[Music]
okay good afternoon everybody welcome to
the work session of las cruces city
council today is monday july 27th 2020
approximately 1 pm
if you please join me in the pledge of
allegiance please
i pledge allegiance to the flag of the
united states of america and to the
republic for which it stands
one nation under god indivisible with
liberty and justice for all
okay now we're going to have jennifer
martinez from our communications office
introduce our pet of the week
that's right thank you mayor i'm
jennifer martinez with the city's
communications office
and today i would like to introduce you
to kelvin let me just make sure you can
see our screen here
all right well kelvin could be your next
summer buddy calvin is the canine
equivalent to a teddy bear calm and
gentle and loving and he is great on a
leash you can add this handsome fellow
to your family today
if you would like to meet calvin you can
go to the animal service center of the
messiah valley the hours of operation
are monday through friday noon to 6 p.m
and on saturday and sunday noon to 5 p.m
though you will need to make an
appointment and you can call the number
on the bottom of the screen here 382018
to do so and off-site adoption events
will be canceled until further notice
right now there are limitations at the
animal service center the adoption will
be 25
you will need to go to ascmd.org
adoptions to go ahead and look at some
of those animals that they do have
available animal control right now is
only bringing emergency cases to the
shelter and that is again because they
do have limited staff
if you're looking to maybe look out for
a pet and you can't really take one in
permanently we ask that maybe you
consider fostering a pet animal service
center is always looking for volunteers
and foster families foster homes provide
a safe environment for for the pets
while they await their forever family
and the ascmd will provide everything
you need to care for that foster pet all
you have to do is supply love and
attention you can get applications by
visiting ascmb.org
now uh the communications office would
like also to take this opportunity to
talk to you about covet 19 and bringing
you um some updates and we're happy to
communicate the messages from the
council so at last friday's meeting you
were all discussing and getting an
update from the department of health on
testing uh dona ana could potentially
reach 2 000 positive tests as early as
today when the numbers are released so
if you are concerned we ask that you do
go get tested you can go to our covet
covid19 webpage that's covid19 las
cruces dot com and this is the screen
that you'll see when you get there so if
you notice that section in blue on the
left i'm going to highlight
where to get tested you just click that
it's going to take you to the new mexico
department of health's website where
you'll see a few of the areas that are
open for testing so some private
companies and then also the new mexico
department of health
you will not be asked for an id you will
not be asked for your immigration status
you could um potentially if if you go
through the new mexico department of
health that is you will be asked if you
have insurance information they may bill
your insurance but you will not be asked
to pay anything upfront thank you mayor
okay thank you jennifer
okay so we've got three items on the
agenda
first one being new mexico family
services
and i had this put on the agenda because
i had a chance to meet with uh lure this
and um laura garcia about i don't know
about a month ago a month and a half ago
and she was going over all the different
programs that
they do
and i thought my goodness that's one
that's an incredible amount
and two
i figure well they must be new because i
never heard of them but apparently
they're not new they've been around for
quite a while and so i just wanted to
introduce her to
to the city
and have her share with us all the
things that they do
and frankly i think there might be an
opportunity to
look at some other partnerships in the
future
so with that i'm going to turn it over
to lure this
torres who i believe is the director
so lure this i just
need you to when you begin just state
your name and just go from there
oh you're muted so you have to take it
yeah you need to there you go
so sorry this is my very first time ever
doing this so
as you know i'm
fairly new um well uh but i appreciate
uh this opportunity in uh introducing
the company of new mexico family
services to the city of las cruces
and uh
you know um
i'm very proud of the whole team and and
everything in the accomplishments that
we have uh put together in all these
years
and we've been doing this for uh going
on eight years to nine years
um you know there's a lot of people
there's a lot of companies that don't
know about us
and uh you know the reason for that i i
believe
is we don't advertise everything that we
do is word of mouth and um uh you know
we're not in social media we're not in
in facebook or any of that stuff i i you
know i'm very
uh
i don't even have those accounts myself
and and
i i try to shy away from you know all of
all of that stuff and i would rather
just prove ourselves to the community
and to everybody who comes in
for information and and just services
so i would i would um i appreciate you
giving me this opportunity and
introducing ourselves
um
do you um do you want me to
uh start
can you give me a uh
what is your process
uh well why don't you um
share with us
you know what you guys do and and
what are some of the services that you
provide and and things of this nature
okay so first of all um we had sent out
a um
a powerpoint presentation
and um if uh what i'm gonna do i'm gonna
go through one and i'm gonna go pretty
uh does everybody have that if not i can
email it real quick
well um
it's okay
all right so
uh so i'm
i'm gonna go ahead and go over uh the
powerpoint presentation that um that we
have um
i have your powerpoint uh presentation
that you emailed if you are okay with it
i can share it on everybody's screen and
then you'll be able to see it as well as
comments and you can walk through it
that way oh that'd be great
yes
very good so uh you can go ahead and
continue talking for now and then i'll
work on calling it up
thank you
thank you thank you so i'm gonna work on
uh
this screen number two and who we are
um we are basically well not basically
because i mean we have a lot of services
so we are a wraparound service company
and what that is it's an integrative
approach that we do
uh utilizing um you know an
interdisciplinary team
which is consisting of
your medical your psychiatric your
psychologist we do psychological testing
we do utilize the care coordination
team
therapy services
and placement services for both children
and adults
so we're a full integrated wraparound
care team that work
on-site
hand-in-hand depending on the the
client's needs
um
and uh you know
what
what we are
looking for is
you know where we're striving for
uh the safety environment of our clients
uh we're targeting skills and treatment
for them to live a uh you know safe
a safe healthy and stable lifestyle
uh so right now the screen is up and you
know that's uh
one two word number well yeah we could
do that one and so the on-site services
is what we currently do
uh i would like to stress this and
we are the only facility in all of
daniana county that have
the family
peer support care coordination
certification
so um it took us quite a bit to obtain
this certification it took us about
like
probably two years to obtain
and um
you know uh
a lot of agencies uh promote peer
support and uh and and and individuals
that are certified for peer support
um
we utilize peer support but we emphasize
uh and we
follow care plans that are implemented
by your family medical practitioners
your psychiatric practitioners uh your
behavioral health therapist
and we follow uh a you know
comprehensive plans that are are
implemented by them
and uh depend we do an individualized
plan so our plans are not
the same for every patient
i mean it's it's they're all different
uh so as you can see on here the life
skills acute care crisis intervention
chronic care nutritionist and dietitian
it's all a wraparound approach that we
do and all of these services are on site
we don't subcontract to anybody
we don't uh refer out to anybody
and the
reason for that is uh for all these
years that we started we first started
with uh medical services and then we
added psychiatric and then we added
therapists and we added the care
coordination team
uh and then once we added the care
coordination team that's where your life
skills acute crisis chronic nutrition
and dietitian services came on board
uh what that is and i i will give you an
example of uh what happens when a
patient comes into the door
um
and uh
they can they they can come in
with uh
okay well we'll do
who is new mexico family services so
we
have been working and open since 2013
uh you know the population that we take
is from zero to seniors
we
if they don't have medicaid if they
don't have medicare we will find a
solution and try to get them alternative
uh services or coverage in order for
them to be
covered we have done
so many services for free uh uh i don't
know i can probably say
maybe a hundred thousand dollars worth
of services for free annually
uh so we'll go on to the next one
uh our our purpose is what i just uh
mentioned is uh for us to create a safe
environment and
you know for them to obtain the
necessary skills
the treatment so they can uh move into a
a
healthy environment and what happens in
in a lot of cases is one patient comes
in
and they might just
you know be going through
anxiety they can't sleep there they just
had an argument with their spouse their
children saw them fighting they're
losing their house and they're going
through a divorce
well
they come in to see the doctor for not
sleeping and anxiety well we get the
referral from our
medical
providers
and our psychiatric provider that
implement the medication
but what happens in all of those cases
is that there's gaps that are not being
filled
and a lot of those gaps
uh you can just
you know cover up that hole by just
giving them medication medication
medication but their problem is still
going to be there why um they still are
losing their home they're going through
divorces their children are seeing the
battle because the stress level is high
so our placement and care coordination
team
help these individuals find jobs housing
uh we use alternative measures uh
a variety of alternative measures and
we'll see that in in
the next slides
uh can we go to uh well so yeah so our
goal
is
you know our goals are
targeting the acute and
chronic illnesses
um those are long-term uh
illnesses that a lot of individuals
cannot find a solution the the proper
medication
they cannot
be able to control their diabetes their
high blood pressure their cholesterol
levels
they're either they're going from
psychotic
depression and they start escalating so
part of our holistic and wraparound
approach
uh integrates a lot of
supplements
food nutrition
that
help
enhance and and
help that home member um
uh you know get us uh
you know stabilize their their health by
uh better choices in life of
what departments that we have to offer
so uh you know the reason why we put
this
it's pretty incredible um you know
a lot of companies uh probably
subcontract a lot of services and or uh
refer out and we do too we refer out we
we uh and i will explain to you where we
how we utilize the referral sources from
outside in the community
um you know so we are billable and
certified for all of these services that
we currently see him in this screen
um
you know the main one
is the peer and the care coordination
your
that one is a certification that
as a peer agency meaning it's a one to
one
18 older
we are certified for the state
of new mexico daniana county and there's
only four agencies
um three
with us
uh in the whole dona ana county and um
in the
for
for uh
family meaning we're able to treat not
just the individual but we're also able
to to treat the whole family so
and and that's in every case a family
member comes in and um you know
they're going through all of this uh
losing their house going through a
divorce well we can't say well you know
what i'm only going to treat him and can
not treat the kids or cannot treat the
wife because we don't have the family
certification so
this is very important uh in in our
situation because we're we're both where
we have both certifications
our nutritionists that we have here on
our team
uh they they target our food nutrition
uh referrals from the medical providers
so um the the nutritionists the
registered nurse and dietitian go hand
in hand with our food distribution that
i will be talking a little bit in a
different screen
um so
this kind of looks kind of uh
you know full but
i
i thought it was very important
excuse me for interrupting let me tell
you what um
what if i may and and we could focus on
a couple things that when when we met
you were telling me what you all did one
of the things that really struck me was
that you do um
food distribution to homebound
residents that's right
and that's something there that the city
does
and so
and i think you were wanting to do
something with
or expand your kitchen or something to
that effect i'm not too sure the second
thing that that really struck me was
that you all have cooking classes
to teach
our residents
especially those that may be diabetic
on ways to cook food that
to help them with their with with
diabetes
those are those i mean
the things that you offer are great but
those struck me because
those are something there that
you know if we could
we could somehow focus on a little bit
because a lot of times in the general um
i know that when when i was a kid and i
would visit my grandparents and um
you know they're always i can i can see
it right now i can see that i mean my
grandmother had one of those
wood-burning stones but i but there was
always corn beans potatoes and some kind
of meat
always every day
yeah well not that but those were there
and then the other stuff she'd make you
know and of course tortillas right yeah
and and little did i realize that of
course as you get older and you eat more
and you don't if you live a sedentary
lifestyle that can turn into
sugar and that's where
right you know diabetes comes absolutely
so
that that's what really struck me was
those cooking classes that you guys had
so you know i know you guys provide a
lot of services
but um so if you could
talk a little bit about that and then
where are you located and who do you
serve not just
do you just serve county residents you
serve city residents
you serve both things like that
yeah
okay
so um and the reason why
i
um and giving a little bit of summary of
the services and how our wraparound
approach works
is because um
we just don't do the food distribution
for homebound we actually go based on an
evaluation that is provided by a medical
team we do lab work based on what
results they have for their lab work
we
have implemented the
food distribution and what that consists
of in that one department
is this
we get
the evaluation from your medical
provider
we do lab work
and we target the the doctor will say i
would like for you to target their
diabetes their hypertension or he will
give me the chronic illnesses of what we
need to target first so we can get that
one uh individual in in in a in a plan
that works based on that
chronic illness so
um so let me give you an example say if
their uh
their bmi levels are high and they have
diabetes well uh we they go through the
lab work
we
have them go through
the dietitian the nutritionist
and we implement a food plan from the
chef that is on site with us
and we
depending on that individual whether
they have transportation needs or not if
they do they come into our facility and
we do a a
group cooking class
um and i wish i can i can send you
pictures of of
what we're planning on on
looking for as far as a facility a huge
facility in las cruces to
to service this type of population for a
full reef
rehab facility but um
you know the the
we implement the cooking classes we send
a care coordination team to their house
to take pictures of their pantry get a
list of products and food that they uh
eat get a list of
maybe a a a menu list of what they eat
we have classes three times a week
depending on what what their
availability is
and we actually cook the food we go
shopping with them we do alternative um
uh food substitutions and it all goes
based on their laboratory work based
from the
medical evaluation that we get from the
from the doctor
um so
you know as far as uh you know the food
distribution we can serve and we're
certified to serve meals from
infants up to seniors
we can either serve them as a bulk on
site or do the homebound our home bound
is a little bit different than what
everybody else is doing
homebound that is provided by the county
is for individuals who yes have chronic
illnesses and they cannot get out of the
home
our our license and our certification
for
food distribution
we're able to to serve to anyone
and send it to the home regardless
whether they're homebound or not
we do limit ourselves as far as if they
have transportation
uh then we have them
uh dr do a drop by to the center
so we can distribute that that food
my request was uh to see if maybe
we can get funds to uh to uh build a
kitchen
and also if there was a facility
available
in las cruces that we can utilize so we
can you know implement some of these
services for food distribution in in las
cruces
um uh please keep in mind that
we uh you know even right now going
through this covet and we don't know
whether they're gonna stop the stimulus
money or stop the the the unemployment
coming in
we
can literally
service a lot of patients and we have no
mac no minimum no maximum to to be able
to serve
but we do target their chronic illnesses
and target their food insecurities
but not just by the medical
not just by their food we also implement
um
supplement services that are
super awesome i mean and the reason why
i say
um
you know the supplements
is let me give you an example myself
last year i thought i have severe adhd
you guys can't tell
but um you know i have uh
it was my adhd going out of whack and i
had to just i was just like i told the
doctor you know i don't know something's
wrong i'm going home and i thought i
need a couple days to
to just you know stay home well uh the
doctor ended up
the doctors here are my my doctors and
uh they ended up pulling out lab work
for me
while under that lab work um
i
my thyroid was out the roof
and i was like oh my god a thyroid
problem i can't believe it so
you know i ended up going to a
specialist they put me on medication and
i i was okay for a few months maybe
three months but i started feeling weird
and and all of this and i took myself
off of the medication
and um
and i said i'm not feeling well well the
doctor said why don't we start uh
looking and putting you into our our
nutrition supplements
so
i said okay you know i'm the guinea pig
i'm gonna
you know i i'm gonna do it
so and this is how we initiated the
nutrition uh
the nutrition department added on to our
our our food
and we started the nutrition
i started the supplements
and i was vitamin d deficient my
thyroid was 17.2
my my tsh
my t4 my t3 were
out the roof
and in three weeks
they came down very minimal i my vitamin
d deficiency was green which is normal
it was normal in three weeks
where this is not normal because you
could be taking 50 to 50 000 btus of
vitamin d in in months and you still
don't go in the green i don't know if
anybody has has done that
but uh right now i've been in the
supplement product
since december
and you should see my lab results i am
okay on sharing everything with you i'm
an open book everything my thyroid is
green it's all
normal without medication
so
we
we don't encourage everybody to get off
of the medication but i i chose to do
that myself because i know the symptoms
i can see and and everything but it goes
hand in hand with the food and the
supplements because there's some
supplements that we alternate for food
so if if your diabetes if it's out of
control the doctor will say you know
what
we're gonna substitute this breakfast
item for this supplement meal and this
supplement has the nutrients that it
needs
for this uh breakfast lunch or even
dinner so if um the the product if even
if you're looking at losing weight
omg
this product i mean it
it is remarkable
there's not one patient that we have not
one patient that we have not been
successful
in changing
or
uh
increasing or bettering their their
laboratory
on on the food and the nutrition
so
laura this can i ask you something
earlier you well first off where do you
all
cook currently right now where do you
make your foods at
home so we are
we are utilizing the senior center at uh
city of salem park
but it's too far for us to take food to
las cruces
and uh you know we have a lot of
patients
in las cruces that want us to start
serving and and and we do um we have a
food drive as well we do a food pantry
here once a month uh we give out free
food to
to some of our patients and
you know
you know we can't drive all the way over
there so we're also looking for
alternatives for transportation or
uh
delivery equipment that we can sustain
the temperatures for that food that
we're going to be delivering
also you mentioned about the county has
um
food distribution almost like meals on
wheels sort of
yes
so meals on wheels is is a little bit
different so
i i can guarantee you nobody has our
program um you know i just wanted to
have meal
i just want to know where the county
cooks yeah
you know i think they have um
they have a few
like
uh centers that they utilize for them i
think it's only one center if i'm not
mistaken but
uh the reason why i took over and they
allowed me to utilize the senior center
here in sunland park
is because
when i proposed this this program
the county was doing homebound meals and
i did a research here for southern park
and
you're going to be in shock but i
i literally told the the selling park
officials and i said did you know
that there is about 1255
homebound patients
and you they are only serving one
meal a day
and i couldn't believe it so i i
and they're not pushing it and you know
it a lot of if you do the research
home these meals on wheels they don't
push the transportation they do not push
the transportation
they're more for
uh having the meals done there and
served there
okay you know what uh let me break for
just a second that looks like counselor
ben cuomo has a question she may want to
ask you yes
thank you mayor um i cannot cure i can't
wait till the end
i just thought maybe we were at the
question oh no we're okay
i think i think i think this pretty much
you know
she already did her ask
okay thank you lord
uh counselor by como it's really nice to
meet you i just have to say i really
like you um you're amazing
um
i'm genuinely saddened to
um
tell you that i didn't know about new
mexico family services before this and
that's okay
and so i'm really really glad you're
here um i have a ton of questions for
you but actually i'm i'm gonna start
with this first because
i know the mayor wanted to focus on this
specific on your specific ask which is
great and this this
subject related to food and the kitchen
however as you were talking at the
beginning of your presentation
um
i couldn't help but think about
voices like yours often missing at the
table when we discuss public safety
and um as a community i mean as a
country but as a community we are really
um
diving into that conversation about
public safety what it looks like what it
should look like
um and i think
someone like new mexico family services
is critical as part of that conversation
the services the wraparound services
that you provide
are incredibly important
when we see a rise in crime whether it's
violent crime or property crime
um you know we're probably also seeing a
rise in poverty and lack of good jobs
and lack of good pay and
addiction and a bunch of these things
that you were just
hitting on what you provide and so yes
for me i'm excited to be in relationship
with you as a counselor and as a counsel
um i i just you know as you were talking
i remembered about for some reason i
kept thinking about
a few weeks ago there was a story in the
news of two young it was like maybe
actually it was like three or four young
kids like 16 year olds
who were involved in a
shooting at one of the local apartments
in town and they were like 16 and it was
over
drugs and i just kept thinking
where did we as a community fail those
kids
and
um i guess
you know and as we have a conversation
about public safety we have to ask
ourselves those questions and we have to
ask ourselves what's missing in our
community and so i'm really glad to see
you filling a lot of those gaps i would
love to know and understand
and figure out how
um
your services and what you do and you
yourself can be part of those
conversations with us moving forward
um they're incredibly important so i'll
just say that um because it just kept
popping up in my mind as you were
talking
i'm really curious though lord this how
big is your staff um how big is your
reach like how many clients do you have
at any particular time
so
uh
you know we grew
from
one staff and we've had about 300 staff
right now we have about a hundred and
fifty staff
and we have multiple departments uh
you know an array of talent that we have
and um you know we have
we we service from
[Music]
all the way to alamogordo patients so
um and we're certified uh for all the
state of new mexico so we could do
telemedicine we have so many
capabilities that a lot of agencies
don't have and and you know we consider
ourselves a little agency but you know a
lot of people say oh my god you have 150
employees you know and but i don't know
you know it just feels kind of small
still
but you know it's okay because you don't
we've grown from you know 20 years of
of being in business
and it's grown to multiple
uh
you know departments
wow that's incredible to hear do you
work with um the drug court that
currently exists here in the county
uh let me give an example um
we
have a lot of referrals from cyfd
um the way we work is a little bit
different than um you know than than
agencies we don't have a contract from
any
county any no nobody i mean we we just
it's just walk in business who we see
right now and referrals from other
agencies or anything like that
um and we've done a lot of our hard work
ourselves instead of you know but
you know i said oh my
god we need some help you know because
we need the connections from you know
the city of las cruces we need to
be able to service a lot more clients
that need this especially during this
this time of covet and and you know you
are absolutely correct
a hundred percent um you know
we we um
we actually met with the drug court last
last month
but you are a hundred percent
what we have seen
is
when the
the uh
you know the theft and the drugs and all
of this
uh when they increase
your your body
deteriorates and so
if there are
if there's one patient and they have
you know say diabetes and they're losing
their job and they don't have the
resources they go from agency to agency
to agency and guess what they fall
through the cracks and
i mean
they get
frustrated why
it takes a month for this appointment
three more weeks for this appointment oh
you know what we don't have any services
right now or we have to put you on the
waiting list
oh us
you give me one client and i assign them
to somebody
and
we we start targeting immediately
how to
resolve their housing or their job
because with those two
you know you can you can sustain
yourself at least and uh and then you
know and then we start working towards
hand-in-hand with your medical
and uh you know we have programs that
are unbelievable and i am we're we're
very very blessed i mean
deosito takes care of us so much and
it's unbelievable but we have um
programs that were able to put
individuals children teenagers from age
16 to 25
get them into an internship program that
is paid by the state
there's another one where they're 25 and
older
and they have families we're immediately
able to place them
uh for uh you know for work experience
where they get paid
there's also two other programs that
we are able to get individuals certified
to get
or
you know to get them uh
working i mean and
we have the capacity and with you know
the team effort that we can get with you
guys and and partner up
um we can employ so many people and and
that will help alleviate the housing the
crime out there the drugs out there
you know
even even with the food
doing the distribution and doing the the
any type of food or nutrition that we
have
oh my god
it's creating jobs uh right now we are
literally probably going to be hiring 50
to 75 more people
um so
and and um you know
it it makes me feel i i mean it's it's
it's amazing amazing
um so and that's uh you know what
why we do what we do and and
you know it's uh helping so many
individuals that need help especially
right now with what's going on
well thank you so much
that was that was powerful i am i'm
really glad you're here and i'm excited
like i said to continue building a
relationship with you thank you thank
you mayor thank you councillor uh mayor
putin
hi lourdes good afternoon gracias thank
you for being here with us um i've met
you a while back and i've heard you um
at different commission meetings and
such and so
refresh my memory your agency is located
down south yes
yes
uh where we have an office in sunland
park and an office in las cruces
and uh alamogor sorry
we're in las cruces
uh
2801 east missouri suite 22.
