
and then the bigger ones in the tree
were quotes that were really meaningful
to people that they dropped off at coast
so then she she made those into stamps
and that's what the tree is yeah
so we really like it we're really
and then we have our little toad
creek so again these are just quick
things that were up on our
social media as well as our website this
past year and this going into our go
thrive b
we were doing go thrive b
for six months and it was
first month was go second month was
thrive then it was b and then it was the
culmination of the different ones and so
these are three that we just put up
right now so you could have a quick
overview
and um also wanted to tell you sorry i
forgot to say that back
back
this year we were actually able to beat
our match with the city by over ten
thousand dollars and we were able to do
this even though we weren't able to have
our fundraiser this past year because of
the omicron variant so i think that is
really important that we're able to meet
our our match as well surpass it because
of the work that staff as well as
our board does to get us to the next
levels
thank you so much jennifer and susan
appreciate
the presentation uh
and we will go with
concert florida's concert graham i thank
you madam chair and thank you susan and
jennifer
for your presentation and
i just love your enthusiasm and the
excitement
you exude a lot of energy so thank you
for that
i have a mundane question in so far well
i have a couple of questions one is do
you collaborate with the city art board
um the city art board actually does have
a state or actually an i'll let susan
answers acd
so
susan cabello for the record so we have
a sitting council that is the arts and
culture arts and cultural district
coordinating council
we have nine open seats one of those is
city art
so ceci vasconcelos is our
representative
for the city on that council oh i see
thank you and then my other question is
you mentioned jennifer that
the numbers in so far as
the
money that is being generated
you said that it includes the uh
downtown and the mesquite is are both um
are both of those within the tid
district
um yes
no okay that's what i thought
the the acd ends on mesquite street
to water
and so the tid district comes from
alameda to campo so when we overlaid the
arts and cultural district by this is
through the state they went ahead and
overlaid it and are allowing us as a
main street program to call it one
district
oh
so you you don't um
is there a breakdown
for your internal purposes of what is
within the tid in terms of yes and
what's reported to the city yes great
thank you so much thank you for your
enthusiasm and your in your work thank
you thank you councillor flores
concertgram
hi thank you so much for your
presentation uh not a question just more
of an offer if you're ever looking for
support on the writers workshops
i really miss teaching writing and
working with writers which is what i did
a lot more before i was doing this so
let me know hit me up
absolutely
called her yes
yes
thank you both for your work
really looking forward to the coming
year and to the chili drop
we talked specifically about that on our
economic development prc
um this last month and um we're all
raring to go and
and ready to stand you know to to work
with you all
i do want to um
inform you that our suicide prevention
test first is doing recovery night and
we we always add an artist's
compo an art component
competition um
to it but they want to add a poetry
um component and so love to kind of
pick your brain and if we could
collaborate maybe this could be sort of
a
initial phase into your next writer's
lit workshop
of course that's in september
for recovery night we do a big
recovery night celebration we've had it
at the university last year but it is
going to come back to new mexico to to
the plaza and so anything that you could
do to help us um spearhead that that
would be excellent
um counselor again um
excuse me sorry i don't even know my own
name at this point susan caveo for the
record um
i would love to help work with that and
we are always working to expand our
writing program
kind of our writing program
stemmed out of covid we had to think of
something that we could do that was arts
based where people work collaboratively
but didn't necessarily have to be in the
same room or touch the same object
so
my background is literature so i kind of
delved into that and facilitated that
but we what we learned is that there is
a large writing community in las cruces
that that writing community is somewhat
underrepresented
that most of our arts focus on visual
art
and that we there's a lot of
opportunities to partner not just with
us but with other organizations here so
okay we'll be reaching out to you susan
again any other questions does it look
like there are any thank you so much
both of you um jennifer koslowski for
the record mayor protam gundara um and
council i i wanted also say that we're
grateful for this year because we've
actually worked more collaboratively
with our other economic development
groups and i know everyone got to leave
and they missed the reign but we have
this year has been a really banner year
and i think pulling elizabeth in was
something that actually helped push that
forward and i know we've met with mr
peeley a couple of times and so i do
want to say that i think that as
economic development groups that we're
all starting to work together a lot more
in pushing economic development for
las cruces further together yeah we
really appreciate that that creative
economy is something right that is
i think is really taking off and
flourishing so appreciate the work thank
you very much
elizabeth anything else
okay
that's it no okay well this concludes
our work session thank you so much for
um being here and for your um
your support today um i look forward to
seeing you next next week
motion to adjourn
second gramp i know we need the hold yes
please i need a motion to adjourn
chancellor beta
second by counselor flores christine
please take the role
this is on the motion to adjourn the
work session counselor beta yes
councilor graham yes
councilor ben como
is absent
cancer cram yes
cancer flores
yes mayor pro tem yes and mayor is
absent
thank you christine
okay
can't hear you
let me see
agenda setting ready
okay
this is the agenda setting for august 15
item one non-consent
item two consent
one consent two
i'm sorry my mic wasn't working
sorry i can't hear you one was
non-consent and then two consent consent
thank you three non-consent three
non-consent for consent for consent
five non-consent five non-consent
um
six non-consent six non-consent seven
non-consent
seven non-consent eight non-consent
eight non-consent nine non-consent nine
non-consent ten non-consent ten
non-consent eleven non-consent eleven
non-consent thank you christine thank
you