okay great um
yeah um i appreciate council councilor
ben gomez um comments and questions they
were those were a few of mine um wanted
to
ask
a few more
um lord this um what insurances do you
take
um that's important to me and then you
made mention you do you do do a lot of
free service i it sounds like and where
are you getting that funding mechanism
to pay for that
oh good question um
so um
we are we're uh we're able to take all
the insurances right now thank god
uh that
i am also certified for ped with what
that means is i'm able to give medicaid
on the spot so i'm able to get somebody
cert
get them
yes
so
and you know the weirdest thing is
um a few years ago
you know i i kept on getting so many
referrals from department of human
services is go over there go over there
they they might help you for medicaid or
go over there they might help you for
medicare
and
i would i would be like oh i don't do
that and one time i i i said you know
give me a phone number of where i can
get this done
and so it was a friday and i remember um
they connected me with the state and
they said well the lady that's
doing the training and in charge of that
department she goes well
you know i've been meeting with this a
group of individuals and we're about to
have the exam on monday and we've been
doing this for a year and i said oh my
god i said is there any way that i can
participate and and she goes well you
would have to pass a test
and i said okay i'll pass a text
i said i'll study and crank it over the
whole weekend and she she emailed it to
me and i was like i came in on monday
and i said oh my gosh you didn't email
it to me so i couldn't get a hold of her
right well monday comes we did the work
session throughout the whole day and
tuesday was our test
and we had to get a 96 in order to pass
and get certified
well
uh
i missed it by three points and i was
like ah
and she says it's okay you have
you have eight hours
to take another test
and i said okay i'm studying
well i got a 96 so yeah
thank you
men
being um eligible you know having that
credentialing to be able to do on-site
medicaid applications i think is
extremely important so
so the other stuff where do you get your
funding to do the free
service
just from our referrals from our doctors
our doctors
pay a lot of money
oh yeah
okay
yeah and and we try to uh do some
outreach and see what agencies because
there are some agencies that provide
indigent funding um right i i haven't
had a chance to get certified for that
but i i'm pretty sure i could
um on top of that we also do medicare
applications here and we also do
disability benefits on science so uh
okay i actually
i got tired of the attorneys asking us
and asking us for documentation and
and we would put the whole packet
together and i said you know they're not
getting approved because they're not
doing their job so i actually apply for
disability benefits and for me to be the
advocate for the
uh the clients
and so we we submit those applications
for them
uh very good that's really important to
know as well um
louis you mentioned peers being
certified for peer supports how many do
you employ
oh i think we have about a
total care coordination team about maybe
32 or so and we're in the process of
getting about 30 more
that's your where they're in the process
of training
yeah so care coordinators are a variety
of team
and it consists of family peer or uh um
peer support
or comprehensive uh support services
yes okay
that's good to know very good um also
i'm really interested in mayor i'm glad
that that you initiated having lure this
on because it reminds me that
um some of the things in fact while
we've been on i got a call
um from a woman that
has
some concerns about
our homebound our seniors our disabled
um
folks that don't quite meet the criteria
for meals on wheels probably because of
their income and or
um their their shut-ins really right so
that it really resonated with me when
you indicated you know that really large
number down south like 15 to 1700 folks
that are shut-ins basically in their
homes that are just getting one meal a
day what happens to the rest of that and
so i've always been deeply concerned
about our seniors everybody but our
seniors especially
um and especially during this time so i
know that there's a group that's
assisting our senior
um services
and and i and um the lady was really
concerned with the number of things that
she's seen
which is obviously food insecurity but
also very um
basic
how um
um
things like
cleaning cleaning their home basic
living types of right of of
of um
your basic living skills that they
aren't able to do but don't meet
the criteria that apparently we've set
forth for them so
and then transportation is is a big big
issue for our folks
who land themselves in hospital and el
paso and then have to be transported
upon discharge back home and so i could
see a very nice partnership
with you as it relates to those things i
think there is a huge need
for your food and food prep food
delivery the nutrition services
um
i i'm just really anxious to especially
when it when it looks
when you know a lot of our latinos a lot
of our seniors or people are are really
suffering from diabetes and heart
um
heart conditions those things and a lot
as you've made mention could be
nutrition right not having the proper
supplements and those things so i can i
can see a very nice um partnership with
what
you do and what paul ford from our
integrated health
services
program
is doing um
[Music]
and
and i i i'd like to see
[Music]
us work on some sort of of
um
funding there if we could
as it relates to
working with maybe allowing um
some of our kitchen i know i don't know
that our stage kitchen is used to the
fullest
um as i thought that had been something
that i know we were all concerned
um about about
but i can definitely see some a nice um
partnership with
with this agency you're talking about
sage cafe mayor predom i am mayor i
understood that we're not it's not being
utilized i think to the fullest
would love for it to be but i also am
thinking
um counselor vasquez and i have been
working with econ economic development
and la semina
maybe
um working on a food
plan related to
sort of the work that la samia was
trying to do getting um
[Music]
this kind of like a kitchen incubator of
sorts
um and so it reminds me again of the
importance of having something like that
and maybe we can do that in partnership
with new mexico family services and la
samia
[Music]
i'm not sure if you're familiar with la
simian they're from down south
um christian aguila aguilera aguilar is
the
is the direct one of the directors and
so i definitely would if you're not
familiar would encourage you to reach
out to christian
um
to form a partnership
so um
uh can i
yeah can i um
at
respond
to church
state your name one more time please i
mean for the record i mean it's just the
way you know who you are it's just the
the person doing the the minutes
they don't watch the video
this is lourdes torres and i'm with the
new mexico family services
okay and you were going to say something
yes so um
in uh
you know responding to um
mrs gandra's um
points i mean she makes
it's like as she was here at the office
for quite some time and and
you know
looking at what we're doing
and um you know you have
you know you have very good points as
far as homebound patients and that is
exactly
why there's a huge problem with meals on
wheels
um you know you're only able to service
based on their income guidelines and
based on their age
um with the
certification that i have
um
it
is pretty awesome because we're even
able to subcontract out to other
agencies to provide these services
for us
so what happens it what where it
in preparation right now of doing
is that we're
once we get
one operation from las cruces let me
give you an example like the stage cafe
well that's once we get that one
going smooth then if there's other
agencies that would want to come in and
let me i am all for working with anyone
i am all for
um you know developing within their
organization additional programs so we
can partner up and be able to serve more
of the community trust me i don't want
it at all
i we cannot do it all there is no
possible way
and if we can utilize
what we have and leverage off of our
certifications
and partner up with individuals or
agencies counties who whoever we are
going to be doing so good for the
community and let me give you an example
you have a very good point as far as you
know these individuals that are are are
being serviced for 2.5 hours the maximum
of three hours for home health services
and what do they do
well you have the home health regulation
that tells you
you can only wash these three little
dishes that they serve for that one day
you can uh do very minimal house
cleaning very minimal i mean you could
pick up their bed and that's basically
it
uh shower them change them you know all
of that stuff but you know what happens
they get deteriorated with all the dust
all the i mean
if their house looks dirty they're going
to feel
not well
uh their their health is going to
deteriorate their uh
these uh
people that that go take care of these
uh individuals i mean they're very
limited on resources why i mean you can
only do nursing skills oh ootpt and
that's very minimal and that's if your
home health agency has that capability
well
we're not here to take the home health
business away
zero absolutely not
as a matter of fact we are here to
enhance their program
and have that one individual have
additional hours
of service from us
so we will utilize their two point their
three hours and we can add an additional
four hours
for for that one day so
if there and and you know it depends on
whether they're chronic or what it
depends on these four hours but we can
we can do the four hours not a problem
um and we don't just sit and
and say okay well we're just gonna watch
tv no
we have a care plan that is implemented
and we're working on their appointments
we're working on you know what doctors
have you missed where
where are they at as far as medically
and health-wise and that's what our care
coordination work on
um
you know as far as um
you know
going out there and being able to
service more more patients or more more
clients
um we are
absolutely all for if if somebody says
why i i just want a meal and i i don't
i don't know i make three thousand
dollars a month but i want a meal it you
know what it's okay
they're probably
they're they're something is happening
with themselves so we bring them in as a
whole and we just start working with all
their points that they have that they're
working on individually as far as you
know health wise and mental wise or
depending on what they're going through
but we do not
uh say uh you know i'm just gonna give
it to this person uh you you don't
qualify we will find ways for them to
qualify and we will partner up with
other agencies to help
now the the
money
that is lost right now for servicing
clients that don't have medicaid don't
have medicare or or um
you know say
they don't have the resources to buy the
food or their immigrants and stuff like
that
this is where we do the teaming up if we
can do a cost share a match fund or
something
you know we're all for doing that
if i have to lose that money
you know it's okay
thank you so much for for all the extra
information i think it's um really
important
that we find you know ways that i'm
especially grateful to the the your lens
and the way you are
um providing services in a very holistic
using a multi-disciplinary team i think
that is so good
for our community
and times
we
we are all
um
guilty of working in our silos
forgetting that you know we have to look
at the whole person
right not just medical you know not
psychiatric got to do medical you know
just all the various things
i'm super
um excited to um um continue on with
this um
with this relationship um and and just
reminding you i i have formed a
resilient leaders group who works with
adverse childhood experiences and the
idea of reaching 100 community right the
access and of the survival and thriving
services so happy to send you some more
information about that i'd love for you
to be on this team absolutely um
um really important as we move forward
so thank you mayor thank you lord this
uh so have you heard of them before
mayor putin
yes i met lord this a long time ago okay
yes
just curious yeah okay we have counselor
vasquez and counselor flores
thank you
mayor thank you miss torres for being
here with us today i really appreciate
getting to know more about this very
under the radar organization that you
have going on that is helping so many in
our community
very much admire that you are just
focused on digging in on the work and
this holistic model of treatment that
you approach your
organization your business with uh is is
just really tremendous i think i've
always thought about what it would look
like to really put all these elements
into a comprehensive treatment plan
together for somebody uh that helps
really address so many of those
indicators those factors that counselors
when como and mayor pro-tem ganda
talk about and and i think it really
helps to humanize the condition that so
many of our families find themselves in
and their children uh when they are in
unfortunate situations that that are
related to
uh addiction or to crime or to juvenile
uh um
offenses and and you know folks can be
really quick to blame uh parents they
can be quick to blame
uh
you know situations that uh aren't as
easy to to really uh they're not as
black and white as so many people think
um and so
uh just love to to learn
about your your practice i think would
love to just see how you can expand
right or even if we can duplicate models
like this amongst other providers uh
these social services it would just be
tremendous
um and so so i i would love to learn to
learn more in the in the near future
about what you what you guys are
are doing that and how it's working you
know would love to hear testimonials
perhaps even from some of the clients
that you that you work with i think that
i would just love to hear from folks
that have benefited from that multitude
that spectrum of services that you offer
um and and then
lastly i won't belabor the point but
just also want to agree that um any way
that that uh the city can partner to
bring uh an improved food service um to
to to folks who need it in our community
partnering with a great organization is
something that should be a no-brainer
in terms of what we're investing in as a
city uh the stage cafe is a great
opportunity that
you know several of the counselors here
have
myself have have talked about as a uni
underutilized space for uh this type of
service to our community um and if and
if that isn't the appropriate venue then
let's let's find one that is right and
let's not give up there um but but uh i
just wanted to to just commend you for
um
bringing this type of service to our
community uh and to the valley right
because we we truly are one community
from from las cosas all the way down to
sunland park
our families are all interconnected um
and and our you know all the colonias
um in between uh those are all part of
of who we are here in in dona ana county
and so it's really important that we
don't just silo services in las cruces
we always talk about
how difficult it is for folks in the
colonials to come out to las cruces for
even the simplest of things uh and the
barriers that exist there so
um so i just want to say thank you and i
you know i support us finding a creative
solution to help address the need thank
you
thank you thank you oh thank you very
much i appreciate that
thank you councillor councillor flores
thank you mayor and thank you lucas um
that was my sister's name ludwig so it's
very nice to meet you
um thank you for all your work this is
wonderful and thank you mr mayor for
inviting um luther to educate us inform
us about this wonderful organization
and um have you worked with a county at
all
in any capacity or are you
receiving any assistance or okay the
answer is no never no okay so um
so the or you said that you um that you
opened in 2013. is that the holistic uh
facility that you have in sunland park
but and
how long have you been in las cruces
um
in sunland park
it was since 2013
and in las cruces
um
maybe like
uh i've been there for like five years
probably are you you basically are here
in las vegas
las cruces at home uh-huh
okay um but you also said uh and i don't
know if it's your organization um
you mentioned that it's been around for
about 20 years
or you mentioned a date that was and it
didn't go with the 2013 because that's
only seven years so
what has been around so um
yeah so we we started a an actual uh
child care day care center in 2001 which
progressed into a special needs facility
which was pretty awesome and that's how
it transitioned into the medical and and
um here in sunderland park we're um
in the
process of
creating an innovative
center
so our target is to
reach out to child care facilities and
implement these services
as an innovative center instead of a
child care center because
um you know i'm i'm an expert of child
development and you know being being in
that business for 20 years going on 20
20 20 21 years
um
and that's how all of this was created
and and the life skills training that we
do we implemented into the child care
facility so it's it's pretty amazing
i mean
you know
it's it's
it's it's a different approach that we
do
no i think it's absolutely wonderful and
it's really interesting how
in working with children you saw a
bigger need and i think that's what
mayor
protesting with aces
how children are definitely the
heartbeat of what's really going on in
families
so um
the other question was do you work with
strong families at all
i think strong bound
they're
in the southern part
okay
so um
again i i hope i too am very supportive
of
uh doing anything um that we can do to
help seniors and
we have meals on wheels here in las
cruces through our uh parks and away and
uh
and there'll probably be some
coordination there so so um
it's under the auspices of quality of
life department but we really do have to
use that
we really have to use it and we've been
councillor vasquez and i had and then
counselor board before the sort before
that
and tried to get it to a kids camp you
know to have their own
uh not their own
their own
kitchen
so just sitting there and it has to be
utilized so hopefully the mayor and
council we can push our city to do that
and thank you thank you very much
thank you
thank
to
respond a little bit to her question um
to to respond a little bit to uh mrs
flores this question
um we were asked to attend um
uh the county commissioners for some uh
crisis triaged um
uh to respond uh what's going on right
there and and um you know to give our
input as far as you know what our
certifications are and and stuff like
that so we
that's the only um communication that
we've had with the county
as far as um
you know working with other agencies
that are here
um
you know we we
have
actually started a
a department and that department so for
you to be familiar with
is bringing in agencies uh let me give
you an example just like uh strong
families um
integrated
health services program from paul
ford
and we are going to grow this
association and what that association
where we're doing it's going to be a
little bit different than what everybody
else is doing because everybody else
they can mean and meet and meet and meet
and then the
there's nothing there nothing happens
three years later it's still the same
thing and there's no movement well we're
doing a little bit different um
we always do something out of the box
and a lot of people end up hating us
because we do something that is
different than what everybody else is
doing but it's okay uh we're helping a
lot of people and what we're doing with
this association is uh
we're bringing
agencies that have one program multiple
programs or whoever it is because they
all need help
and
you know yosito gave me a talent i don't
know
how what but i'm very blessed and i'm
i'm willing to share
how to help them build how to get them
certified for other funds how to get
them
moving and progress from where they're
at and i am all for growing any other
agency out there even i i mean
if a lot of people say well you're a
competitor no you know what
we are we if we work together we're
going to help these individuals and
we're going to be able to grow
more together than apart from from each
other so um you know we we are all for
working with other agencies and i am uh
the type of person where i'll help them
if they have billing issues
credentialing issues
um you know
if if they're stuck and a lot of people
a lot of agencies are stuck because
they're not familiar
with what is out there and i'm an expert
on you know certifications grant funding
and and you know and how to maintain it
very important so
okay uh thank you counselor sword
thank you mr mayor
um miss taurus i i'm pretty impressed by
what you are trying to do
um i just want a little uh understanding
of a couple of things
um
first of all i can't believe you've been
at this 21 years you don't just don't
look old enough to be working that long
oh thank you
you are my favorite
and then also um some of the suggestions
that you've heard i i'm i think i agree
with them uh they're pretty important um
i uh um i i wonder did i didn't catch
you uh stating how many clients you have
could you repeat that number
and an estimate is good enough
we probably have what about maybe
ten thousand
oh my god yes that's amazing that's
amazing yeah
and then two yes you say it's the new
mexico
um
family services
yes now so that's a statewide
organization then huh
so we are we are a for profit and we
also have a non-profit
that we are
doing the grants and
the partnerships and stuff like that
through that so besides having an office
in sunderland park and one in las cruces
you must have there must be other
offices that other parts of the
organization has around the state
so we have offices in el paso and we
have a satellite office in albuquerque
i see okay out i'm sorry alex and
albuquerque yes yes thank you thank you
that's good well i would just like to
say um the sage cafe if that fits what
you need i would be more than happy to
support that to have you use it
um because it has gone
uh
empty for for many years now and it's
about time we use the
facility that we
the city built and let it go to uh
mothballs so to speak
so if we could
that if you you think you can use it i
would be most favorable
okay absolutely thank you i wish you
luck thank you thank you
thank you okay um we've got
lynn gallagher
like to make a comment and then
counselor beta stevie
good afternoon council members
and members of the public lin gallagher
for the record director for quality of
life for the city of las cruces and i
just want to make a point of
clarification regarding sage cafe love
the presentation um ms taurus great
information and i am familiar with your
services from a lot of other work
sage cafe right now serves meals four
days a week to seniors and operates
for for a large period of the day
starting at 6 30. monday is the only day
that
meals are not served currently at sage
cafe however our current strategic
business plan has us opening four
lunch options at sage on mondays um in
the very near future and we do have a
draft contract in place with community
agency action agency for the kids can
program
um which is active right now and so i
just wanted to make that point of
clarification i applaud the uh council's
uh enthusiasm and but it's not a quick
fix sage cafe is actually currently
being utilized and we have recreation
and meal services provided there four
days a week and um in addition it's in
our current strategic business plan to
offer that service on monday but again
there are a lot of other options that
we're looking at as data comes in on the
use of that space
thank you
mr mayor are actual meals being cooked
there at the sage cafe
prepared
i'm mayor city council councilor sir
glenn gallagher again director for
quality of life meals are are
brought there and it's used as a warming
kitchen so the kitchen itself is
utilized
for service of meals
okay they're not they're not cooked
there on site every day the meal
stored
and um prepared put together and then
warmed in that kitchen
on those days of service yes sir
mr mayor if i can just ask miss
gallagher
so what
exactly
is kidscan doing and it would have been
nice for
councillor vasquez council sword and i
to have been a need to have been a
prizes to developments i'm ecstatic to
hear that there's something going on
there
sure mayor city council again lynn
gallagher quality of life department so
the the contract as you know
you brought it to our attention in and
around uh the
first part of the year
we met independently with the organizers
at kids can and then we're working on
the draft and then had planned
we actually had a schedule planned for
uh councillor vasquez council flores to
work with um
an actual meeting at sage cafe
with um kids can organization and that
actually
um
happened right at the beginning of
the covet 19 pandemic and i think we
were scheduled to meet
march it was right before st patrick's
day i remember so it was right around
the the 14th or 15th sometime in that in
that time frame to meet there physically
to go over
what that would would look like and i
don't want to i don't want to take over
an opportunity that we've already
through council's direction presented to
someone else
thank you thank you ms scalia and thank
you mr mayor
uh thank you we have counselor beta
stewie
uh can i ask a
question to uh miss gallagher
if that's okay sure
go ahead uh
lourdes torres with uh new mexico family
services ms gallagher um how many meals
are being served right now
how many meals are being served in the
city for for the
go through at the stage cafe
um i don't let me see i don't have any
let me see if i can pull that number up
and then where is their centralized
service area where they where is the
centralized kitchen from
so the main cooking location is out of
our munson
senior center area
and that is located on mesquite
right behind the shopping center by the
crunch fitness
okay
and
just trying to see if i can
and what age group do they service
so we are mandated under the older
americans act through aging and
long-term services we serve
seniors 60 and older
however
individuals
and adults who and anyone who wants to
come and eat a meal can eat a meal
at the senior center for a small fee
okay so we serve on average
sorry i apologize lynn gallagher
director for quality of life we serve
approximately 10 000
plus meals a week and i don't have the
exact number for sage cafe delineated in
my
spreadsheet that's at my fingertips at
this moment but i can
get your contact information and get you
some more information
and um
the kids can organization is that is
that uh k-a-n-c-a-n
is is that the spelling correctly
it's through um community action agency
and i think it is kids
can with a c
and it teaches cooking to young adults
as a summer and an after-school program
okay and and the reason why i'm asking
these cert these questions is
um we can actually
uh
in
implement around those services uh
you know because i i'm
for
helping
and and working and trying to see if we
can work together on
adding um
uh i mean from what you're
explaining excuse me
oh my goodness i mean we can be able to
reduce their payroll we can add but you
know without actually knowing what
operation how they do the operation and
and what they do from what time frame
and and what time frame i'm able to
implement
some some uh some services around that
area
or uh you know be able to
to work together on uh you know serving
a population there on site
and laura this that was one of the
things i was going to probably ask is
that this is what i was going to do
was
since we heard from all the council
members is that three things one
we
have staff
work with you to see what
options are available there at sage cafe
to
see what other options are available on
homebound meals
and then the third i know you all it
wasn't even discussed because you may
not even be aware of it but the city in
the in in our cip 2023 we have a a
future
senior kitchen that we're planning on
building on compost trees it's going to
replace a lot of the the kitchen that we
use right now especially on the east
side center where we do a lot of the
meals on wheels
and and now that i heard that the county
does
some
cooking you know we may want to reach
out to them to see if they might want to
you know use our kitchen of course for
you know we have to charge them and and
then possibly yourself as well
and so
so those three things to look at and you
know let staff kind of work with you on
that instead of you know because i
i don't want you to try to negotiate
here but um that's probably what i was
going to suggest that we do
if that's okay with you
yes yes definitely okay um is that is
that okay uh lynn
mayor lynne gallagher yes sir that's
fine okay and counselor beta stewie you
had a comment
yeah i thank you mayor um and thank you
mr as i had just two uh follow-up
questions i thank my colleagues for
asking such
detailed and in-depth ones um
about
how long do you usually end up working
with a client from the time that they go
um start with you all to the time you're
able to see them through what do those
averages look like and i know it'll be
different for each situation
so we have clients
that we have found a job in three hours
uh two clients that were working on
divorce courses
uh stopping foreclosures
uh disability benefits for
oh my goodness
three years the five i mean there's no
uh the certification that we have
um
the doctors
is the one that continues the
it
the doctor's referral and the
recommendations based on the the
evaluation is the one that continues the
follow-up uh treatment plan that is
provided by the care coordination team
thank you
and when working with a client obviously
if it's like a family situation that's
going on and we know that we have a lot
of multi-generational families living
together um do you help kind of
everybody in the family and then bill
per person do you take the one initial
client and then work around it
what does that process look like
so it depends on what the situation is
um uh we separate the groups depending
on whether it's a
adolescent or a child
so we separate that by their own peer
coordination team
and then the adults and then um it
depends on the therapist whoever's
working on that family
unit
and the therapist is the one that
leads the care coordination or the
treatment plan for the care coordination
team
thank you
thank you meredith for all my questions
okay thank you counselor
well um laura this if that's okay with
you those three things that i mentioned
i think staff is is aware of those and
then we'll see what we can do
to uh continue uh or work on some type
of a partnership because as i mentioned
to you when i first met you the services
that you you offer are incredible
and i appreciate all that you do for in
the community and kind of taking some of
the words that counselor vasquez said
the
incredible operation flying under the
radar so um yeah that's what you saw my
expression to you i mean i've been
around for a while i never heard i may
have seen the name you know just passing
but had no idea what you did so
congratulations thank you okay thank you
all right well then that uh that
concludes the first part and now we're
gonna go to our second uh part of our
second item in our in our work session
you're welcome to watch or you know
you're done for the day
thank you okay thank you again thank you
uh so the second part is the workforce
talent collaborative updates
not sure who's gonna be doing that but
uh
it's gonna
it's gonna be me dr martinez okay
thank you council uh mayor and council
members my name is griselda martinez for
the record and it is my honor to
be here with you to talk about the
workforce telling collaborative just a
little bit of background information the
work for selling collaborative is led by
the bridge of southern new mexico
they're the conveners
of this meeting we meet regularly to
discuss and work together on current and
future strategies and initiatives to
connect our people to the best
employment opportunities
and our next speaker will be tracy bryan
she'll provide further information on
this and i want to let you know that we
have five different organizations
represented here for this discussion
and the first one would be tracy bryan
the ceo and founder of the bridge of
southern new mexico we have dr monica
torres our president for the acc
we have don homer
director of community action agency
darlene lopez our one-stop operator for
workforce solutions
and david childress and nidia nash both
of them with the human resources
department here in the city
so with that i'll pass it on to tracy
and then i'll see you in a little bit
okay thank you
good afternoon mr mayor and council
thank you guys for uh having us uh
present with you today
uh workforce development kind of an
important subject right now and i want
to give you an update not just on what's
happened because of hovid but the work
that was already underway and i'm very
grateful to you
because i think it's important you all
are leaders uh you know in your
communities that you serve and
we continue to struggle from one big
thing and that's an awareness gap uh you
know you just had a whole presentation
about some wonderful services that
people don't seem to know about and i
really am convinced that uh you know the
awareness app is a big part for us so by
helping you know what's going on helping
you know what's available we want to
equip you as leaders in your communities
to be able to connect people to
resources so um with permission i'm
going to share my screen
uh to kind of to navigate us through
the presentation that we have for you
this afternoon um
so this is a powerpoint here we go so
the british southern new mexico i'm very
grateful most of you already know what
it is and i know we have two new
counselors i've not had a chance to meet
with i think uh councillor glencomo we
were supposed to meet and covet happened
um so the bridge of southern new mexico
has been around uh since 2009 actually
and it was basically the response to a
crisis in our community where half of
our students were not finishing high
school
and the business community was looking
at this from a workforce perspective and
going where are we getting our skilled
talent and the economic development
community was looking at this and going
you know when people say tell me about
your skilled and ready workforce we
don't have a great story to tell and the
business community went to the education
community not at all pointing its
fingers to saying how could we help
and they began a conversation that
started in the greater las cruces
chamber
it developed into the regional
regional economic wait rei regional
educational initiative i'm sorry rei
and that brought a whole lot of people
some of you may have been on it
um to talk about what was going on with
education the private sector paid for a
study
to say what is happening they
interviewed teachers and students and
parents in the business community and
kind of came about some solutions but
what happened in that conversation was
everybody said i have a role to play and
i'm going to play it
the bridge of southern new mexico is
simply the formalized place where that
conversation continues
the leaders in our community business
education economic development and
government all having a conversation and
we're focused on two specific things uh
increasing high school and college
completion rates we know in the world of
work today a high school diploma is it's
not the end it should not be the end
there needs to be something just beyond
that to have the greatest opportunity
for employability and earning power
and then building a highly skilled
workforce people who who who are here
who want to stay here who with the right
set of training uh the right set of
skills can to access the the
opportunities that are here um for a
really long time we had this terrible
story about there's no jobs here and
that was a new mexico narrative there's
no jobs here it was never true and i
think we lost a lot of talent but we are
starting to do a much better job of
building awareness about the
opportunities that are here and i do
want to thank uh you know david maestas
that's on our board at this time the
city manager holds a seat on the bridge
board as part of this collaborative
where essentially if you bring the
resources of the community together
in a coordinated way
to solve an issue no matter how complex
then you've basically mobilized a set of
resources people and programs that is
very powerful and that there's so many
opportunities for for that kind of
collaborative and counselor gandara
knows it just as well as anyone because
of the work she's done with the
resilience leaders and we've been real
privileged to be a part of that effort
as well um so what has happened since
then you guys know we have some of the
highest graduation rates in the state
now
we started at half
well over 80 percent it's an amazing
story of what a community can do it
wasn't the bridge that made that happen
it was the fact that everybody who had a
role to play played that role you know
the teachers the schools the business
community everybody had a role to play
and this is an amazing story and it is a
county-wide story because the bridge is
a county initiative um
but what we've really never kind of
hadn't been tracking is oh wait college
completion is going up as well so we've
seen and this is old beta this this ends
in 2017 just because i can't find the
new data anywhere but we as a as a
county have continued to see an increase
in high school college college
completion or student college completion
which is natural when you had an
increase in high school graduation rates
so that's a good story for us um and i
believe these numbers would go up i got
this from the federal reserve bank
so when
last summer before anybody knew we were
going to be in a pandemic we sat down as
a board and we said what do we need to
do to continue pushing forward
we know that donaiana county and las
cruces
have opportunity and we have wonderful
people and if we could connect the dots
we would have an ecosystem of economic
development
and academic completion that would
benefit people to such that this could
be the most amazing place frankly to
live and to grow up and to become
employed
we know that we need to be thoughtful
about building
an expectation and a continuum between
pk
the elementary to middle to high to
college to career and college can be it
doesn't have to be a four-year
university it can be a career
certification to your degree four-year
degree matter
everything has value and the way we
categorize that is we say you know cross
the high school finish line first and
cross as many after as you want but make
sure you cross something in a
post-secondary in a post-secondary
sphere
we do want to support a thriving and
growing business community and we want
to make sure that our talent know the
path to get them into these jobs that
are here because there's some incredible
opportunities that aren't available
actually anywhere else in the country um
and then we want to leverage the the
influence of the board the members of
the workforce collaborative who i'll
introduce you to in a moment
uh and and just the wisdom of this
community that has done so much
and we want to to leverage that to
inform policy uh statewide
everything we do here we share
everything we do here we learn from it
we quantify it and we share and it's
really opened some incredible doors of
opportunity statewide so what happened
because of covid
well
as of uh not last week with the week
before
it's 11 000 people unemployed because of
the pandemic now it was as high as 13
000 a few weeks ago but as we started to
open things up uh the numbers came down
and what you see on that graph is where
those numbers are coming from
not anything that should be surprising
accommodation and food service health
care and social assistance because
that's not just health care that's like
child care and you know it covers it
covers social the social assistance here
and then retail trade and what i did was
i tried to show you the comparison by
weeks you know where we were is that
that bottom line that's kind of teal uh
at the end of june uh we start we were
continuing to go down but then when we
had to shut back down you see it
starting to creep up again
and i looked at the most recent numbers
which came in after i submitted this to
the city and we've had another like 56
people
be unemployed since since that time
what we know is who is this affecting
the most it's the lower skilled the
lower educated workers that are at
greatest risk long term and what
happened after the great recession was
people who had some level of a
post-secondary credential experience had
completed they were the ones that were
not not not affected but least affected
by unemployment
least affected by um uh least affected
by by the downturn in the economy
the employers themselves then have the
opportunity they're looking at a work a
labor pool that's got a ton of people
that have degrees and no jobs so what
happens is
you you have employers who can
upskill jobs that happened after 2008 i
don't think it's unreasonable to expect
that we may see that in the initial
recovery from covet but you do have a
bunch of the class of 2020 they
graduated
into a very different job market than
the one they thought they had going into
their spring semester
so um so we really need to be thoughtful
about the opportunities that are in
front of us the strata education network
has done
a lot of work
surveying kind of weekly and across the
nation people are saying
i'm going to have to get another job but
i'm going to need education to do it and
where do i want to get that education i
want to get it online
so so this is telling us as we think
about it from here do we have the
resources to help our community recover
i'm very thankful to tell you that we
have everything we need to recover here
it's just about time
um
so so when we think about the moment
that we're in
what are the opportunities that covet
has created that didn't exist before i i
prefer to see things from an optimism
view and an opportunity view um you know
there is this transition now to online
learning and work environments which of
course does make the digital divide that
much more crucial because education
employment and economic development are
all riding on on that as the city of las
cruces we are far more equipped with
broadband connectivity than a lot of
places but we know that some of our
people don't have access they don't have
technology and that's something we have
to continue to discuss
that's some of the traditional barriers
to
upskilling to pursuing more
more education to get a better
employment situation some of those may
not be a factor right now
maybe i can go back to school because
i'm not working maybe i can go back to
school because i've got a flexible work
schedule
my kids may or may not be in child care
and if everything's in a virtual world i
may not have a transportation barrier
we know that the federal workforce
system is spending a lot of money to
help people access education
they call that an individual training
account so we see that money's going
into the system skill up people we know
that our youth service providers are not
looking to provide the the 16 excuse me
well the 16 to 24 year olds who are not
in school and not working
they're not looking to put them
necessarily in a work environment right
now but they're for sure looking to get
them educated
so we have opportunities with our youth
providers and then
as a state
the department of workforce solutions is
really starting to think how do we use
these dollars to help business
the department of workforce solutions
and your workforce connection system has
two clients
the job seeker and the business and
they're of equal value and so we really
want to think about how can we support
businesses reopening so we can provide
more opportunity for the job seeker
so uh back uh back in 2017
we started this conversation about
workforce development and what was
happening here
and we brought together the entire
basically the entire representation of
the workforce talent continuum into a
group and we said what is happening and
what could we do so what you see is an
unprecedented set of partners there this
has never happened before it hasn't
happened before in the states what we
did has never happened before in the
state um and you will see the city of
las cruces there so
we started asking a conversation you
know what is going on um we got grants
funding so the bridge is a non-profit we
operate you know
free of charge so to speak because we
have grant funding from a host of
partners who believe absolutely in the
work that we're doing
it is revolutionary it's based on best
practices it's you know it's it's ma
it's modeling all the best practices
from across the country here in las
cruces um and we you know we are
grateful for the funders who make it
happen uh and then we ultimately came
forward with a plan
um this plan said exactly what we needed
to do
uh if you were to read this plan and i'm
happy to share it with anybody if you
were to read this plan it's twofold the
first half is what we're gonna do the
second half is every
national state and local
survey recommendation that's practiced
that people had been saying we should do
we are simply doing it we don't need to
study anything
we need to get the work done and the
collaborative has been very focused on
that so we know that education is the
foundation
education builds talent no question when
you have the the the well-skilled talent
when you have diverse talent with
diverse skills then you can have
economic development because economic
development
thrives on a skilled and ready workforce
and when you have economic development
you will have more jobs
and ideally when your economic
development targets are factored in
those are good jobs sustainable jobs
jobs with social promotion career
promotion and good wages and then when
you've grown jobs you basically grow the
prosperity of the region
so
we looked at
seven different different plans that had
been done vividonia and the city of las
cruces and borderplex alliance and new
mexico jobs council we looked at all
these different things that said what
are the economic development targets for
dona ana county these eight
were consistent
um
these are industries that are here we
don't have to go recruit somebody we
don't have to go make this up like in
you know north carolina when tobacco and
and their their fiber industries were
going different places and not doing
well they have reinvented themselves we
don't have to reinvent ourselves this is
opportunity here now
employs for growth
so then we we looked at each of those
industries and said what would a pathway
a career pathway look like you may know
that career pathways are the going best
practice across the nation and we simply
created a map
we mapped out
with accurate information the kinds of
jobs that are available uh if you look
across the bottom in blue those are
career opportunities here
in aerospace space and defense and
that's just the kind there's some of
them there's certainly not all of them
and you can see the pay scales at the
lower skilled the middle skill the
higher skilled and then of course you
can start your own business if you look
across the top these are the academic
assets we already have we don't have to
go make up new stuff that we already
have and if we were to partner them
together and create a pathway then the
academic
trajectory will match the economic
opportunity
we have the workforce system that is
important it's critical because they
help the out-of-school out-of-work youth
they help the low-skilled adult they
help people who face barriers to
employment and they have an important
role to play
and then you know the part we're working
on uh is that the business
hands-on learning work based learning
internship you know you learn you learn
on the job you you have a you have an
apprenticeship maybe you have a mentor
who counsels you if you're thinking
about a career and so what we did was we
just created a pathway and if you look
at it it is lined up horizontally but
the opportunity is burst is vertically
because that's how far in your education
you have to go to to become what you
wanted to come and earn what you want to
earn
so we said well what do we have to do
and we decided we have to do everything
all at once
we have to do it all so we have been
engaged in the implementation of this
graphic that is a comprehensive approach
to workforce development
policy policy of sustainability
business engagement how does an employer
play an active role in building their
workforce stem proficiency uh and steam
and steamage um every technological
innovation is changing everything and
the more stem proficient we are as a
community the greater those
opportunities are for people the four
levers have changed high school
graduation
yes
cross that finish line but don't stop
there and go to work from there go just
a little farther just a little farther
college certifications uh
two-year degrees four-year degrees we
are so fortunate to have all of that
here the workforce system has a role to
play and once you've mobilized all of
that you've got a comprehensive approach
to workforce development and when we say
culture change and narrative change what
we mean is a culture of completion
lifelong learning and high expectations
so to tell you what we're doing uh just
a few members of the collaborative we're
here there's a lot more work represented
than what we're going to tell you today
um dr torres from donand community
college is going to join us um you guys
at the city have taken the lead actually
on some of the business engagement work
i'm so thankful to the city for that
work i'll fill you in on what we're
doing uh that's reflective of u.s
chamber of commerce talent pipeline
management project and we call it
industry roundtables
you're going to hear from don hammer
community action agency but i'm going to
start with with dr martinez
and
your partner darlene lopez at the
workforce connections office
okay
so you're going to have dr martinez
speak now tracy
yes is dr martinez available
yeah i'm available i believe
tracy i believe the next slide is is
darlings
all right can everybody hear me
yes
hello please introduce yourself darling
darlene lopez a one-stop operator for
the southwest new mexico workforce
connection offices
um and so what i wanted to do is take
this opportunity to not only give
everybody kind of an update on where we
are at currently the state of our
centers
and a recap of what we have done to roll
over into a virtual environment
but also kind of talk about what we're
what we're looking to do in partnership
with these other community agencies
um so
as of right now we have four centers one
of them being in las cruces uh that do
still have staff reporting to them we
are
limiting um
access to the public the public access
so right now what that means uh if an
individual was to walk up to the door
and knock someone would open the door
and see what they needed assistance with
but they would be assisting them um
outside of the building they're not
entering the building at this time
um
that is due to be reassessed on august
28th by the core partners
so we will see what that phase one of
reopening looks like which will be some
hybrid model
um very short-term appointments um and
just kind of making sure that and making
sure that we um are looking at all the
facets
and so um
as as we
you know kind of begun this journey you
know taking into consideration that we
did need to restrict public access for
safety we realized that we were one of
the most important agencies on the block
in phase of coven so there was no way we
could have those services interrupted
they were critical and because
everything was coming out as brand new
there was so many things to learn
and so trying to get individuals to
understand what effective teleworking
looks like
supplies and
you know traffic control stickers and of
course
custodial services and just all the
little ins and outs of how do we do this
how do we do this safely
and so basically right now we do
schedule testing so an individual
that may be applying for a position
let's say with the las cruces police
department they normally send them to us
to do work keys or prove it
we're still doing those
we have the youth that need to do their
tape testing
and they don't have access to technology
or internet we are not going to punish
them for something that's out of their
control so we are still doing those
under safe uh coveted practices um and
so of course we're taking our cues from
the government governor just like
everybody else but we have done um
all the things that we just thought
would take us 10 years to implement in
the last couple of months we can go to
the next slide
um so what we've been working on is
really really getting this
employee m website um more robust it's
always been there but it didn't have as
much as it does now and so ultimately
this is a hub
this is our local workforce board's
website so
basically what you can find here is if
you were to click on um search jobs it's
going to take you to the
jobs.state.nm.us website which is the
department of workforce solutions and
that's where individuals can look for
employment post
look for jobs that have been posted by
employers and get their resume built up
and register for our system which is
necessary in order to apply for
unemployment insurance
they can
select post-jobs so that's where an
employer would be directed to all hands
new mexico an initiative by the governor
um our cabinet secretary in order to
respond to those uh businesses that were
needing to urgently
fill positions and so
that's that's where an individual and we
actually have a new one since i made
this slide which i'm very excited about
we have a new little toggle there
which is our workshop so we now have our
virtual workshops accessible from this
platform and that's where we have
resume writing workshops we have the
interview skills workshops we have
posted one of community action agencies
upcoming workshops on there and we're
going to continue to add to that so
they're going to be on demand and live
ones that they will find links for
this is going to be a resource for both
individuals and employers
and we're going to continue to grow that
in addition to that obviously we can
find covid19 resources
and on another page on this website
there's also a resource
toolkit that i have been begun working
on with the board
lots of posters and just things that
employers need to get back into the
workforce so um you know we've got
videos and materials on safe practices
um
different places they can find materials
for social distancing postings and
things of that nature and we're going to
continue to grow that as well
we are in the process of working on a
contact us form
and basically um right now it's
initially going to be more geared
towards employers and really supporting
employers through this time and the
resources that we have available to them
but eventually we're going to work on
something that we can make it where it's
for everyone
and ultimately this is something that's
never been done where we actually have a
form that someone could just get on this
website
and
have someone contact them the
appropriate person contact them to
respond to their questions and their
inquiries online
um and so we are definitely continuing
to
work together with different economic
bodies
we've been working together with the
city of las cruces economic development
we actually
um have done three virtual job fairs so
far um
the uh
the last one was kind of a
last minute but it's tr it was fresco
and it's a very strong partner of ours
and um it was it went off very
successfully so as we move forward we're
getting better at them we're having them
basically every few weeks um and we're
doing that throughout the region not
just not just in las cruces um but
the virtual job fairs has been something
that has been kind of a relief line um
in in conjunction with the all hands new
mexico where they could do the job
postings for employers uh trying to
connect to those who are actually still
seeking employment
we go to the next page
and so here this is just the the the
flyers um that we created when we work
together with this uh city of las cruces
for grace village
and then also you'll see here
on on the right hand side um this
posting so basically we have a virtual a
digital um
billboard up on telshore
bicolor world
with our service information that's
another thing that's never been done
not even in the state i think um and we
also
have regular billboards going up all
over the region we have radio ads we
have uh youtube commercials
we have postings in the newspapers
across the region we're getting ready to
do mail outs because we realize that not
everyone has access to technology and
internet so we are going to do some hard
copies sent out to
individuals all across the region
and so those are kind of the efforts
that we've made we know that we've had a
lot of challenges uh with our awareness
because of our restriction around
funding and marketing um and so it's
always been a challenge but you know
after a very very hard work and i want
to say about two years of investigation
and getting to the bottom of what we can
and cannot do
we finally were able to get approved to
be able to purchase awareness
aware an awareness campaign vendor and
that has allowed us to just really go
into a whole other level with social
media and just linkedin and all these
other resources that now we're able to
connect with people and people are
finding out about us and they're
understanding that we're more than
unemployment and that has been probably
the most uh critical element of having
an awareness campaign is that we are a
provider for employment services we are
a provider for supporting employers we
have funding we have the ability to
support an employer in bringing on new
staff
and establishing their their skills
where they need them to be and so um as
we move on um you know moving towards
the next phase of whatever the new
normal looks like you know the intention
is um
linking arms with all of the community
partners and ensuring that all of our
resources are being braided together in
such a way that
the end user is the the beneficiary and
that they're the focus
uh next
one and so i just wanted to uh give this
little snapshot that i did because what
i was really looking for was the
fluctuation that happened right on the
onset of covid and
ultimately what we determined was that
we were able to provide 9000 services in
one month
and that's individual services for um
people that were just needing support
for one reason or another
and so
we realized that we were able to support
people even in a remote environment
pretty much the same way we were before
because as you can see here on the on
the total customer services you can see
that there's not much change between
february and march
so you know we
really were
able to sustain the level of services
that we were providing even before when
we were in in person-to-person services
uh we do see a decline in april but we
figure that that has to do with
decreased reporting that may have
happened right at that moment
uh staff being shuffled around and also
people that had finally gotten their
unemployment benefits um submitted and
then maybe were a little less active
within our system
but ultimately our our platforms are are
sustainable we see that we know we can
continue to do that um we're growing our
toolboxes and we're trying to create
more and more ways we're never going to
stop building this we never experienced
something like this before as as the
rest of you haven't
but it made us realize that we are
capable of so much more and what that
means is that those individuals they
were hard to reach those individuals
that were in remote areas
that we have always had a difficult time
serving we can serve them we just needed
to be willing to pull out all the stops
and that's what kovitz made us do
so next please i think i have one more
yes i do so um this is kind of a
workforce promise but more
darlene's promise to the community
we promise to invest in awareness and
education of our services which we have
been doing focus on sustainable sectors
and recession pandemic proof employment
we've been working together with the
department of workforce solutions to
make sure that we're focusing our
funding on those types of jobs that will
sustain in person even in the face of
another outbreak and not another
outbreak but in the face of another um
another peak that they're expecting
might happen come fall
we are looking to support those that are
most highly impacted by covet and that's
where those partnerships come in
community action agency city of las
cruces talent collaborative we we need
each other to be able to do that um and
even just to get the information about
who those people are
um collaborate build intentional and
meaningful relationships with community
partners and braid funding and resources
to better serve you
and you know uh like i said earlier we
need to link arms with economic
development other economic recovery
partners to rebuild our communities one
person one business and one future at a
time because we realize that sometimes
the tire the tireless work that seems to
go into
trying to to keep the community afloat
it sometimes seems like there's just not
enough progress happening but if we've
helped one person pull themselves out of
a
out of a a gap in their lives i think
that we've done an amazing job and we've
done a lot more than that so i look
forward to continuing partnerships and i
stand for any questions
thank you darlene i appreciate this
excuse me very much
and uh we have councilor flotus who
has a question
my apologies my apologies mr mayor may i
ask a question before councillor flores
just a quick question we have this in
sections and we can do we can do the
questions however you choose um i just
wanted to give you that option and i
apologize i didn't say that up front
please please forgive me
oh no problem
counselor flores
thank you mr mayor and uh thank you miss
lopez um i might have missed this i'm
sorry but how many so do you actually
place people in jobs i'm trying to
figure out what your services what the
end goal is for
your the services
yes
there's a lot going on but
bottom line how many people get uh
placed or do you do placement or do you
keep track of people who don't get hired
based on your services how does that
work
we have uh basically three different
buckets i guess you could say uh one of
them is our universal services and
that's what someone could receive at any
office across the state they will have
assistance with resume writing they will
have assistance job seeking they have
the ability to use the resource center
where they can use the telephone the fax
machine computers
we have
also
job postings where employers can
contact the office and
list a job that they may have whether
it's ongoing recruitment or it's just a
finite number and then we on the back
end have staff members kind of bet
through those new people as their uh
applying for unemployment or
registering
for
candidates that may be suitable for the
jobs that are getting posted on the
other end
so there is referrals they refer and
when they refer should the employer hire
that individual then that's considered a
placement on in that bucket so that's
one type and then in the other bucket we
have what we call on on-the-job training
and that is through our adult and
dislocated worker program
as well as our youth program
and with the adult program
what happens is this is a little
different
we are we are requiring in that program
that an individual is eligible
per the workforce innovation opportunity
act eligibility requirements
um and then the employer has to be
eligible what eligibility means for the
employer is basically that they're up to
date on their taxes you know that
they're you know everything is kosher on
their end as as their responsibilities
civically
um and it's not much
ultimately um
there's a match in heaven match made in
heaven basically that has to happen that
the employer
is happy with the candidate would like
to hire them and that the candidate is
eligible and then upon that time we go
into a contract with the employer
and we depending on the size of the
company can
reimburse the employer up to 75 percent
of that individual's wages for up to six
months while they train
now
what that
is meant to do
is bridge a skills gap so if an
individual may be overlooked because
they're lacking a skill this is an
incentive for the employer to go ahead
and select that individual because that
that they would lose in the time that
takes to train them they are getting
back
uh up to 75 of that
and so um
the there's also a requirement for the
employer because the attention for this
is self-sustainable work and so the
minimum is 14.62 an hour
so uh that could go up to 32 dollars an
hour
that we would be able to still
compensate or reimburse up to 75 percent
and so um you know outside of there
needing to be those eligibility
requirements meant and the employer has
to you know we have to have that match
um that's all it takes to be able to get
into a program like that
um
lopez my question is numbers i mean do
you have that do you know yes so i would
say that
since covid we have placed 38
on the job training
which is
uh pretty outstanding
um
on-the-job training contracts are not
that simple
and um you know if you get a hundred
in a year you're doing good
so
this is pretty
pretty great
um we've done very well in the last year
with those
and we've basically
done something that's never been done
before and we expended all of our
on-the-job training dollars
last py
so the placements i can get you i don't
have those for the for the first tier
that i that i was explaining to you for
the job placements um
but i would say that we probably in the
southwest region altogether we probably
get about 30 together 30 to 40 all
together
per year
uh no uh per month
okay 30 40 placements and that's
employment that's that's just when an
individual
gets hired on as a referral from our
entity
so if the employer has a job order in
with us
and we refer a candidate and they get
selected then that's considered a
placement
so uh 30 40 a month that's about what um
300 400 a little over 400 people
160 people per year
yeah but they're they're it's really
hard to gauge the annual without
actually looking at numbers because
there are months when we have huge
spikes where we're doing double that and
then there's months where it goes it
dwindles down and it's not so much so i
can definitely get that information for
you and i will
i will make sure that you get those
numbers so that you can have some data
to review
are you are you uh driven by
you know your funding or whatever is it
driven by
certain numbers that you reach or
yes so there are um there's metrics of
course
um
but it's different for each
program
so each program has a totally different
um objective
and their
the progress is
really
the the progress that i'm tracking as a
one-stop operator now those programs
have totally you know totally different
things that they're looking for but as a
one-stop operator you know the progress
that i'm tracking is the um the
partnerships the co-enrollments
how how often do we have someone who
comes in for a universal service where
they get into a job placement get sent
over to our adult program so that they
can get on the job training
dollars so
it's really about that cohesiveness of
the system that that i'm looking at
may i say something
may i say something uh mr mayor for for
the counselors
and can just state your name tracy oh
yeah tracy brian uh yes hi kemper ford
hi
um so
so i want to make sure so we're showing
you different pieces of this puzzle
right
your workforce system is fueled by a
federal set of dollars called workforce
innovation opportunity act
dollars so it's federal money and a lot
of the metrics are i mean you know
federal bureaucracy is not exactly
simple and easy but they have all these
metrics so so the state negotiates at
the local board level a set of outcomes
they expect and so
darlene and the system
so so it's very complex and convoluted
and i'm not going to try to go into it
right now but essentially that board as
a whole is responsible for using all the
different partners within to create
a set of
of outcomes that matches what the safe
negotiated with the state so what i want
to tell you that's really awesome about
the work that we've done here
we have the workforce talent
collaborative has leveraged a whole
bunch of leadership roles so uh you may
remember your former city councilor
sharon thomas
uh she is a member of the local
workforce board that's that's darlene
works for the local workforce board
she's the she's the contractor hired to
do the job uh your your mayor is the ceo
of the of the ceo board he's the the the
chair of the ceo board of elected
officials but we also have members of
the collaborative
mary ulrich with donate community
college jose roscoe with the border
industrial association
who hold leadership roles representing
dona county on that local board now at
the state
your fellow counselor councillor sword
has a new state board member the state
workforce system makes policy for the
local system uh and you also have from
here debbie moore
uh you have uh ben wood that uh there'll
be more of the greater las cruces
chamber than woods of mountain view and
i'm very thankful to serve as chair of
the state board so what we're trying to
do is look at basically a pot of five
million dollars that comes into our our
seven county region and make sure those
dollars are making an impact and and and
there's work to be done and there's work
to do and i just want you to know we're
doing it great thank you thank you ms
brian good seeing you thank you thank
you mr mayor would you like me to go on
to dr torres at this time
well we've got one more question from
counselor beta studio and then we'll go
to that then that'd be okay
counselor stewie i beg to stewie thank
you mayor um and
thank you miss brian i know we haven't
had a chance to meet up yet or talk more
about um your programming um i had a
couple questions and this is for
you know just my own benefit to see how
all the pieces are connecting together
um it looks
uh with your slides that you've had
um
it looks like you guys act as kind of a
facilitator with a bunch of the
organizations
um am i correct in that
yes mr mayor counselor steven yes it's
lovely to get to meet you at least in a
virtual environment and and yes so the
bridge's role is to convene to
facilitate to identify best practices to
uh to to you know build the the will to
do you know whatever the group decides
to be done but then at the individual
level
different people work together so within
the collaborative a whole bunch of new
things have given birth the bridge
didn't do them the partners did them um
the
the fact that i have on my board of
directors karen trujillo at las cruces
public schools uh dr monica choice who
you're fixing to hear from from dona ana
community college and chancellor arvizu
tells you that you have a very
collaborative set of educational leaders
who when we decide to do things together
they act in unity to do these things and
so um so so to your point the bridge in
and of itself
our our power is to just
to to uh lead the collaboration drive
the collaboration serve the
collaboration um but it is the
individual uh partners that make it all
that make it all work
okay okay thank you um and do you guys
track how many of the like the pathways
that you've created um for different
workers do you track those types of
numbers or success outcomes even
you know how
was a student able to make it from the
high school graduation to their end goal
or something near there do you guys do
any of that
uh uh thank you mr mayor cancer civic we
we are
we are getting to that place
we have not yet done that the state uh
so so i don't know if you know this the
state doesn't have a connected um
set of data like the data doesn't talk
to each other all the time and it's
really hard to track right now and in
kentucky they've done amazing work to do
exactly what you're saying i'm really
thankful we've actually partnered with
the new mexico
union state university center for
community analysis and they're doing
some of this work but like to say
student a graduated from las cruces
public schools went to dona una
community college went to nmsu and is
employed at you know white plains
medical range we don't have that yet but
we are working on that there was a set
of mou agreements that had to be in
place so we're working towards this
okay
and so how do you guys track
um those like measurable successes what
are what are your qualifiers do you
track for those successes for any or
whatever you have as a success
uh well thank you uh councillor steve
excellent question um so
graduation rates
uh
we want to make sure that we're looking
at how many graduates in these critical
you know fields
we want to track
the people who are you know able to
secure jobs in the local people secure
jobs in these industries we're not we're
working towards that ladder piece the
other two are the other two are easy and
i can you know we talk about um there's
a difference right out output is how
many people did you serve
we can talk about some of that outcomes
is what happened because of it and so i
think that we are really starting to
talk more about outcomes and using the
output uh in a comprehensive connected
way to understand the outcome and we are
getting there
and uh what outcomes then are you
looking at that seem to be most
important for our community
i would love to see our poverty rates go
down counselor
i would like to see us retain our
talents at great rates that people who
grew up in las cruces are employed
in the amazing opportunities that are
here i would like to see the
the growth of people employed in these
industries that are here i would like to
see more of the industries coming here
you know like danny need games like
electronic caregiver um you know
companies that are hiring local talent
um and and that we're attracting that
kind of businesses here so you're gonna
have a presentation here this afternoon
uh from from your economic development
partners and i think you know i go back
to what daven lopez told me many years
ago when i started at the bridge
i started i went away to dc which was
not not the most fun time of my life and
came back um but but davin has said you
know
economic development and workforce
development they're two sides of the
same coin right economic development is
bring bring opportunity here grow
opportunity here workforce development
is make sure that people who live here
access those opportunities
that ecosystem that's what we seek to
create and our outcomes would be
reflective of that
thank you
and one final question i know that we're
we have different areas but it seems a
terminology i always know is very
important it's usually very intentional
how we say that how we place things even
with their graphs um you seem to have
um we're having a conversation about
like low skilled workers in high skill
and that um
little bit i think
gives me pause just because i know
some areas that i consider i want all
skill is valuable and necessary
and it can be
you can have one degree and that's not
of a use of a skill for if you have
something very technical my dad is a
welder he has a certificate um and
that's not if we're ranking things like
this it looks
like it's not an unnecessary needed
skill so i'm
wondering
what is that terminology how are you
placing it and what do we talk about
when thinking about a person's pathway
on skilled flavor of it
oh thank you counselor and no i am fully
i fully support what you're saying the
way that an industry an industry is is
built on a set of different people who
different kinds of jobs and it tends to
be education is connected now a
technical skill you just talked about a
welder that's a technical skill that's a
middle skill job there was a lot of
conversation about middle skill stuff
right that we we had educated so many
people with four-year degrees that we
created this gap in the middle where we
were losing our technical skilled jobs
and so that was a big conversation
before but i i am the biggest proponent
of thinking broadly about education
because i can get a career certification
as a welder and i will out earn a
four-year degree candidate in a host of
fields any day of the week so it's
really not about the value of skills
it's just about the fact that
each industry is built on a set of
different people with different skills
to make a holistic workforce so it's not
that they're
low skilled in some lesser value it's
the it's the how much education did you
need to get certain levels of skills and
i would tell you that you know i don't i
don't care whatever your bottom skill
level is it has value in that world of
work so it's not a statement of value at
all
okay um yeah like i said it just causes
me to have a little bit of pause because
language is intentional when you have a
person that is looking for
an item a skill level or a career
pathway you know i i just want to make
sure that
that is all seen as equally important
and given value
uh thank you mayor
thank you
okay now we're gonna
counselor sir did you have another
question or did you want to hear um dr
thorus uh update from the community
college
uh it doesn't matter i can i i haven't
spoken yet about this uh
i'll
say something okay i just wanted to
comment especially after tracy bryan is
uh
given her presentation this the bridge
of southern new mexico was the first in
new mexico
and uh its success is touted all over
the state um
we are very proud of
of the work that the community did to
build this bridge and of course the
leadership that tracy has brought to it
and um
i i see examples of what how actually
what she's worked
uh the work she's done and the bridge
has done uh in our local area uh from
time to time um
and i just got to say one little thing i
i got i was in a conversation by phone
with a a person from colorado that is
running this uh business called silicone
ranch they bought the uh sun edison uh
solar farm out on the west mesa
and uh she said in our conversation she
was looking for some employees part-time
to uh operate this solar farm and so i
steered him right to workforce solutions
i told you that's where you want to go
and so this connection is always there
and i just wanted to say these pathways
that um
uh tracy talks about and what we're
talking about here um they're the most
important part
of leveling the equity divide we have in
our community here on and those are
something we need to support as much as
possible thank you mayor
thank you
uh councillor vasquez did you want to
comment or did you want to
wait until dr uh tortoise
presentation you mayor um no i just want
to provide some short comments as well
uh tracy thank you i know you've been at
this for a long time and i did just want
to make sure to comment specifically on
the work of the bridge i've seen it um
just evolve into something that's been
um
from today's presentation you know
incredibly coordinated and professional
and an effort i think that's worthy of
all the the hard work that you put in uh
but also what our community needs to to
move forward um i'm really glad that
that
that we're you know that we're these
maps really essentially kind of lay out
the path that our youth really need to
take as well as our
adults who are going through perhaps a
vocational change
as you mentioned connected to covet and
perhaps other economic uncertainties in
the future um having a resilient economy
here that serves us best is is probably
in our best interest regardless if covet
was here or not so i just wanted to just
to say that
um i will wait uh to provide more
comments and questions until after
photos's presentation thank you
thank you counselor
okay um dr torres are you there
i am here
let me just real quickly let me just
real quickly um before i go to before we
go to dr torres so
so dona in a community college she i
don't know that she would say this i
want to say this
branch this is tracy brian and i've and
i cautioned everybody we needed to do
this and then i forgot it okay this is
tracy bryan donaia community college is
an incredible economic driver in our
community
and i don't know that we all understand
that because it is a workforce driver
and um you know i have always considered
that the bridge's success rides on how
effective we are in using that
incredible driver in our community um
career and technical education uh which
is the the bailiwick of a community
college
is really really important and in the
recent reauthorization of the federal
funding for career and technical
education they basically challenged
communities to say all right if we're
going to make these investments where's
the best most impactful place for us to
make them
and the most impactful place for us to
make them in dona ana county is in these
areas and so um so dr torres is going to
talk about what dacc has been doing but
before covett even had we were saying
career and technical education
career exploration can begin in middle
school it takes place in high school is
ideally connected to college with
students who are able to even as high
school students access college credit
through dual credit classes and come
through high school with a college
career certification or
very quickly earn a certification
afterward so this work was already
underway and and this is the this is
where our dollars that are called
perkins that those dollars will be spent
on building a workforce that even begins
as early as eighth grade uh to fuel
these industries so so sorry dr torres i
just wanted to say that before i turn it
over to you
great thank you um tracy and uh mayor
and members of the council i just wanted
to talk a little bit about what dacc
does in this area um dacc was founded as
excuse me dr torres i apologize for
interrupting can you please teach your
name please yes sorry monica torres from
dacc
um you know dacc was founded as as an
institution to serve the workforce to
prepare to prepare students for the
workforce and we continue to do that and
i think some powerful ways and so when
we think about upskilling and
re-skilling that really is is uh part of
the soul of what the college is about um
we we all uh generally people understand
that dacc offers college certificates
and associate degrees and we have 100
plus of those um but in the last number
of years um industry has been interested
in in uh short sometimes even shorter uh
shorter term um
sorts of training and also
industry recognized certifications we we
have uh kind of rebundled or altered
some of our curriculum to respond to
some of those needs in industry so so
some that are specific for for uh
what's happening kind of in the covered
era but also post covid is is that often
students will come to us because they
need one skill
and so we might or a set of skills and
so they might take one course or they
might take a set of three or four
courses um so so for example if if
people want to get a
an industry recognized certification and
microsoft office they might take a
bundle set of courses for that but some
of the other things we do is we we have
a an office that provides customized
training for employees based on what
employers are looking for um in addition
to that our adult ed program has become
um and this is in line with kind of
federal and
state trends but i think our adult ed
program is doing this particularly well
is is that we're not just trying to
teach students english we're not just
trying to get students geds
what we're really trying to do is make
sure that students are prepared for kind
of the next stage in their life wherever
that stage takes them so we have a new
pathway program in adult education that
integrates adult ed courses with
workforce training we've just finished
our first pilot of that with training in
in certified nursing assistant uh first
responder course and and building
constructing trades
uh technology rather tracy if you could
go to the next slide
we also have an office um that
is called
career preparation and development and
and what these folks do is they they
help our students kind of
develop skills to get them ready for the
workforce kind of outside of the
technical skills or the academic skills
that they need so in some cases students
come people come to us with with um that
not knowing what they want to do and so
we have a career exploration tool called
career coach that actually is
prominently featured on our first page
of our website and as you can imagine in
the last couple of months we've seen
tremendous uptick in people going to
that tool and using that tool
they also they also do workshops and
one-on-one consultations with students
preparing them for the workforce
customer service skills problem solving
skills computer skills those sorts of
things that round out the technical
skills that that students need
and uh we're in a collaboration with
lots of organizations but certainly with
the city of las cruces
we do a lot of work based learning um
and then and then they help students
find a job at the end of their career
their academic career rather
next slide tracy
um one of the things that we have that
that is really has been vital to the
community in the last number of months
is we have a small business development
center that is on our campus
and clearly um this this uh group works
they provide individual consultations
for small business owners both for
people trying to open a small business
but also for people who are trying to
improve their small business and they do
that through individual consultation and
workshops but in the last few months
they have been incredibly um
busy helping people with disaster loan
assistance so idling and ppe and then
state and local funding um and they also
have really turned their attention to
helping people develop um disaster
recovery plans uh there were a lot of
small business they they were surprised
to find out did not have disaster
recovery plans and you don't need it
until you need it um and so they've been
doing a lot of work with that
next slide tracy so there are a couple
of things that have become really
critical changes that we've had to make
or pivots that we've had to make
since since covet happened
one is as as you'll see in a press
release going out today is that we've
transitioned almost all of our
instruction and services to remote
technologies where possible um we've
done that
there are some programs that we have not
been able to transition to online so
it's hard to teach welding some welding
skills online it's hard to teach them
auto or hvac or certain sort of
laboratory skills um like chemistry
skills online and so and so we have
designed those uh that sort of
instruction with covet safe practices in
mind and we'll be doing that we're doing
that this summer and also we'll be doing
that in the fall and then we've changed
some we've studied course material or
have helped others change course
materials so our public health folks
have made pretty serious adaptations to
some of their material to account for
for um covet which is
you know
an amazingly terrible thing to happen
but also an amazing learning opportunity
for students who are interested in
public health
and also a number of our creative media
technology faculty have worked with lcps
to help some of the public school folks
design
design materials and then um i i'd like
to talk just for a second um is that one
of the most important things i think we
can do is to make sure that students can
find
uh those programs that that they want to
train in but also i can find those
programs where they have but there's
funding support to help them get through
school so almost all of dac cte programs
credit and and a number of non-credit
are on the state's eligible training
provider list and clearly that's a
collaboration with the state in addition
we're we're producing we're trying to
figure out how we're going to distribute
a kind of a mini catalog that lists
short-term training opportunities for
displaced workers um those short-time
opportunities that people might be
really looking for right about this time
and of course we'll use the network of
people that that are here today and in
the community to help us get that
information out
and then a lot of times when people
think of academic institutions they
think of fall semester and spring
semester but dacc really has six starts
a year we we start you know in august in
october january in mid-march and then we
also have two starts in the summer
the if i could say just one more thing
before i go but you know we couldn't do
any of this or any of this as well as we
do when when we're successful without
our partners um
it's it's uh
i think one of the nicest things about
this slide right now is it actually it
creates the big picture for us it says
this is what we're working for and these
are the relationships we have with other
with each other and as you've heard
today we have relationships with
workforce solutions with the bridge of
southern new mexico with west coast
public school and gisd and hatch the
city of las cruces uh with organizations
like
community action agency i mean we we
have these partnerships so that we are
helping each other meet the needs of our
of our our students uh the communities
in our
the citizens in our community and uh the
community at large because as tracy
mentioned uh when people are prepared
for the workforce that that improves the
economic development picture in our
county so thank you
okay it looks like we have a question by
council vasquez
okay sorry about that mayor i had my
hand up from uh
councilman cuomo
thank you mr mayor um and thank you so
much dr torres and everyone else who's
presented um i also wanted to save most
of my questions for everyone until the
end i don't know if we have more people
still ahead
we do okay
uh well but since i'm speaking maybe
i'll just ask um since i have the floor
the virtual floor um dr torres i'm
really curious about um
thank you for that presentation i always
love having you here with us i think
you're really incredible and the work
you're doing is incredible and i'm
curious how you're addressing some of
the issues regarding um going going
remote um given that many of your
students at dacc are probably not living
maybe many of them are living in las
cruces maybe yes many are not right and
given the issues we have with broadband
in the southwest and access to wi-fi
good wi-fi
for a lot of those folks how are you
addressing some of those things
thank you this is monica torres
mayor and and um counselor ben cuomo
there there are a couple things that
we've done the very first thing we did
just just to get it done because we had
to have some access is we equipped a
number of our parking lots with wi-fi so
that people if they didn't have access
anywhere else they could do that the
second thing that we did is we are
prepared we have already distributed
some ipads but one of the things if
students if students qualify we we have
to have a financial aid qualification or
a covid related qualification we are
distributing ipads to students who are
eligible um we've distributed about a
hundred over the course of the summer
but we're anticipating um distributing
several thousand during the fall is what
we're hoping to distribute
those the third thing we're doing is you
know as you know there's been an uptick
in in virus transmission and so we've
pulled a little bit back on services
that we were planning for the fall not
not very much just a few services one of
the ones we're not going to pull back on
is open computer labs students will have
to make appointments and we'll have
fairly we'll have fairly strict
protocols for people to use the labs but
we found that that that some students
just absolutely needed access to an open
computer lab somewhere in the county um
and so we we have decided to to keep
some of our labs open again using pretty
strict protocols for for coveted safety
so those those are the three things
we're doing now i guess i would add a
fourth thing is
is that we did require all of our
faculty to get some professional
development on teaching strategies for
online teaching um because we know that
lots of our folks teach online but not
everybody did um and so we wanted to we
wanted to make sure that all of our
faculty had access to kind of best
practices in in working with online so
that they could be more create a more
supportive environment for the students
wow that's incredible thank you so much
i uh wi-fi parking lots that's really
good i love that um
um
and then i'm curious and i think this is
a question i'd obviously like to hear
from everyone on um but dr torres and
um miss brian i know we were supposed to
meet uh nice to eat meet you virtually
um
i'm really curious about how this
collaborative is addressing some of the
structural barriers to access um you're
right like if i see this i see this
slide um and you're moving forward on
the scale like well there's a couple of
thoughts i have about this right college
isn't necessarily for everybody not
everybody wants to go to college right
so folks need to be put on a path
um
or go towards a path that that meets
their needs best but if we are following
this path right there's a lot of
barriers to access higher education for
a lot of folks especially in our county
in southern and southern new mexico
um but right so how are how are folks
how's the collaborative addressing some
of those more structural barriers i
think like language is one of them
um immigration status child care
transportation some of those bigger
buckets right and so that's what i would
love to hear that from from you all
well i can speak to the collaborative
broadly and when we started this
conversation almost four years ago
everything was siloed everything was
disconnected and i think what's happened
over this time is we've built
relationships and we started to take
down some of those barriers um the you
know the workforce system i don't know
if you know this but up until um our
work the state's workforce uh
website was not bilingual
and we were like oh hey you know you
might want to do you know so so our work
was really identifying barriers and then
tearing some of those barriers down uh
we partnered with the uh the engage
organization actually and as an example
we had uh parents of children who were
thinking about going back to school who
were thinking about getting a job and
they just kind of didn't know what to do
sit with partners in the workforce
connection system to to not
um
to listen to their stories to listen to
their dreams and what they wanted to do
but i promise you
the people who wanted to make these
changes weren't always aware of the
opportunities or the resources available
to them and by those conversations we
then were able to work within the
workforce connection system to start to
uh to to change their culture internally
to think about themselves as partners to
these parents because the conversations
that happened that day were breathtaking
where you know they would listen to the
person's story we just wanted them to
hear don't think they could just hear
and then at the end of hearing they were
able to go well here's what we can what
we think we can do these are some things
that are opportunities for you and we
were able to then very personally help
these parents on a you know one-on-one
basis but but we really have
structurally addressed what wasn't
working to start to make the connections
so career and technical education
pathways as an example
provide that path
from high school to college yes the high
school system and the college system are
real different
and we actually uh through the bridge uh
we actually piloted a blended senior
year model in partnership with the acc
and the gaston district at santa teresa
high school to explore what would it
look like to make the senior year of
high school the freshman year of college
and just getting the two systems to
really be uh real closely in partnership
with one another in alignment we've
identified what some of those barriers
are and we're working on those as well
so everything we're doing and don hommer
when don talks about community action
agency she's for sure going to talk
about this and the work that they're
doing with thriving families because to
your point
the system was a bunch of people doing
stuff
but it wasn't always a bunch of people
doing stuff with one another and and i
promise you because of the people that
that comprise the collaborative it is
far more collaborative now
great
uh dr torres i saw you turned your mic
off did you want to jump in
i did um this is monica torres uh
councillor ben como i'm mayor of council
of in coma i you know this is i think
it's a really important question i think
i really appreciate counselor beta
steve's point about language um i think
there's a lot when you when you kind of
work for so long in a system um you so
in higher ed for example um i think you
live with its assumptions and believe
them to be to be the truth and i i think
that um given what's happening across
the country you see a lot of higher ed
asking itself what what is structural
racism in in higher education very
specifically in in our institutions um
and i i think that one of the things
that's nice about this and i i will
actually look forward to hearing don
speak about this as well um
but
we we know that there are things that
are that are in the system for example
there's something in financial aid
called the verification process and when
you look at data it consistently harms
uh working class students and students
of color
and so i think we're in a position and i
know that
i know that dacc is is putting together
an effort which includes a lot of
professional development for leadership
on
asking ourselves this very question is
what are those things those structural
pieces in higher education and so while
the bridge has has made evident and
created connections
where we didn't even see the chasm
between lcps and and higher ed for
example for lots of students we started
to fill in that chasm with paths right
um but i know that as an individual
institution we we have some work to do
in our planning to to spend some time
this year doing that and asking about
those structural issues we need to ask
about so thank you
no thank you that's great i would love
to continue a conversation with you
about that that's something that's very
important to me and like you said i
think it's this year and what's been
happening in the last couple months
we've been um it's even more present uh
for me that that we continue to have
those conversations very publicly thank
you i'll reserve the rest of my comments
for the end mr mayor
i thank you mayor pro-tem
thank you thank you mayor thank you
tracy and dr torres and i think was that
darlene that presented earlier um
i i am
i've known tracy and what she's done
with the bridge probably going on five
years now tracy we we've had many
conversations about access
um the importance of
of of that
and um
i i'm i'm sure that the council's aware
that we have three very important
collective impact
models um
the bridge being one
engaged being another and the brazilian
four actually resilience leaders and
then our local behavioral health
collaborative and i'm happy to to say
that everybody on this call sends a
representative um
or goes to resilient leaders meetings
which is the other impact model that's
sort of the umbrella for all this
work
um and these are the important things
that that you know that we're talking
about access ask access to transport and
so this room
gets filled with people that are doing
the work daily um and
recognizing that there's relationships
that they need to make or
re-remake if you will
um and and um i've appreciated hearing
um
from folks today about
[Music]
workforce
talent development programs and the the
comprehensive look and and i don't want
council or the viewers to get
get this impression that tracy and the
bridge is only um
focusing specifically on college or
um
you know
it's not that there's a lot of work
that's happening to engage folks that
trace is sort of in the forefront with
everybody else on this call
engaging you know our middle schools our
high schools and college isn't for
everybody and she will be first to say
that and so she's done a lot of work
with our home builders associations and
different like las cruces public schools
sort of building the bridging those gaps
um
with some of the work that we're
working on and maybe tracy you can talk
about the construction industry and sort
of some of that stuff that i know you've
been intricately involved involved in
um and some of the
the other opportunities i think monica
dr torres that your staff have been
involved in i'm sort of building those
those bridges i i
i don't i'm getting the feeling like
people are thinking well this is the
bridge is about four years or
and beyond and it is to some degree but
it's also about
um reskilling
um
making people you know not making but
getting people to understand where their
talents lies and it may not be in a
four-year degree
so i'm just wanted to just wanted to say
that and appreciate that everybody
that's online now thank you
thank you thank you mr mayor and may i
real quick respond to councillor gandara
and i'm a big fan of her she got that
resilience leader thing going so quickly
it was just made your head spin but
you're right
you're right tracy i just need you to
state your name again tracy brian tracy
bryan you are right that
we're so what we're saying is we have
assets in our community
these assets are intended to serve
people
i had started out trying to figure out
who served who right that's where that's
where the collaborative started who does
what with who and if they weren't doing
it with others then why weren't they
doing it with others
and so it's not that it's only about
going to college
but it also is about using education and
training opportunities to prepare you it
can be a boot camp it can be you know
you took a you took a class in uh you
know cyber security online somewhere i
mean there's there's choices and it can
be that uh you you you wanted to get
like literally a certification that you
can earn in three weeks i mean you know
there's there's there's options
the biggest barrier to people's success
is even understanding what opportunities
are in their backyard
and i tell you that from i spoke to 120
kids at centennial one day
in a life skills class
four classes through three or four
classes and i asked them how many of you
know what happened uh over at white
sands missile range
they did not know
some of the most important careers in
our community are over there right
how many of you know that there's a nasa
facility here
and the road to mars goes through
whitestone's test facility
two kids knew nasa was here they had no
clue what they did
there are opportunities for people with
any level of education
as long as they have experience in a
host of fields but maybe they don't know
and covet is going to show this right
i have been doing x job for this many
years and i am newly unemployed through
no fault of my own
what are the transferable skill sets
that i have because i've been in this
job that can have value elsewhere right
so that's a conversation that's going on
across the country and we've we actually
started a website
that is about connecting education
employment opportunities because the
workforce system is specifically
intended to support people in getting
employment the education system is
intended is intended to help people get
the skills or knowledge that's needed
that's valued by employment but i don't
know if you know they just passed an
executive order that says all federal
jobs are that that our federal employers
here would tell you bound and determine
you have to have this degree or you
can't even think about this job you know
you have to have this well they just now
changed to start to look at how to make
federal jobs skill-based
and not require degrees
necessarily some will and but more won't
so the federal system itself is starting
to think like what we're talking about
and that is a very good sign for las
cruces because of the number of federal
jobs that are here so that that i just
wanted to add that real quickly before
we go to dawn
okay
thank you so
don i guess you're next
mr mayor city council good afternoon don
hummer ceo of community action agency of
southern new mexico for the record um we
are an anti-poverty organization working
with people facing adversity uh next
slice
so based on our work we know that single
moms are more likely than other family
types to live in poverty and depending
on your zip code anywhere from 10 to 23
percent of single moms live in poverty
in zona county
the good news is you can see from this
slide that a single mom who graduates
with an associate degree is 35
less likely to live
in poverty next slide
the percentage increases to 59 when a
single mom graduates with a bachelor's
degree
and as we've already been talking about
we are definitely and it should be noted
that career certifications have similar
results and um in some cases have higher
lifetime earnings than degree holders my
son's an electrician so i know that to
be true
education combined with a living wage
job can pull single moms and their
children out of poverty which will
improve
health and social outcomes for both the
parents and children and break the cycle
of generational poverty next slide
so early on the original members of the
workforce talent collaborative knew that
in order to be truly successful with a
comprehensive approach to workforce
talent development service providers
such as caa would need to contribute to
the development and the implementation
of its strategies to give people the
best opportunities to succeed
um and as a result of that the family uh
the thriving families pilot was created
the target population for this program
is single mothers with children under
five but of course will never turn a
single dad or a grandparent or or anyone
else who needs assistance away next
slide
so although we've seen some improvements
in our local systems and largely due to
the women presenting with me today uh
they're continuing to be difficult
uh they continue to be difficult for
people to navigate and
and uh inequitable systems must be
addressed and disrupted the members of
the collaborative realized that people
especially those living in poverty face
barriers well beyond some of the more
traditional kind of obstacles that we
associate with career aspirations
child care and transportation continue
to be an issue however we can't ignore
the toxic stress experienced by people
who live in a constant state of poverty
the trauma people experience when they
don't have access to adequate health
care healthy foods or safe housing must
be confronted and they have to be
confronted before people can even think
about pursuing their career aspirations
job training going back to school
anything like that so that definitely is
something that we need to
address next slide
so
through a trauma-informed lens thriving
families was developed using a whole
family approach that builds on the
strengths of the family
uh the family is the center of the
program and they are the ones that guide
our work
we not only partner with and advocate
for the family but we also partner with
other service providers to better assist
our families um and as
folks have already mentioned due to the
workforce talent collaborative the other
collaborations such as the success
partnership the resilient leaders the
behavioral health initiatives all the
all the organizations that are having
touch points with our families right now
are developing
meaningful trusting relationships that
make connecting families to supports
even more impactful and i think um you
know
years past we've had more of this this
um referral system i'm going to refer
you to caa i'm going to refer you to fyi
but now it it truly is this this
conversation is it is a coordinated care
model that's happening amongst the
organizations even if it's not happening
within um you know one specific
organization so it it
the relationships that we've been
building have been just extraordinary
next slide
so um
here are at least a few of the upper
level outcomes um for thriving families
and
we do have very specific kind of as we
talked about outputs um other things i i
have massive massive um data on on what
we want to track and what we want to um
uh track to to kind of show our success
um we are aware that because families
set their own goals some may not enter
the stem age pathways identified in the
strategic plan but our hope is that
several will
thus keep in our talented neighborhoods
in our community and employed in sectors
that pay well and are growing um and
then of course the ultimate goal is that
parents and children are able to
advocate for themselves and experience
increased feelings of well-being and uh
thrive and for the most part that's it
from for me today i i definitely want to
continue this conversation especially
when we are talking about um uh um just
systems that are inequitable and and
going much deeper into um some of those
challenges that our families face i
don't know that today is the time for
that but um but i'm glad that uh
counselor ben cuomo you brought that up
because i think it's an important
conversation that we have to continue
and we have to uh like i said it has to
be addressed and it has to be disrupted
okay well thanks don
any any other
questions um
for dawn
okay so tracy is there any other
speakers
yes sir uh your own uh human resources
director uh debbie childress and your
career coordinator uh lydia nigel will
be now uh talking about the work that so
when we start and i want to say this i
want to make sure you really hear me say
this when we built this
understanding of what comprehensive
workforce development look like and we
talked about business engagement it is
important for and a future employer to
play an active role in the building of
their future talent right they can play
a partnership role and we talk about it
in five shifts and your former city
manager gets credit for three of them
surety was really on it with those three
and he and he led this effort at the
beginning of the city and and we added
two others so leadership that's where
the the business says this is what we
need these are the skills we need these
are you know the certifications we're
looking for this is the kind of talent
we need
mentorship get involved with a student
get involved with the person show them
the way
in a classroom in the work site whatever
internship apprenticeship and and the
fifth one is externships for teachers
what is the impact of a teacher spending
a week of their summer vacation
providing provided a stipend so that
they can understand what happens at fill
in the blank uh electronic caregiver
white transmission range or any mean
games so that they then take that in
that information back to the class to
tell those students however many that is
it can be hundreds right to tell those
students what it looks like to be
successful so the city of las cruces did
this with a very broad goal they said
it's not just about building future
talent for the city we see ourselves as
having the opportunity to build talent
for the whole community and i really
credit debbie with having that vision so
i'm gonna turn it over to to your folks
okay
thank you tracy good afternoon mayor
members of city council and city
leadership
my name is lydia nadel and i'm the
career development coordinator human
resources
thank you for the opportunity to share
how the city has been engaged in
workforce talent development by offering
those internship cooperatives
mentorships and apprenticeship-like
experiences to the community that tracy
was just talking about
switch slides please
city council advocated a goal within the
city strategic plan to offer career
development opportunities to the
community in 2017
while we have had interns and co-ops in
the past the focus to connect with the
community in more tangible ways really
became a priority during peak
performance
our human resources department has come
right alongside the bridge of southern
new mexico its comprehensive approach to
workforce talent development
and our engagement as a business is
currently strategically driven in
partnership with tracy bryan city
employees and other community partners
switch sides
co-ops and internships are fantastic
opportunities for students to gain
exposure to their area of interest
throughout 2019 there were a total of 50
nmsu and dac students in various city
departments
this past spring alone we've had 40
students and this summer even during
covid 22 students have been safely
working with the city
the majority of these students are
working virtually and those who
occasionally work in person are
following all required precautionary
health and safety measures of course
we actually have two co-ops in public
works that are currently assisting with
determining the impact
kovid has had on traffic around town
so these experiences are designed to
help students develop the skills and
knowledge needed for their future career
we've also partnered with las cruces
public schools
to offer work experience opportunities
to high school students in the fall of
2019 the city had two ace students by
spring 2020 we had six ace students
exploring their area of interest within
the city
we have a program in utilities that
operates in the spirit of an
apprenticeship
students pursuing an associate's degree
in water technology at dacc can receive
tuition reimbursement and paid
on-the-job training in exchange for
future employment with the city
we actually had our first measure of
success when mr errol lockett graduated
and became a wastewater plant tree plant
operator this past january
and i'm happy to report that two
additional students have recently
enrolled in the program
another one will be coming on board in
august and three students will be
graduating this december
i've just gone over some of the ways in
which the city is engaging and
developing the workforce externally
there are two programs that the city has
designed to engage the workforce
internally one of which is the mentor
program
the first mentor program was piloted in
one of the goals of the program is to
support the career development of local
community members by connecting them
with city mentors so city employees who
would like to become a mentor
can
attend a series of formalized training
sessions to gain hands-on experience and
learn mentoring best practices
we actually have 15
city mentor program graduates
they participated virtually and
mentoring middle school students as part
of the passo's two project in
collaboration with dr gilbert morano
and i'll be turning over the next slide
to debbie childress
okay thank you
good afternoon mayor city council city
leadership members of the community my
name is debbie childress i'm the
organizational development manager in
human resources
the study of las cruces leadership
program was put together back in 2013
and we've presented this program 14
times
thus far so we have 195 active alumni
a lot of our
goals for the participants in this
program both supervisory and
non-supervisory groups is to help them
to know what is their potential how can
they develop
and we want to put meaningful strategies
in place for them to develop into their
dream jobs so that future job could be
in a supervisory role but we take the
chance that there are many many uh
opportunities for leadership whether
you're supervising
uh or contributing to a team
the summary of our learning topics in
the leadership program are from peer to
leader things like project management
office 365 tools hr legal compliance
training team building employee
motivation and engagement change
management
character and role ethics self and
emotional awareness tools we use the
disk assessments
and we give them an opportunity for a
public speaking practice and council
chambers
in front of their directors and peers so
it's been quite an opportunity to
help leaders develop there and a lot of
those
graduates from the leadership program
have also participated in the mentor
program and have been very very
interested in connecting with the
community
my name is lydia nadel career
development coordinator with human
resources
the city has a vested interest in
continuing business engagement by
working with our partners to provide
meaningful career development
opportunities to the community
which is why we're implementing several
new measures
we will ask students to complete a
detailed expanded interest form that ask
acts as a resource of information for
both the student and the city
it includes a skills assessment to
determine what areas of development the
student would like to work toward
improving during their time with the
city
it has a departmental summary to help
students decide which departments would
best fall in line with their career
interests
it helps students learn to create
measurable and attainable career goals
and also create a development plan
supervisors can then use this
information
to determine how best to help students
develop skills and reach their goals
once work experience has ended students
will be asked to complete a series of
exit interviews to determine how
significant their experience was to
their development and how successful
they were at finding a job in their area
of interest
so whether the student gains employment
with us or elsewhere we hope they can
use their experience at the city to
further their career aspirations
our plan includes expanding the reach of
our mentor program with continued
partnerships and involvement and with
the passo's 2 project
we will be exploring giving our mentors
an opportunity to provide job readiness
assistance and training we will also be
coordinating with the ace team to set up
segments for students to help prepare
them for the workforce
we're committed to continuing to develop
opportunities for business engagement
and collaboration with our community
partners
open for questions
okay thanks lydia
let's see here if we have any questions
well no not yet
so tracy any any other
speakers
uh just myself in conclusion i was just
gonna share tracy bryan uh mr maron and
council i just want to share a couple
last pieces so um the other thing that
we started doing so the united states
chamber of commerce has put a lot of
money and work into something called
talent pipeline management how do you
grow
your people into the talent that you
need for your community and you do that
by having a business sort of led
informed approach well
the u.s chamber considers the work of
our collaborative among the top 35
projects in the country
and i was able to be a part of uh i'm
actually in a learning cohort with them
where i'm getting to understand what
other communities are doing so we can
you know sort of implement some of those
things here and this the industry
roundtables we're setting up are to get
the information from our um from our
employers themselves so so we did the
first one we did we did aerospace space
and defense they're they're connected
industries the skill sets are very
similar and we tried to understand
what is happening for you from an
employment perspective what are your
workforce challenges how can we help you
um and so one of the things i found out
we do actually a very good job of
preparing future talent for these
industries
uh we asked them very specific questions
about skills that were needed uh in math
and in english and uh digital literacy
and and in five categories the gaps were
actually not that large as you might
suspect uh what people call soft skills
what i prefer to call employability
skills or some of the the the more
significant gaps but it's okay it can be
it can be fixed it can be closed if you
know about them so we engaged uh these
six employers significant employers in
our community white hands missile range
white sands test facility which is on
this side of the mountain that's the the
nasa contract that's run by jacob jacobs
technology um and i want to thank
mariette miller at white sands and joe
bullington who are members of the bridge
board uh virgin galactic as you guys
know they're they're an amazing partner
in our community spaceport america is uh
the sky is going to be the limit for us
literally because of what spaceport has
going on now and we'll have going on for
years to come we also talked with um the
new director eric sanchez former general
uh uh eric sanchez who is running the
physical sciences lab at nmsu and then
boeing that has contracts and we just
asked them about their workforce we know
they have 1700 people here that's a lot
of people and what kind of jobs do they
offer well not just engineers they offer
jobs in everything uh
virgin galactic has a barista i mean you
know so there's a lot of jobs for people
that people i may not be thinking about
working in those pla in those places
because they may be thinking it's just
engineers yes it's a lot but it's not
only
their wages are high these are their
average wages for these career fields so
you can see that these jobs and these in
these connected set of industries do
have a very strong economic return
and because we were asking them about
skills we were able to create the
perfect candidate this is the profile of
the perfect candidate what kind of
skills ought to be able to demonstrate
so as we think about shifting to a
skill-based hiring platform
here's the skills that one not be able
to demonstrate in order to be a
successful candidate and so that allows
your education community who's doing
work in these areas maybe it's a career
and technical education pathway in
aerospace engineering maybe it's a math
teacher trying to help kids
contextualize why is it important to
learn how to do fractions well
these are what the ideal candidates come
come to these employers with we were
able to ask them what are the most
valuable bachelor degrees to them
that helps msu what are the most
valuable associate degrees to them
that is the acc
what are the most requested trades and
certificates that's the acc what are the
jobs that you can get when you don't
have those kinds of credentials what are
some of the most important degrees or
excuse me non-degreed experiences that
are valued and the jobs that go with
them because there's great jobs to
cancel stevie's point from before
it's a breadth they're all of value
right every job is of value so we were
able to quantify that and we found out
one of the things we found out is a
barrier that maybe the city has a role
to play in because they have a lot of
medical middle career people so we don't
just gen generate a middle career person
who's had five years of rocket science
we've generated grad
but what do we do for the person that
how do we get the person that maybe
hasn't done that work over a five-year
period or a 10-year period or 15-year
period and maybe we need to think about
outreaching to those other communities
because i submit to you las cruces is
one of the most amazing communities to
live in and i know because i've lived in
so many others
but really thinking about how do we help
them with their
their workforce gaps and closing those
gaps because we know the economic
potential and the economic impact that
these industries have on our community
so just you know just things to think
about so we are doing this with all of
our industries um the international
trade uh uh
employers were just surveyed uh the
digital media ones i haven't evaluated
but we've surveyed them energy is going
to start i think in the next two weeks
and then healthcare we kind of pushed
healthcare off because they were a
little busy but we're going to do
healthcare in the fall so we're going to
know that kind of detail for all of
these industries that are critical to
our community and then i'm going to show
one last thing so the number one thing
we wanted to make sure we did was
connect people to the opportunities that
are here right so um let me see let me
go to safari
there we go hold on so we started a
website
and it's the one-stop shop of
information and it is available in
english and spanish and it is mobile
friendly it's called
newmexicotruetalent.org it is an
official new mexico true brand they were
actually thrilled
for us to use this brand as a
communications vehicle to help people
identify what are the resources for them
we have resources for students for
parents who want to be a partner with
their student or maybe they're thinking
about changing their own trajectory uh
teachers uh and for businesses and we
did we did put up a we're doing a
special kobit 19 recovery effort and
what we're doing is connecting them very
quickly to uh the different resources
that are available to them so do you
need a job right now we have you know we
have darlene and her folks connected uh
do you are you looking for education and
training we've
talked to mary alright at the acc if
there's businesses that need people how
now to connect them to
the um the all hands new mexico that
darlene spoke about and then we've got
videos on how to do some of this stuff
that literally show it's a demonstration
of showing people how to make it happen
and how to get it done so that was
something we created for the community
to be the one stop connecting point so
that being said i want to thank the
council for the opportunity to tell you
there's so much underway and this isn't
by any means all of it
and so mr mayor and council we all as a
group stand for questions
okay thanks thanks tristan
yeah this is hello martinez there is one
more slide tracy if you would go to the
last one
all right
mayor city council members my name is
griselda martinez your economic
development director and i don't know
about you but but i get excited about
hearing all of these partnerships and
initiatives that are happening in our
community and for our people so just to
wrap up
some of the highlights that
our department is working on with
some of these partners and
and that we have currently in place
um we we know that workforce is key to a
vibrant economy as as trace mentioned as
other people mentioned
we want to make sure that we're not
duplicating efforts but we're building
upon what is already happening including
the resources the initiatives that the
information available
so the collaborative has been amazing in
connecting information and connecting
dots and connecting people towards
working
towards one vision and common strategies
as you heard we all have in common
making a difference in our community to
change the
the income of our house households uh
eliminating poverty cycles lowering
barriers to
access to resources and we we are
committed all of us and in behalf of the
economic development department i'm
committed to continue to lower those
barriers for access to resources um an
example of that is about a year ago we
were in a conversation with workforce
connections and they needed to have a
bigger space where they could have job
fairs with more employers and more
employees and so we partnered with them
to have those job fairs at the
convention center and we had four of
those
or five in the last 18 months and then
when this current situation
uh came about we were the first um
we partnered with workforce connections
to have the first virtual job fair in
our community and so from that um
nazarlyn mentioned she's had another
couple of them and will continue to
find ways to bring those connections to
to become reality and become
opportunities for job seekers and
businesses um we are working currently
on a potential economic development
administration grant through the curse
act on connecting um
those job
job seekers who have been furloughed or
who have lost their jobs to
opportunities for training
we know that a lot of different jobs
will not be the same as
this before this current situation so
what are the jobs of the future where
are the jobs in high demand
and very likely will be with some
component of digital media how do we
lower those barriers for the the job
seekers to be trained with the right set
of skills and we're focusing on
um
exploring what certificates we have that
may be of an eight-week certification
that may translate into a job or twelve
week instead of um the the full bloom um
college degree and so how do we provide
an opportunity for people to have access
to better opportunities right now and
then as you heard from our hr department
how do we continue to partner internally
as well and through other departments as
well um to continue to expand
opportunities and and all of this is is
part of your vision
workforce development is a key component
to the comprehensive plan we have made
changes to our economic development
strategic plan to incorporate workforce
development strategies and to continue
to
find the gaps in the system i was having
a conversation this morning with our
workforce connections adult um
services and and and it's it's a
continuous conversation where are the
gaps where the barriers um how do we
continue to provide the resources going
to the people who need them instead of
having them having to find us and so we
are very excited um for the conversation
that has brought us up to now but we're
more excited because of all the work
that now we're seeing the results and
we're seeing that these trusted
relationships are leading to many more
opportunities and so um we think the the
leadership throughout the community and
in their involvement and as you see we
all have a piece of the pulsar or role
to play in this this ecosystem to make
it uh work the best possible and so with
that mayor city council uh we're
available for questions
thank you dr martinez
okay so open up the questions for any of
the speakers
counselor beta stevie and then council
ben como
thank you mayor um and thank you again
to all of our speakers um i wanted to
touch upon something um that
uh don
um had talked about um with community
action agency and moving forward um in
kind of this post covid situation
um and it struck me you know during this
pandemic what we're seeing obviously
kids are home
families some people can stay home some
people are working from home and now we
have school
um and a bit uh not necessarily some are
doing homeschooling some are doing the
virtual learning but we're
we're finding is that a lot of um
it's mostly it's females that are taking
the primary care of kids still
and further kind of limiting their
access to job um job security even
there's you know i can't tell you how
many
posts and people that i've seen
of women that have lost their jobs
because of having to take on those
primary care responsibilities
and so moving forward i think there's
going to be a lot of work to be redone
to
kind of establish people back into that
workforce again
and then to see what they can do to
you know advance their careers because
now a lot of careers might be stalled or
even off path so i think it's something
that i definitely like to to look at
further and um
it's just something that's been on my
mind after seeing all the the
interactions and communities that i um
am a part of uh talking about that with
kids child care and job security even
now so thank you
thank you councillor bin cuomo
thank you mayor um and yes thank you to
um everyone all these powerful women
presenting here today i really
appreciate that
um i actually i forgot earlier to ask a
question for darlene is she still on
dart darlene
well
maybe not maybe i'll just have to email
her
mr mayor and counselor
then come on i can answer it if you want
to ask oh sure okay i thought that was
her um i i wanted to ask about so
workforce connections um i know that
darlene had mentioned
there was some requirements for
a business partnership and i was curious
about the other end if there was
requirements as a worker who comes to
the workforce connections door and wants
services if there are certain
requirements uh that that worker has to
meet in order to get served
it
it varies there's certain services that
you know anybody can access you anybody
can access the excuse me this is tracy
bryan and mr mayor and counselor then
come on um
anybody can access the website anybody
can look at jobs for free anybody can
post shops for free so if i'm if i'm a
person looking for work um uh right now
the system can help me but there's a
whole set of programs that go with
people who genuinely face barriers to
employment and they have very they have
very specific you know are they
people who are low income are they
people who are disabled are they you
know there's a host of different things
they're trying to help people with the
these dollars are supposed to help the
people who need to help them out
and when they don't that's when our
community started going hey what's going
on you know so we started asking the
questions in order to make that system
more integrated in um because just
because you're providing a service
doesn't know that the people who qualify
for it know that it's there right and so
really the system has a set of
requirements and by contacting the uh to
go to employeenm.com
and to go and register in the system the
people will the people there will then
uh be able to counsel with you and let
you know based on you know whatever
effect barriers you may be facing um how
they might be able to help you
okay
thank you
mr mayor i think dr martinez has
something to add
okay dr martinez
yes sir cancer mayor christina martinez
for the record i thank you tracy for
that information i believe that
awareness is a key component on
continuing to connect the resources and
as of next week we just got the approval
from city managers office we're going to
be partnering with workforce select
connections to have
jobs of the week
in every city council and so
ms arlene lopez will be available on a
weekly basis showcasing those jobs that
are available and then most importantly
helping people
connect to their website and connect to
the resources that they offer and and
they can
walk all of them through this process um
so we're very excited about that because
i believe that consistency and repetiti
repeated information will make a big
difference so you'll be seeing that uh
coming up in city council thank you
good afternoon
that's amazing i love that um
thank you for sharing that with us
um
i loved the slide you had tracy on on
the one that you kept showing with this
building whatever
um i i and i love that you took us
through that i think for me what was
missing was perhaps the bigger
conversation on the policy and
for us as policy makers a couple weeks
ago we had a great another great work
session specifically on economic
development and i think what i felt what
i took away from that meeting was that i
would love to sit down more with uh
folks like you all of you to think
through policy and what are some of
those structural barriers that we can
address with some policies and so um you
know i would love to hear from some of
you um
in relation to that piece what are some
policies that would be key in helping a
lot of these things flourish even more
tracy bryan and mr mayor councillor i i
want to i want to let you know so
i spent a lot of time working in the
foundation world and in the nonprofit
world and that is where you find
innovation
and that is where you find you know um
you can prove things you can prove ideas
but none of it can be sustained without
good policy
those things inform policy and embed
practice so as an example
of early policy you know the bridge was
behind the early college high school
movement that started here in las cruces
because las cruces public schools
dungeon community college and nmsu
decided they would take the lead in
doing this because this model might work
for our kids here and it worked it
worked so well that there's 20 across
the state so that's a policy support so
when we talk about policy there's a lot
of things we need our state does not
fund dual credit courses accurately uh
because costs are incurred on both
systems and they don't fund the higher
education system for providing college
level coursework to students who receive
literally the same set of services as a
traditional college student and yet
those high school students have no legal
act no no legal access to pell grants or
you know to any of those funding
mechanisms right but then the state
doesn't pay for that so we've we've been
very powerful advocates for that at the
city level policy to me is about
increasing the opportunity for
partnership increasing the
whatever you can do to support
businesses and attracting and retaining
local talent whatever you can do
through the city which you already are
to uh to use the city's assets to help
support a comprehensive approach to
workforce development and i think you've
seen that i really am grateful to
griselda martinez
who has done an amazing job of
connecting the dots and she'll be in our
collaborative meetings and she's
challenging us well why aren't you doing
this or why aren't we doing that and you
know she really forces us to think big
about some things maybe that we haven't
talked about yet and so uh so
the partnership that she talked about
with the eda grant well that might allow
us to launch a a a pilot that would end
up that could end up into sustainable
policy but but at the end of the day
policy is money
right policy gets funded
and so you all as counselors deeply care
about the people of this community and
you can tell from the people on this
this call this meeting that we all care
about people so anytime we look for
opportunities to leverage
the systems of government to support the
development of people that's good policy
you know if you want to put new mexico
true talent
on the city resources that's a silly
little
policy decision that you could make that
would make a big make a big impact
so i'm just so any time that we have the
opportunity to come before you because
we've identified specific policy uh
anything you can do with broadband
anything you can do with access that's
all going to be good policy decisions
especially especially in a time of covid
so you guys have already done it you've
already done a lot your partnership with
las cruces public schools is unreal
i mean you've done a lot community
schools you've done a lot so anything
that you can continue to do in those
things is really appreciated
great
would it be okay if i jumped in
yeah yes
mr mayor councillor ben cuomo uh don
hummer with community action agency um
something that that i do want to add to
that is especially for community action
agency and i know for the collaborative
as a whole is that it's important that
these end users are informing these
policies right so you have all these
leaders that are working within these
these really cool organizations that are
part of our collaborative um but but
what does that mean if we're creating
policies that are still creating
barriers that are still not listening to
the voices of the end users and so
that's been something that's been at the
forefront of community action agency's
mind we brought that to the table um
everybody is kind of in agreement with
that that we definitely need to make
sure that that the end users are
informing policy but also then at the
macro level that the end users are
informing my policy so so that they're
you know part of my evaluation is for
families that we work with to tell me
what am i doing what am i doing wrong
what am i doing to create a barrier what
can i do to make it easier for them so
um and part of that evaluation is
something that we're able to share with
the partners so that we can have that
critical look at ourselves to make sure
that we're not creating uh just barriers
that are unnecessary that we can get rid
of i keep telling everybody you know
this this covet the pandemic that we're
in
has created opportunities because just
in the time that um this is all started
community action agency has eliminated
so many barriers for for clients to be
able to receive emergency assistance and
it's been wonderful and we're not going
back so i just wanted to add that
comment
thank you so much don i really
appreciate you saying that something i
i've learned as a community organizer
and that i always say is that the people
closest to the pain or the people
closest to the solution and they feel
like that's um that's sort of what
you're saying right how do we continue
to just touch base with the single moms
that you mentioned right regarding what
would be the best uh way forward how
could they be uh supported um
in in the best of ways so i really
appreciate you saying that um i think
the last thing i'll say is um
i was thinking about uh
going back to that slide and you don't
have to go back to it i just love the
top of it talked about
culture and narrative change which i
really appreciated and i think um for me
last year i was in
i was in minneapolis for a work thing
and um at the hotel that our training
was i started chatting with with a woman
who worked at the hotel um
and she told me that she'd worked at the
hotel for like 23 years or something and
i
it disrupted some of the biases that i
held about who hotel workers are
potentially
and
i just i was so curious about i'm like
you know wow you've worked um
23 years at this place what are the
things that keep you here and she
started naming some of those things
right and i for one it was a unionized
hotel right which i think goes a long
way
but she was talking about um that she
had really good wages and good benefits
and that she just genuinely loved her
job
um and so i think when we consider um
policy i think that that's one of the
biggest places for us as policymakers is
to advocate for policies that uphold
workers policies like living wages
policies like pay sick
on the list can go on and on right about
what best supports workers
um and i think covet has really
confirmed who some of those essential
workers are and so i say that because
much like my colleague uh counselor beta
stuve i also had a little bit of a
reaction when i saw low skilled on the
screen
because i think part of narrative and
cultural change is is some of that as
well and how do we begin reframing
um this this idea of low skill towards
perhaps even low low-wage jobs right um
placing placing
um
that narrative elsewhere i think is is
important moving forward because at the
end of the day i think some of this
dominant narrative then drives
um and justifies
bad policy making and it justifies not
you know when we say low skilled workers
it justifies our then decision to say
well we're not going to raise a minimum
wage or we're not going to pay people
living wages and so um to me it's a
really i i i felt really important to
name that and to note that and i think
that
um again as policy makers and as leaders
in our community i think our words are
hugely important and and can go a really
um a long way so thanks again to
everyone i really have um have
thoroughly enjoyed um this conversation
thank you counselor mayor protem
thanks mayor um
thanks again to all of you who
took the time and all the work that you
do in the community
i am very very grateful um
one thing that's um super important to
me and i know that's important to
us on the council is equity in all its
forms right like pay
jobs
and one of the things that has struck me
in
um
you know
[Music]
as it relates to hiring our city manager
i you know i got so many people
um
[Music]
that would email me and say it's time
for a woman
and i said you're right and so we go and
we hire you know we go we hire this firm
um
and and
the second go around we ask for um you
know
the woman head hunter if you will and
we got a tremendous amount of of of um
resumes
but when it came down to it
the women did not have
had
lots of skills but skill set as it
related to
a city manager not so much and so i
start to to be
increasingly concerned
um about
[Music]
leadership and and those skills and so
i'm really happy that
um the branch and new mexico state
university and other organizations are
really are really looking at that
because right now i'm striving as well
as my colleagues on the council to
ensure that any any board committee
anything that we do reflects our
demographics
and reflects um leadership um you know
and and that and that and that goes
across the board right people of color
um women those kinds of things and and
we're more cognizant i know i am in in
when i'm
looking to
wanting to fill a position and such that
i'm i'm really looking
at at all of that and ensuring that
um
[Music]
that that so that
we have you know that it's reflected and
so um i know that um
i especially appreciated um
don's presentation about the single
mamas and you know just those
percentages and how much it increases
when you know they get the two-year a
certification a two-year a four-year and
and and honestly we were reminded again
what our poverty rate is here in our
community at 24
i'm really excited
with the city manager that we hired
because he's done some fabulous things
in re in
increasing um
people's salary median um salary and
that's what my hope is and i and
so i mean i don't want to belabor the
the but i i'm really looking to you all
um on this call on this zoom
um because you have very key um
positions in our community
to help me sort of spearhead some
programs and one of the things that i'm
really wanting to do
is um
inter
working on an accelerator program
for women um
specifically
um
that are being ch are challenged right
that that they are either homeless or
near homeless
um and and
really
really wanting to work that out and and
those are the things that i'm glad that
griselda is really pushing um dr
martinez is pushing that um but i'm i'm
really wanting to push
economic development and you all um to
help us really bridge that gap because i
think
when you put that very nice
um list of all the aerial space and
technology
here and all that
um it could it's a leap for some of of
these folks some of these folks that i'm
looking very specific to
and so i'm happy that the city
and actually very proud of all the work
that the city has done
and our hr department around mentoring
internships apprenticeships it's
exciting because you know we put out the
policy um counselor being cuomo our
strategic plan is very clear about what
we would like to see and look what
they've been able to accomplish
and continue to accomplish
um
by doing that so i i am
i
hope that
um i i wanted to share through our
resilience leaders we did a survey of
over a thousand participants um across
the county
and one thing is very striking to me and
i think um tracy year where don also
is that 41 percent of the respondents
reported difficulty assessing job
training services
um
and
and approximately again 41 2 out of
every five respondents had difficulty
getting a job
training services um
and said that the type of training that
they wanted weren't offered
and so those are the things that i know
that you all are
are working on and i think awareness is
really important when you said like go
into this website
literally when we talk about a cohort of
people that don't have access to ipads
and
those things and i'm still feeling
there's some disconnects
with even our city services
where our museums
are sort of at um
not museum excuse me the libraries that
people have access to
um that use those computers right to
look for jobs look for re you know the
different resources is available and so
i think we're challenged during this
time especially under covet so i'm
hoping that that um
that we can come up with some policies
that really assist people um
especially those people that are very
challenged right now and i think there's
so many of them
today that that and and
that just can't get to a computer
um and and just really don't have that
access and i agree tracy something as
simple as
putting your next you must go through
all those resources on our website i
really want to
um
recommend to staff that we do that we
have a covid website currently but i
wonder
how much of it is filled with job sort
of seeking and i love the idea of that
job
at every regular session highlighting
the jobs or whatever i think is super
important
um but i think we're still
at at a higher level for some folks and
i and i think
for me as government we need to be that
safety net for those folks that don't
have um it doesn't feel like um
that that
that we have a system in place for for
folks that are that are being challenged
in this way i don't know if that makes
sense but more off my soapbox i guess
than anything but i i
i was just gonna say when you finish dr
garcia i think wanted to respond to some
when you finish
oh you're muted
oh finish mayor
dr martinez
yes sir mr mayor uh city council um
mayor patem
i i agree with you actually in the
conversation that i was having this
morning
um i i asked i mean it's it's important
for us to hear from
those people who actually have those
interactions with the people
in in need and one of the
recommendations that um i'm still trying
to figure out how that could be done um
with through a partnership with the city
it's a mobile unit in which the services
are brought to
the
where the meals are being picked up or
where
weak and other welfare services are
being provided and and lower the barrier
to bring the services to the end users
and not
um
wait for them to come to become aware
and so i i don't know if that's policy
but it's something that i heard this
morning and and that stroke as something
relatively simple to do
that could be done even now um even if
it's just
come for
information
and in the job training um opportunities
available or the jobs available right
now
through workforce connections and
and more of the like
also in terms of information the
economic development department we are
revamping our website and will
definitely have a an area of resources
and in the new mexico true challenge
where people will be able to
cross-reference resources and connect to
opportunities as they browse
our our website and
we're aiming to be a hub of information
for
the wide number of people that we have
browsing our website so that's that's in
the works and hopefully we will launch
our website beginning of this month with
that information as well
thank you so much martinez i i think
this mobile
unit type of
model is an excellent idea
um
i'd love to see us
partner
in that way with other organizations to
get the information out to folks that
normally um have a difficult time right
um seeking a website uh have a computer
even um you know those kinds of things
and and so
um i'm i'm excited to hear more about
how that transpires thanks mayor
thank you
uh it looks like councillor vasquez has
a comment question
thank you mayor uh thank you to all the
presenters today it was a really nice
show of partnership between
our community organizations and the city
in a long-standing effort that
just gives me so much encouragement i
know so much of this work happens behind
the scenes
and uh oftentimes we're not always privy
to
uh to what's being discussed in in these
types of work groups and these types of
collaborations but
um definitely pleased to see so much of
the progress that's been made
up to this point around workforce
development
i think uh dr martinez you mentioned
earlier you know how do we reach that
population of
individuals
and families and young people who have
uh the most difficulty perhaps entering
into the workforce starting at a
meaningful you know at a at a decent
wage
that allows them to provide for
themselves or their families and i i
just can't help but think of the last
presenter that we had
um and and the type of holistic approach
that she offers um as part of a uh kind
of you know treatment opportunity and
and how how great it would be to have um
the different workforce partners as a
resource um
in addition to all the other great um
assistance that she may offer so that
you know we could maybe look at those
places where
uh where folks that are struggling
economically
are are just you know that they're
visiting or that they are um uh that we
know that they're receiving services
from uh as a way to perhaps offer um
some type of training or some type of uh
class that allows them to explore the
opportunities for them
for vocational training or even for
education uh whether it's at the acc or
other places so i think that's something
that on the policy end you know i could
i could see the city creating a program
that does that right funding and
creating a program uh specifically that
acts as a
uh you know as a as a marketing arm i
guess of of the workforce training
opportunities in the city that meets
people where they're at
that provides that resource and so
you know that that might be a policy
solution that honestly could i could see
running out of our economic development
department um
if you know when we talk about building
back systemic equity
you know i also think about as we
um
talk about shifting shifting that wealth
or not not so much even shifting but
just generating wealth for those
families who who don't have it uh in our
community
not unique to las cruces right new
mexico is the poorest state in the
country and so we face unique challenges
that other states don't face
but but certainly with that comes a
responsibility as mayor pro tem
mentioned as government to try to fix
that um otherwise we'll never get out of
being last and so
i'm thinking of
you know if we were to
if we were to have some type of um
i don't want to call it a study because
gosh i'm
i'm i'm not a study person so much
anymore
because i want things to happen but
sometimes you need the data and when it
comes to those families or at least
those households
um and i'm thinking especially where
there's children present
where income levels are below the
federal poverty level
if we were just to ask some of those
folks what their greatest barriers are
to education or vocational training i
think we would be much better able to
figure out where
how to develop these programs in a way
that that meet families and meet folks
where they're at so if it's child care
if it's you know if it's um lack of
transportation if it's
uh
households that have people with chronic
illnesses that require around-the-clock
care there's all these different things
that come with low-income households
that are just sometimes insurmountable
um but that might be a good opportunity
to kind of develop
continue to tailor and to develop these
workforce development services in our
community that really target that
population of folks who could really use
the boost and who are less likely to
engage with even a community college or
a volcano vocational training program
for a variety of different reasons
so that might be a good opportunity also
for the city um working with the
community partners to engage in some
type of survey at least right of um of
what some of those barriers are um
and and then lastly i also want to just
uh
support counselor ben gomez and
counselor and mayor protein gandalf's
comments about the digital divide
the gentleman on our last work session
about small business development talked
about
how the lack of computer skills
in today's era no matter what industry
you're in even if you're a pipe fitter
or you're a welder or you're a phd
scientist if you don't have those basic
communication skills of like writing an
email
navigating your way around a laptop or a
computer system
it's going to be really hard for you i
think to advance in a career uh nowadays
um
where just to inquire about a position
that pays at a higher level often time
requires you of course to submit a
resume but to have uh digital
communication with people which is now
just that's just the way people
communicate and so
um
uh so i think that's that's also an
interesting gap to explore that on the
city's end would love recommendations of
of how we begin to fix that um
my first experience using a computer was
at a boys and girls club
and i fell in love with the computer
because i got to play uh
a game i forget what it was it was
um
it was like an old atari type of game
jungle or something like that it was
called but i i fell in love with the
computer because i could move this
little
you know guy around that was a pitfall
it was called pitfall this guy was
jumping around crocodiles and and stuff
and swinging on these little digital
pixel pixelated vines and i was like man
this is cool
uh but if it wasn't for that experience
at the boys and girls club and getting
exposed to just the feeling of even
operating these computers which were
like black and yellow text at the time
i may have not developed the skills
early on that said hey i can use a
computer i can do this and so
you know i i know i'm sure in inner
cities where this is also an issue they
perhaps um invest in places where
children or youth or families
can go use computers and so if more if
we build like communal computing centers
right in some of our low-income
neighborhoods
where kids and families can just go have
access to a computer
then that's something that i would
support too right if that digital divide
can get can get help solved by by doing
something like that let's think of a
program to do it
and then the other thing is
you know as this is part of our
strategic plan is that expanded
broadband opportunity uh free wi-fi
and where where we can continue to
expand that uh i know that's not cheap
but but if we prioritize it we can get
there
and so looking at places like a young
park right or in aprilacca park
um where there's plenty of room for
somebody perhaps to
either sit in their car because
sometimes like you know that's what
people like to do or even sit outside
to use internet or even access it in the
surrounding neighborhood
if we can build a system that's powerful
enough to do that uh then we should we
should consider deploying free wi-fi
into some of our lowest income
neighborhoods around the city um if
if that's an opportunity for us to do
let's pursue it um so so thank you thank
you guys i really appreciate all the
work those are just some thoughts that
come to mind
as we discuss really how to level out um
the income inequality in our both in our
city and in our state
um and target these workforce
opportunities to those who need it the
most uh but you guys are doing wonderful
work and so thank you so much for for
dedicating some you know part of your
career to to doing this i really
appreciate it thank you
thanks counselor
okay well
to all the presenters thank you very
much for the information you provided
this has been very a great update to see
all the various things and the
inner workings of all the all the
partnerships so we appreciate it very
much and
look forward to some other updates in
the near future
so looks like the last one is going to
be 1.3 economic development partnership
updates so dr martinez i presume that's
you
good afternoon mayor and city council
for the next presentation we will have
both our program managers for
destination downtown and business
development introduce our partners so
the first one i'm seeing this
with
liz vega our interim program manager for
destination downtown
and
mandy gus our business development
program manager
okay
good afternoon mr mayor and city council
my name is liz vega and i've been
recently
given the position of interim
destination downtown program manager
uh so several of our economic
development partners
are required to do an annual report to
city council and that's what we'll be
doing today
uh we have four partners that will be
well that we'll be presenting
uh first will be the farmers and craft
market then we'll have the downtown las
cruces partnership
then we will have uh mavina the sea
valley economic development alliance and
finish up with film las cruces
so we have the farmers and cross market
of las cruces
and they will be celebrating their 50th
anniversary in 2021 that's next year
currently they lease um this the main
main street on saturdays for the farmers
market and then the plaza de las cruces
on wednesdays their rent is one dollar
annually
and that is because they also provide at
least two thousand dollars worth of
advertising value per month for las
cruces
they also manage the vendor compliance
with crs which is the state tax id
number
and they mandate manage vendor
compliance with the city's business
registration
now i would like to introduce tiffany
thompson she is the farmers and crops
market manager
tiffany has been the market manager for
three and a half years
and she also sits on the downtown
parking committee
please help me welcome tiffany thompson
thank you liz for that introduction um
good afternoon everyone so as we said my
name is tiffany thompson
and i am the market manager for the
farmers and crafts market of las cruces
i've been doing that for about three and
a half years now
and
um liz if you can go ahead and pull up
for slime
[Music]
so i'd like to start with just some
general information about the market um
now not everything is listed on here but
just so you all know we are a
501c6 nonprofit organization
and so we are run by a board of
directors that are comprised of
vendors as well as community members at
large
and
currently our numbers
for our vendors are sitting at
approximately 135 permanent folks who
occupy 175 spaces
with about a hundred temporary vendors
and 41 musicians with half of those
being children under the age of 18
and we also incorporate several
non-profit organizations that go
throughout the market
now these numbers
obviously do not
um
show what we are doing currently
due to covid
so just a little bit of an update on
that
right now we are operating at 25
capacity so we're following with retail
operations
even though as a farmers market we are
essential
we were shut down
to only food vendors for 13 weeks
so we were shut down from march 14th
until june 6
and then on june 13th we brought some of
our craft vendors back
so with the 25
capacity and operation um we do have
minimal vendors set up and we're not
actually utilizing the full seven blocks
of main street
we are currently on the plaza with all
of our food vendors agriculture
and edible items
with our crafters
in a few blocks of main street so right
now we've been utilizing five blocks
instead of the full seven
and with that we are keeping our vendors
approximately 10 feet apart everybody's
at least a minimum of six but most are
10 feet apart
and
of course masks are required in the
market
now
pre-pandemic we were having
approximately 180 vendors set up on any
given saturday
and right now we're operating with about
70.
so we are we are hurting a little bit
just as is everybody else with the
pandemic um i will let you guys know
that the market is currently losing
about 4 500 a month
and so
we we are definitely struggling
with with the current covid um situation
liz if you want to go ahead and go to
the next slide so i'm going to go ahead
and go over all of our requirements and
everything that we've done the past
fiscal year so as part of our lease and
the way that we get that rent adjustment
for only a dollar is we have to spend
two thousand dollars a month on
advertising
now we were a little bit below this year
because of covid so come march we
stopped spending on advertising all
together due to you know mass gatherings
and they're not really being that much
of a market to push
so we had a total value of 20
in advertising for the market and
downtown
and that was through uh various
venues so our some of our bigger ones
our neighbors magazine
we distribute rack cards regionally and
we also this past year completely redid
our website so now we have a brand new
vendor directory which will tell you
exactly where all of our vendors are
located and they also link up to vendor
websites if they have an online presence
next side
one of the other things that
we
um support heavily
are new mexico families and our farmers
and so this just shows you a little bit
about the monies that have come through
our market alone
to help support those lower income
families and our farmers
so snap
or food stamps we do accept those on a
dollar for dollar amount with our
farmers
and we actually have a grant called
double up food bucks where folks that
are on snap
we double their amount for free so if
somebody takes ten dollars off of their
snap card we give them twenty dollars to
spend at the market and that free
additional ten dollars is to use on
fresh produce so fruits and vegetables
we also accept uh wic checks and senior
farmers market nutrition program checks
those are seasonal they are from july
through november
and as you can see almost every single
one of these numbers
has gone up from the previous fiscal
year
so
2018 to 19 we saw just over 127 thousand
dollars come through our market
and in 2019 20 we saw over 135 000 come
through our market with those programs
now
this year with um some of the
enhancement programs
and additional funds we've already seen
these numbers in the past three months
almost double
so we do expect that those amounts will
be
far higher next year
we also work hard to support uh some
other community outreach groups and
organizations and one of those programs
that had been mentioned earlier was
actually the cruces kids can program
they've not currently been setting up
because of covet safe practices
but
you can find
three to six different
children vendors typically set up at the
market every saturday
we also have the animal shelter out with
on-site adoptions
and one of the new partnerships this
past year was check the chip
where we have folks down on the first
saturday of every month
checking microchips and pets to see if
they're chipped if the information is up
to date and also offering five dollar
microchips
and then we also have a few other
non-profit organizations and we work
with bureau college to have a health
fair
twice a year
next slide liz
yep that's it so um i did just want to
throw out a quick thank you to lcpd
and this past year we've worked really
hard to
up the presence in the downtown area and
we've seen
a significant difference
with that presence and so i just kind of
wanted to throw out that
appreciation
to all of their hard work and i stand
for questions
okay well thank you tiffany
um none so far so well council bencomo
thank you miss thompson i hadn't had the
pleasure of meeting you and that was uh
um i learned a lot from your
presentation i just have one question
i'm curious about the coordination
between the market
and the uh permanent businesses along
um main street how does that how does
that work how how do we ensure how are
you ensuring right that
we're equally lifting up those permanent
small businesses along main street um
yeah so how to talk to me about that
coordination
yeah great question um thanks for that
so whenever a new business comes in i
try to make it a point to go and
introduce myself and and let them know
kind of what we do and find out what
they're doing and we do have it in our
policies that any main street business
whose entrance is on main street is
given um a 10 by 10 space immediately
outside of their doors so that they can
actually have a presence within the
market as well and not just in their
store
and
um we do our best to make sure we don't
put any kind of competing products right
outside their door or right next to them
um
so we we just try to foster that
relationship right off the bat
and i actually
met with a brand new business honestly
about two weeks ago uh she sells
oils and um things like that she just
moved down here
and
just kind of try to get to know each
other and see how we can
create a relationship that'll be
beneficial for for everybody involved
that's great to hear thank you so much
and and um
i'm glad to hear that process i think
the reason i bring it up is because i
had heard um someone had commented me uh
to me a while ago about
um
some of what you said about the
competing uh businesses right and i
think i have noticed
a new restaurant slash coffee shop
uh with a food truck right in front um
and so i think those are really good
things to to keep in mind and to know
moving forward and to notice that
we want to make sure that the permanent
more permanent businesses are able to
flourish and we're not putting um
competing things in front of each other
so i'm i'm glad to hear you say that um
and i look forward to meeting you in
person one day
yeah absolutely in that instance you're
you're
talking about actually that food truck
um in a conversation that we had they
willingly took coffee off of their menu
in order to stay there and not compete
and so they they would put customers
point them in the direction of that
coffee shop if that's something they
were looking for
thank you
well
mayor tim
thank you mayor thank you tiffany i
appreciate you being here in your
presentation i just want to
deep gratitude to you um and the way
that
um you've um facilitated um the market
i know um
you know it's been a tough year already
with covid and um and i understand that
the concerns that have been outlined in
terms of just making sure you're
protecting your merchants protecting um
the patrons and and whatnot and and and
so i know that um we've had a few
conversations when issues have arise and
i've always appreciated your candor and
um and about some of the things that
have taken place you know from homeless
folks um
some um there have been some issues with
um you know just challenging um where
there's been conflict with
our homeless population and i know
that's not easy
um
and and so i've appreciated um the
communications
um and also council bencoma to your to
your um concern that's something that we
have been working with tiffany on
mandy and public works i think um some
of the things that have happened have
been just not enough space right where
there's electrical um
capabilities and we're in the process of
getting more of that so that we don't
have that kind of instance where
the the food trucks are parked you know
in front of an establishment
um
and and i know we're working really
really hard and there hopefully
liz or others can update us in terms of
where public works
is in terms of just getting more um
electricity so that we're able to move
the the
um
the food trucks and
just in in a different location um so um
so that we make sure that
um there isn't those kind of competing
demands but that everybody's safe
because i knew there were some issues
with
a patron tripping and falling and having
to call ems and whatnot so
um also um our our folks
at the city
um the risk management will be
once um the market is fully
um
fully staffed if you will i guess uh
meaning that all the merchants will be
there um they're going to do an
assessment a safety assessment so that
we know
um where the food trucks are where there
might be pitfalls and concerns in terms
of literally people falling and hurting
themselves and so i know i appreciate
barbara de leon's um work and
work and and public works that just just
to to give you some information um since
you made mention so thank you tiffany
thank you mayor
thank you
okay uh dr martinez anything else or any
more
mayor city council our next presentation
uh it's from downtown exclusive
partnership
oh okay got it
i was getting a text message from a
board member wanting to know thought
that they were done and so you put them
under the under this portion here
because they uh so that's good i'm going
to go ahead and text them right now
thank you
thank you so much tiffany for that
presentation mayor and city council liz
vega again for the record and now i'd
like to introduce the downtown las
cruces partnership
um as you also known as dlcp
and as you know they are a small
business recruitment and support
organization that the city has partnered
with for many years
and over the years it has become a true
partnership
and this past year was the first year
we've had a service agreement with the
organization
and dlcp met 88 of the deliverables um
it would have been 94
but uh they had to cancel one of their
events due to the pandemic
um so go over a few of their
accomplishments and we'll have them do a
more
deep look at what they've done this year
um but they've had two events with at
least 2 000 people in attendance
they helped facilitate the creation of
the arts and cultural district logo
we've also had three new businesses
we've been downtown
they've done training and outreach on
visual spaces
and they've
helped us to promote economic incentives
in the downtown area
they also did a survey where 60 of the
survey participants responded positively
and to their overall impressions of
downtown
they also increased the window display
lighting until 11 pm which is important
so when people are driving down late at
night they can see the activity there
and they also have had funding that has
equaled the city's contract so they've
raised money for downtown improvements
some of the deliverables that have
rolled over
are
two downtime events for nmsu audience we
are focusing on bringing the mmsu
students to downtown and one of those
was canceled due to tovah
but it is in the progress it is
going forward with it for next year
also in progress as an audio walking
tour of the downtown area to highlight
the mesquite historic district
and the doing business downtown
so with that it's my pleasure to
introduce jennifer garcia kozlowski the
executive director of dlcp
jennifer has been the executive director
for the past three years
and has been very involved in las cruces
community even before that so please
help me welcome jennifer
jennifer you're on mute
i apologize i was afraid i wasn't going
to be able to share my screen and didn't
think of
my mute portion so um thank you for
having us here today um
for the record i am jennifer garcia
kozlowski the executive director for the
downtown las cruces partnership
um the first thing i would like to say
is i want to thank the city and thank
you counselors as well as mandy and liz
for all the help over the past year
that um you guys have shown us and how
we move forward as
with a really strong partnership and i
think it is something that we've seen
really test itself into our new normal
as i'm sure many of us are going to be
using that term a lot
um the first thing i want to do is i
want to read what our mission is at
downtown las cruces partnership for
those of you that may not really truly
understand the exact
thing that we do but we are to create a
signature business destination that
celebrates the region's rich cultural
heritage local arts and culture and
contributes to a thriving sustainable
and economically vibrant downtown every
day when we come into work that is
something that we truly think about what
we're doing um if we're bringing
businesses if we're helping small
business if we're patrons downtown we
wanted to touch on these things so our
mission is very very important for us
um
is the are the slides showing
yes oh perfect
so this year we have been accredited
again with main street america 2020
main street america is an accredited
partnership
program
that is accredited status in main street
america's top tier recognition and
signifies that we've demonstrated
commitment to comprehensive
comprehensive commercial district
revitalization um through that we have
also been
re-accredited through new mexico main
street and we carry a very strong person
personal relationship with new mexico
main street and the several main street
programs around the state
this year in our economic vitality we
are quite proud
that we have helped work with numerous
businesses to start up this past year
right now we're at 10 new businesses
overall this is a list of a few of them
that have come in since last fiscal year
i do want to note that gypsy azul has
changed their name to luna easol
and at one point we thought that morrow
day spa
was closed but they have reopened um
they just closed down during the
pandemic but they have reopened for
appointments only
um currently we have three pending
projects of businesses that were hoping
to open prior to the fiscal year ending
but were pushed back because of covet
issues but i do believe they should be
open by the new year
um
with the numbers
of the jobs or the businesses that have
come in with the numbers that we show
since may 2020
and that's been 27 new jobs to downtown
um i think that's a very important thing
to show because when other places have
actually had a
a hemorrhage of job loss we have
actually showed that we're keeping our
numbers kind of straight across the
board um we have seen 1.7 million
dollars in private investment and
improvement in the downtown area that is
through our
grant processes that is through people
coming in and opening up new businesses
and then putting it in their money to
create
new business opportunities and update
the business locations
because of the great things that we've
been able to work on over this past year
including facade squad
and our
mini mini murals and a few other
projects we have put in seven thousand
dollar seven thousand volunteer hours to
me this is a really important thing
because it shows that our board as well
as the community as a whole puts in time
and effort into making sure that the
downtown and the arts and cultural
district is is beautiful and that
they're a part of the community so
they're trying to give back to their
community um overall this past year we
did work with 214 volunteers um
personally we would like to see us
increase both volunteer hours and
volunteers and these are accounting
volunteers that helped us at zombie walk
at our events um salsa fest last year
chili drop
even helping with the city's tree
lighting ceremony we had volunteers that
came out and helped so again these are
very important numbers to us as a
downtown revitalization
program showing our commitment and the
community's commitment back to the city
next we're looking at our deliverables
and our accomplishments as as liz said
this was the first time that we were set
up in a service agreement that provided
um dlcp deliberate deliverables and
accomplishments
and so for the first part of it um
we are events for last year i just
mentioned or salsa salsa and tequila
fest
we are looking to do some sort of
virtual
in the new year or in this new fiscal
year virtual salsa fest um we're playing
with the different ideas and i will
probably be reaching out to a couple of
you
later to see what works within our new
coveted safe practices
we do our zombie walk winterfest this
past year we participated in small
business saturday and it was an overall
um
i want to say it was an overall success
in regards to how we were able to reach
out to people
um although we did learn other ways that
we need to be able to get people to shop
within our downtown and at our farmers
market
we provided extensive training and
outreach to district businesses through
our quarterly meetings we've distributed
timely information and resources for
innovative practices during the pandemic
um especially through our facebook and
our
outreach through
um social media well through social
media we've been able to get help our
our patrons and our merchants downtown
look into grants and provide them with
better information and regarding ppp
money and other at the cares act and
other opportunities
that they may not have had otherwise
we provided district businesses with
technical assistance and grant resources
over the last year
and other incentive economic economic
incentive opportunities
we've completed an annual community
survey as liz stated and actually the
perception of downtown the positive
perception of downtown was that 67.7
of the participants responded positively
and for us that is an increase from what
we did last year and we're
we see as we get more things downtown
that people can interact with better
more businesses downtown obviously are
our likability and our positive
response comes in we've seen a 200
percent increase of businesses on main
street that have window display and
lighting until 11 pm
now this was stated back in march 2020
and i apologize my um
my
screen has it incorrectly it should be
march 2020 um because that's when we
kind of quit looking at it and um
because of us going into
covet safe practices and the essential
workers and
a self-containing i believe that changed
and so when i went back down this past
weekend we did see a large portion of
our lights up after 11 pm but it it's
not quite as huge as it was back in
march and so we will be working on as we
open downtown i believe those numbers
will increase again
so through grants and donations and our
event cells and new mexico main street
technical assistance
and our service agreement with jonah ana
county dlcp was able to um achieve over
its financial match to the city which is
one of our deliverables and so i think
it gave us great incentive to personally
to move forward and to work very hard to
reach those goals we also have seen the
installation of a chalk park on the main
street
unfortunately
it got put in during our
our time day our time
quarantined and we have not been able to
do a proper ribbon cutting and to draw
people's information to it
um so that's something i hope to do
shortly
um the next part is within our
deliverables and our accomplishments is
we have collaborated with the college
new mexico student new mexico state
university college of arts and sciences
to promote species in peril event at the
rio grande theater um they sent as liz
said the second event was canceled due
to covet 19 we are hoping to do a an msu
based art show on the plaza and have our
students um be able to be there to sell
their art and to show their art and um
and that would be one of our events we
are still looking forward to doing that
with the arts and cultural district and
nmsu but we have again it'll come back
to when we're able to do these outdoor
events and when um groups of people can
um open up again or be in large groups
of people can be together again and we
are also trying to figure out virtual
aspects to this
um
we did work with arts and cultural
district who is a subset of dlcp we
worked with them to help create their
the adoption of their logo and their
tagline which i really love and
you'll start seeing us using a lot
authentically southern new mexico
and i think because we're not trying to
be something else we are just trying to
be who we are and that's the arts and
cultural district in downtown las cruces
and so we want to make sure people
understand that we are being authentic
with who we are and the services that
we're given um our preliminary
development of an acd walking tour has
been set up the next portion of it it
has been a much larger project than i
think any of us knew
and we've had our arts and culture
district working diligently on it um but
the next portion of it will to be doing
the voice over for the walkability in a
recorded whether it be a youtube or
podcast action on what would be easy for
people to do a walking tour
um
we also through the lcacd the liberals
and accomplishment um have will be
allocating over 900 000 in capital
outlay funds
the arts and cultural district
members were very worked very hard with
council gondara and our state
legislators in being able the last
couple years to get capital outlay money
for projects such as bandstand downtown
or excuse me at decline park a lighting
um lighting opportunities and even to go
and changing out signs for wayfinding
and i know that's not the best word to
use but it would be the way finding and
the welcome to downtown the welcome to
the historic district so um they've been
working very hard to be able to use
those funds um we've also done two big
completions one was the completion of
the facade squad project on compo
compound i hope you've seen that that's
where atom bomb
is we actually repainted with the helps
of volunteers and some of some of you
counselors um we were actually able to
repaint that put in new lighting new
signage has gone up for some of the
locations
and our merchants that are over there
are so deeply excited and the property
owner knew that he would never be able
to do this or afford that so that was
one of our wonderful grants that we
applied for and received and were able
to see some some big action right away
um also through the arts and cultural
district we did the design and
installation of the six mini murals
throughout our district
it's another thing that had high impact
um we applied for a grant we received it
i believe that was the new mexico
resiliency alliance grant
and
it was high impact and people saw
instantly they appreciated it we started
seeing a big turn around with the
noticing of pretty art you know quote
unquote pretty art downtown and i think
it excited people we do have a goal to
expand that
um the other thing that we tried this
year and it was our pilot project was
ventanas vivas
and we worked with the
the city arts board as well as the arts
district to
create some sort of visual space
and what we we asked originally we had
eight businesses in the downtown that
wanted to decorate their windows for the
holidays
we ended up with over i think over 18 in
our district that decorated for the
holidays which really provided a lot of
fun and um
and whimsy for for the time and so we
because of the grant we had received
what we helped do is we helped pay those
artists the original eight and so this
year since it was a prior program and it
did so well
this year we're going to look at other
ways that we can do so we can actually
pay back to the artist and they can
again
it is something that they can
participate in and see how we expand
this throughout our district
um continuing projects as liz said again
that we only we got up to 88 and i was
hoping it was higher
but um these are the continuing projects
that we will be taking into the new year
the new fiscal year it's broadening our
tour of more historic structures
changing the original
project timeline collaborating with
museums and developing descriptions for
each of our locations and the next steps
will be the photography of site the site
a geocache map and recorded narration
both in english and spanish we feel that
that's very important for our district
um we're going to be doing the we will
be setting up the doing business
downtown guide again it was a project
that was a little larger
than i expected it to be and so with
outside help from the state from the
city um and a few other groups and
collaboration we're getting better
numbers so we'll be working with new
mexico main street and new mexico
economic development to gather more
accurate historic data and current data
for our district we've gathered the
information to be distilled to um
to a compact and user-friendly format um
a lot of these things can get taken away
from you
um by virtue it's too much information
given at once so we're trying very hard
to make sure that it's it's the right
information for the right audience and
that people can go and research the
proper information and work with us and
we also want to update the project
timeline this project timeline to
reflect the size and scope of the
project so our next
our next
um excuse me slide is our forecast for
the 2021 fiscal year which obviously
we're already in
um we will be working with the arts and
cultural district and it's part of our
service agreement going forward is the
artist in residence this program will
promote artists who live and work or
work in the arts and cultural district
we're hoping to choose six that will
participate in this pilot program and
the program will feature in-person or
virtual open houses so our idea is
hopefully to do one every other month
and then at the end of it we can
we can get them all to do a large open
house or we can do these but we really
want to be able to push not push back
but give back again to the community
and support those who are bringing us
who are bringing us up to date
the other part for dlcp is the business
advocacy program
it's the enhancement of communication
with our district businesses and this is
something that is going to be new to our
contract this year we would like to
evaluate the issues and next steps when
talking to businesses so they know to
come to us and maybe it's something that
we can help solve and instead of it be
maybe a city issue or maybe we can tell
them where they need to go um i think
it's a better way for us to evaluate and
to create a stronger relationship with
our
with our downtown merchants we want to
improve the utilization of the state and
local resources through this and a
systematized resolution of issues
lastly i am giving you all a picture of
the different events that we were able
to do this past year and i couldn't put
more pictures for other things i do know
some of you would really appreciate just
literally see what we're doing on the
daily and
we're very very proud of all the work
and the time and effort that downtown
las cruces partnership volunteers are
putting into helping revitalize downtown
las cruces the arts and cultural
district and please know that our
district is quite big
it's the entire tid district it is not
just main street and i think sometimes
people get a little caught up that we
just take care of main street
but i want to show you we over the
during this pandemic we had put forth
some time and effort with our board to
do some commercials we had some coveted
spots letting people know downtown
that there was
places were open that we were we were
doing
safe practices everything this is a
commercial that we have slated to start
already but we have stopped it because
it's just the timing didn't work out
right
but i wanted you guys to be the first to
see it and here's going to be my issue
is if it opens up
if you can give me one second
liz would you be able to open it
let me see if i can
okay wait maybe it's
i apologize i tried this is it showing
can you see anything
no no we can't
okay
i think you may want to just stop
sharing and then
open up the screen that's being shared
again
okay
thank you again i am so
sorry i thought we were past this i
tried it
okay don't worry about it
let's see
are you seeing anything yet
uh
youtube
yes yes that's it
they liking it
well that looked pretty good
very good
so i just wanted to give you that to
show that we are trying to do things to
reach out but
much further than our just our district
but regionally um state wise originally
and wherever else we can try to figure
out how to recruit money to recruit
people
and to um
businesses to come to dos
um i stand for any questions i apologize
for taking longer than i expected to but
i stand for any questions you may have
no problem at all uh looks like mayor
protem gandara has a comment or question
i just have to say thank you jennifer um
and to your board um it's one of the
more robust boards that i've ever been
um a part of
i mean they're really into
um
you know just modeling and making sure
that um you're following your mission
and i'm gonna do is open it
measures and so i very much appreciate
um what you've been able to do and
especially during covet i know you've
had a very instrumental
um
[Music]
you played a very instrumental part in
helping our businesses downtown kind of
pivot
and assist them
you didn't talk a little bit you didn't
talk too much about that but i do want
to say
um
in the sort of phone calls that we've i
don't know if people know but jennifer
and staff
and i um talk at least once a month and
sort of updates me on the various things
and i just want to say how important i
thought
um
your work was in assisting um the down
the businesses and the tid really and in
the arts and cultural district
there's been some really fantastic
partnerships
um that have come out of that
and like for instance bex and meown
company and
some of the others um that are working
together um which is fantastic and and
so i just want kudos to you all
um i love the the commercial i think
that is um really important really
really exciting
um
jennifer we've had some discussions
about
um currently where you're located
and working with the amador
who
and the board there are you prepared to
talk a little bit about
what might the um partnerships be
um
moving forward
not completely um thank you councillor
gunder thank you council
i truly appreciate your your positive
feedback i'm not completely ready to
talk about the amador aspect we do have
an arts and cultural district meeting
this week and that is something that
we'll probably speak on a little further
so i was hoping that we would have that
meeting before i really took it to
um to our downtown las cruces
partnership board as a whole i think it
is overall something that would be very
important for dlcp
and the donated arts council to be a
part of as the as we look into
and working with the um
the group that has been working so hard
on the amador over the years and this
could be a way for us all to have a very
strong partnership
and to really highlight and help
help push for something quite beautiful
in our district that is part of the
history of las cruces and definitely
part of the history of downtown
very good
okay
we have
counselor beta stevie
thank you i'm mayor perton were you all
finished
i can't
i wasn't but oh i'm sorry i'll help my
questions
um
thank you counselor bethesda um
can you explain further the guide that
you're in the process of
of working on and what that might look
like specifically is that to recruit
businesses or a combination of
recruiting retaining businesses
what would that guide look like
jennifer
mayor pro tem council um
what we have noticed
is there is an abundance of guides
and we are trying to create
a
might be a little bit larger than a
three-page fold-out it can again goes to
the information that would have very
important numbers for people and it
would be specifically for people doing
business within our district that you
know where you need to go for very
specific things it could have a little
bit of information in regards to our
current numbers and where we sit we also
want something that can be somewhat
static that we're not going to be
expending a ton of money every year or
every couple months to update it because
something happened and all those numbers
no longer exist so we want something
that's going to be able to last us a
little bit of a long haul the city has
done a great job in doing business
downstairs i think there's a couple like
where do i start guides and we want to
use some of those information some of
those things that you have in your
guides we also want to bring in wes the
department of economic development and
new mexico main street to show
businesses especially small businesses
in a downtown district what they can use
and how we can help them achieve those
goals
great okay thank you thank you i
appreciate it thank you mayor
yeah and sorry about that mayor pro tem
uh councillor bait this dude
thank you mayor uh and thank you
jennifer that was a very great
presentation i'm excited to see that
video i liked the color scheme of it by
the way and the brightness very cheerful
um
and welcoming and so i really do
appreciate it i know that we were
supposed to meet in person as well
before this i do look forward to
doing some sort of version of that um
here soon
i had just a couple of questions um
regarding the partnership
um how much participation
do you guys have within the businesses
along the area um
you know how many um of those uh
businesses are kind of active with you
all
um counselor abate this duvey council i
believe we probably have actively about
80 of our businesses
um depending on the time of year and
what's going on overall um when it's
prior to the covet outbreak we do a
weekly walk
and trying to visit as many as we
possibly can if they're a little bit out
of like our little
walking area we definitely work with
them through social media through phone
calls through text messages emails
sometimes it's all of the above the
information or we reach out and we don't
get anything back
but we always try to make sure that they
know that we're here just in case they
may not need us at that point but i do
truly believe we have a overall an
overwhelmingly good
relationship with the majority of our
downtown merchants
fantastic
are there any financial requirements
from the businesses to be involved with
you all or any requirements in
particular
um councillor beta stevie city council
no there are not we are a 501c3
so we do not charge anybody any sort of
fees our doors are open if they have if
they need to come in ask for questions
um one of the things that we did learn
over the last couple years is the
the merchants wanted us to do more
advertising and it wasn't something we
necessarily had the
money for
we were able to come up with that money
this past year and that's where we're
able to do these ads we're able to
create some palm cards
and i can forward them to you can see
our covet ads we've really tried our
we've really are we call them the
coveted bytes we've really tried to
utilize all of our merchants and
reaching out so there's a portion you
may not have seen all you know
all of them on this one video but in the
cove invites we really tried to use
different ones for different messages
and our overall goal is to be able to
start doing some advertising again
that's outside of our region and even if
that comes to
purchasing space on
billboards and trying to buy more
newspaper space or online advertising
outside of our district to help out to
help people find downtown and to come
downtown that's something that we have
talked to our merchants about doing
fantastic thank you
and um
i think that's all the questions they
have for now but i really did it and i
really appreciate this presentation
thanks man thank you councilor flotus
thank you mr mayor and thank you ms vega
um
you just mentioned that you're a 501c3
who uh
who are your donors
uh councillor flores city council are
right now we have a partnership
obviously with the city
we had a partnership this past fiscal
year with the county and we do the salsa
fest and that is our large fundraiser
for the year we also have sponsorships
and other programs for our other events
so we can take in donations and we do
have a portion of private donors as well
as going after grants
so how um i'm just curious the
partnership yeah with the city what does
that consist of
we have a contract a service agreement
contract with the city of las cruces and
we have to meet specific deliverables
every year now in order to read so we
become your economic developer for
downtown las cruces
thank you mistake
okay
well thank you very much jennifer and we
appreciate all the hard work i mean
um yeah before cove that boy i tell you
downtown was just starting to just take
off and
you guys are doing a fantastic job we
really appreciate all that you all do
thank you very much
dr martinez is that it we're going to
movida now
that is that right here
we're getting some
feedback there
you can someone put your phones on mute
if you're not talking
so mayor city council this is mandy gus
with the economic development department
and the business development
program and so next up we have a messiah
valley economic development alliance and
as liz mentioned all of our partners
our top
went into a service agreement last year
and so we wanted to start off our
presentations with kind of an
understanding of what those deliverables
are where they accomplished
before the partners went into
more information so with movida we had
of the deliverables in the contract
accomplished uh just to outline what
those deliverables include was 230 new
jobs uh 7.5 uh
million dollars in payroll 20 million
dollars in capital investment um 25
retention and expansion visits and then
raising funding equal to the city's
contract so that this it was important
to us that the city not be
um the only funder for any of our
partners because we wanted them to have
sustainable
businesses business practices to help
them reach our goals
there were some deliverables that
fell short
one of which was the site visits they
libido was at 14 out of 15 when covet
hit in march which of course
then impacted the ability for folks to
travel and come for site visits and then
there was we had written into the
contract 20 new jobs at the west mesa
industrial park
we didn't get those but we had several
leads which i'm sure devin will talk
more about
but overall we just wanted to paint a
picture for city council so you
understood what those deliverables were
what movita was working towards and one
thing i would like to point out to
council we know that movida is a
regional
group and so these are numbers that we
ask for just in the city
so that we know that the funding from
the city benefits the city
and with that i'm going to turn it over
to davin lopez and he is the president
and ceo of mevita
go ahead and thank you mandy
yeah thank you
thank you mayor city council can you
hear me okay
uh we're having a little bit of feedback
but go ahead and i don't know if it's
you it's probably
counselor florida's
well i'm gonna attempt to share my
screen first and hopefully that comes
across okay
i just want to start off by letting you
know that eric montgomery our vp of
business development is also on the
phone
uh in case there are certain questions i
may turn over to him
uh you know i also want to just thank
mandy for all her effort working with us
this past year she's highly involved in
her organization
uh she attends our board meetings and
she's been a great asset to work with
over the years so
shut up by saying that
um let me move on to the first page this
is really just a summary of what uh
mandy mentioned in terms of what our
measurements are
uh we put this on a dashboard that tries
to uh mimic what we have as a dashboard
to our board and what we represent for
the entire region but this is really
under the contract specifics alone to
show you where we're at during the year
the red line indicates where we would
where we should be at based on the
metrics for the year
and then of course the bars really
indicate
did we perform at that level or not to
meet the the contract of the city so as
as mandy mentioned we have 14 site
visits by companies out of 15 that we
were targeting
of course we were cut off by this
pandemic we're all dealing with so we
really worked with only three quarters
of the year
but i think we had some good results in
that three quarters and quite frankly at
the end of the presentation you'll see
that i think we're positive for going
forward but let me share with you the
metrics here
of the 230 jobs that we were
that we were asked to create we actually
hit 320
uh at payroll we were at 11.7 million so
above the metric that was set for us and
then for capital investment because we
had a lot of new construction or
revamping of buildings
uh we had originally planned for 20
million and we've succeeded that by 43
million or up up to 43 million
which of course adds tremendously to the
uh the new grt that can be created
throughout the year
and then with our retention and
expansion program that's where we we
meet one-on-one and consult with
companies economic-based companies on
how they can expand and grow their
business
our measurement was to meet the 25
throughout the year we met with 27.
let me come back as you will see in the
middle there there's a big goose egg a
west mesa industrial park jobs we were
asked to create 20.
we just did not fulfill that for the
year
uh a little bit a little bit about the
challenges of westminster industrial
park is um
we were challenged that most companies
not all most companies have been looking
at industrial parks they're not looking
at new construction
they're primarily looking at something
existing that they can move into and
that's what we're competing against
across the country
so not having spec space at the west
mesa industrial park has been
challenging um because really we don't
have a timeline a definitive timeline
for construction that we can illustrate
to them and then of course with the
moving constant construction we just
haven't been able to get a developer to
want to
at least build in this climate that we
have
moving forward however we have been
talking with mandy about maybe doing a
hybrid where
we're currently working with a bill
design developer where maybe we can do
some
some upfront choose a parcel do some
upfront permitting and design work on it
and perhaps uh getting it to the point
where we cut three months off the
permitting process so that when we're
talking to a company we're not talking
about a process that's going to take a
year and a half or a year to year and a
half we can maybe talk about something
that's maybe nine to 12 months to build
out
and timing is critical for any company
who's going to be deciding to locate in
a new area but that is going to be
engagement we're going to have to have
with both economic development and
community development to make that work
as a program that we can market
uh this next chart is really our
dashboard for the entire region as a
whole
and i just wanted to show this to you as
a comparison
um because as you can see of the 475
target for the year we were only meeting
422 as a region but again over 300 of
those jobs were with the city of las
cruces entered under that contract so in
that situation i think it was a
successful year for driving new business
and growing new business uh within las
cruces itself
as you know i think we've all we've
shown you over the years we are a
results and metric driven organization
and i just kind of wanted to break down
uh what those numbers look like over a
five year period
the top left hand corner you can see the
comparisons this is as a region not uh
the city of las cruces alone but we
created 422 jobs and you might look
against fiscal year 1819 and say well
that's uh disappointing compared to the
year before but
fiscal year 18 and 19 was a bit of an
anomaly because we welcomed stampede
meat through donata county in that year
that was a thousand jobs that was the
biggest job a single project job creator
in uh new mexico history well over a
decade so we we don't expect that to
happen every year we would like it to
but we don't expect it to happen every
year but if you compare what we did
without that big anomaly compared to
prior years really it wasn't that bad
more importantly i think when you look
at average wages
uh you can see how in this current
fiscal year that just completed the
average wages of the projects that we
brought in compared to prior year
projects actually went up quite a bit
and you know that's what we're striving
for in these conversations we're trying
to
drive new types of projects that have
greater value
and can actually create better income
for our residents of the whole
the bottom two
the bottom two charts they show square
footage absorption in the marketplace
uh over a million square foot absorbed
or built and that is very strong
compared to prior years where companies
were coming in and only
leasing existing space
and then uh
and then when we look at capital
investment we look at about 52 million
dollars in new capital investment which
over the average of the last five years
actually is pretty pretty decent
i wanted to show you this chart
leads by industry
and these are not projects recycling
these are leads so these are companies
that we're talking to they're looking at
the entire region as a county as a whole
before we can narrow it down
specifically to the types of
sites that they need to
make a decision and grow on but i'll
point to the far right you'll see that
that value-added agriculture went up
actually quite a bit compared to the
other categories
that is directly related to the
strategic decision we made after the
hemp industry this past year we had
quite a bit of success in that industry
uh although covet has slowed it down we
do believe it will pick up and grow
again and it's one that we're trying to
foster an environment where
many aspects of the business cradle to
grave can be conducted here in dona ana
county in las cruces to include
everything from growing
to advancement to extraction to consumer
product development that's really our
goal here with the partners that we're
looking at
we've also seen a lot of growth this
year in aerospace it doesn't show on the
leads per se
but when we get down to this final chart
and i'll talk about a couple of projects
we're working on within the aerospace
industry i think that holds a lot of
promise going forward into the new
fiscal year into this new current fiscal
year
um
as with what we do with every year
we run impact analysis we utilize
implant data that's used by economists
and universities across the country
we subscribed to a tool from
a group called
economic impacts out of phoenix
where they actually have created a model
for us that measures job creation and
grt
collection based on
the results of our current fiscal year
that we report
um so
in any
in any other year i would say this is a
phenomenal opportunity because of the
projects we created
the tool tells us that over 108 million
dollars
in new household spending
should take place in the local economy
when i say local i mean within donate
county over the next five years and you
will see
if dona ana county residents spend their
money in the same way that they spent
their money in the past
these are the areas that will benefit
the small businesses that will benefit
from it throughout the region
um and this is what it's all about i
mean what we try to do in creating
economic based jobs is really that new
dollar flow coming into the area where
that new dollar flow is spent in all of
these different areas that help support
local industries throughout the county
i do have an asterisk at the bottom
we do not know how consumer
purchasing patterns are going to be
changing
over the next
at least the next six months to a year
uh because of kobe we just don't know i
mean
uh i saw a report by the state last week
that illustrated that because of the
federal unemployment assistance that on
average
new mexico residents over the last four
months were actually earning more than
that than they were making pre-covid
i think that has kept our grt
strong for the most part
but now that this may be ending that
their next slide that they had showed me
was without that federal assistance
on average new mexico residents will be
earning less than what they did
pre-covet so i think we have some
difficult times ahead and that's why i
have an asterisk here that
this may not be the best predictor
because there's no model out there that
can predict what's happening right now
in terms of new tax base and spending
because of kovit
let me talk about the coven 19 impacts
on us if you don't mind
we had to make significant marketing and
business development shifts and i'll go
into that a little more detail but uh
suffice it to say that
march april and may are our busy time of
the year for traveling the trade shows
and we had 10 trade shows on the
calendar that have basically gotten
mixed overnight
and i'll talk about how we shifted in in
this new environment
secondarily
when coca did take place we
really went into the needs of what our
investors our partners in the overall
community was telling us
uh they were concerned about what was
happening with covet and the information
that was out there to digest
we really went into informational
outreach uh there's two things two areas
that we concentrated in the most
one was uh illustrating remote work
opportunities that were available to our
local residents even if the employer was
anywhere else in the country or in the
world
on a daily basis our staff was
investigating remote remote work
opportunities we were posting them
avidly on facebook and other social
media
and we hope we hope some of our
residents were able to benefit from it
we have no tracking measurement for that
however
and then eric actually spent quite a bit
of time in terms of digesting the the
loan assistance program for the cares
act
uh designing some informational packets
and getting that information out to uh
to not just economic based companies but
a lot of the service industries around
the county as well
and
had many conversations as a result
because of that again these are not
things that are on our normal day-to-day
operations but it was a need that we
felt we had a pivot to um going forward
then we started to begin to access the
damage uh we started looking at consumer
purchasing behaviors we did two surveys
which we provided that information to
local businesses so that they could they
could better understand what their
futures might look like based on
consumer purchasing changes that are
taking place
with your assistance of course in
support we
we conducted a flash assessment by ce
labs both at the city and the county
level
we are now looking at how we can
utilize that tool going forward
and turn it into a measuring index to
to go forward how do we measure
lost jobs because of covet and use it as
kind of an instrument like the dow jones
moving up and down and we're trying to
work with ce labs right now to figure
out how we do that
uh and over the past few months we've
been observing a lot of the
behavioral changes that are taking place
in industry across the country that
might provide new opportunities
for us to look at that will create new
economic based jobs for las cruces and
donate county and i'll talk about that
in a little bit more detail
but first let me get to our marketing
efforts through the year
as i mentioned our trade show and travel
were completely cancelled
we had to move quickly into really
digital media marketing
which is newer for us but we moved very
aggressively first we conducted an in
mail linkedin in mail targeted
advertising campaign
where we constantly where we
concentrated on focused industries that
we're looking at here in the city to
grow like video game development the
hemp industry uh aerospace and then we
had a
general
uh message to uh in mail message to um
sea level
uh corporate executives basically on the
quality of life of las cruces
and through that engagement we were able
to reach out to almost 40 000 corporate
executives across the country
uh then what we also did once we knew
that our trade shows were cancelled we
started to purchase a number of email
attendee lists from those trade shows
and we started to reach out to them with
messaging directly again that was within
game development with an unmanned air
system and then within the outdoor
recreational marketplace
uh through that marketing effort we hit
almost 71 000 uh
executives within those industries
um to let you know what lead generation
actually looked like because of this if
you go down to the bottom of the chart
this is a year by year comparison this
this year over last year
and you'll see that the the further
right line the lighter line we actually
have very good lead generation compared
to the year before but then you get to
march and you see it just drops down to
zero
what we were worried about there we that
that was a leading indicator for us that
we thought you know we're going to have
many rocky roads ahead in the coming
months because of kovit but you'll see
that in april and may we spike it right
back up again in terms of our lead
generation and i think that has to do
with the fact that we pivoted very
quickly uh we were aggressive in moving
to these new online market marketing
forums and mediums and as an overall
result we saw a 23.6 increase in
projects in 2019 over 2018.
looking at industry behavior and what it
means to
to donate county and las cruces and
where we see opportunities there's a lot
more analysis that we have to do with
within these areas but this is what
we're seeing initially
some of this corresponds with what tracy
mentioned earlier and some of the
training they're doing but we obviously
all know about the shift to work at home
and now we're seeing exactly the
companies type of companies and type of
industries
that are willing to remain within that
model and make it permanent remote work
opportunities
we think this you know
we've talked about this in the past it's
just now with covid
um
the need for this as a very targeted
strategy is coming out but we do believe
it becomes a greater opportunity if we
can expose our residents to
work from home opportunities that really
can be given to them
from any company anywhere in the world
i think that shows a lot of promise and
and along with our university
we'd like to see what we can do to
really shore that up
uh there were a lot of supply chain
disruptions that have taken place and um
we've heard about this uh you might have
heard about this but because of uh
inventory challenges and disruptions uh
companies out of asia that manufacture
for a us consumer
now realize the need to be either in the
united states or closer to the united
states
therefore we see a lot more of the
possibility of onshore that means
companies coming into the united states
or near shore meaning coming to mexico
which we benefit from
but along with all that manufacturing
we've been reading about the need for
700 750 million new square footage of
warehousing needs just for inventory
stockpiling that companies are going to
be requiring so
based on the region that we're in with
our partners and what is
we want to we want to look much more
strategically how
donaiana county as a whole
and
what is together we can become the
single destination for both onshore
and near shoring and of course with our
us being on i-10 and i-25 being a
primary area for the stockpiling of
inventory as well so for for future
warehousing
uh we've heard a lot about food chain
disruptions um we believe this leads to
the need for more companies and more
regions to be looking at food security
which i think has the opportunity to
grow our value out of agriculture
not only agriculture from
the point of produce but also from
our beef and cattle as well so that's
one thing we'll be looking at going
forward
and then skill set migrations
uh going along with what tracy talked
about earlier
we need skill sets and an abundance of
skill sets in this area to attract and
grow even existing businesses that are
here
um there's a couple strategies that i
think we should be looking at i've
talked to the state about this over the
past years again i just think because of
covet it's emerging there's more states
now where people are exiting
new mexico may actually be a desirable
state for that talent to come i think
las cruces would be the best destination
in the state for them to want to migrate
to but the ability to not only grow our
existing talent but hopefully we we
benefit from an inflow of new talent
migration i think would be very
beneficial to our economic development
efforts going forward and something we
will be looking at as well
that being said let me uh let me give
you what i think is uh
why we're a little bit bullish for this
year quite frankly
these are projects that movita has been
working on
and
the
x-axis illustrates
our confidence in being able to close
them here in las cruces and donate
county now some of that is a gut feel
some of it is we know that we've been
narrowed down to maybe two or three
locations
but some of it is just a gut feel based
on the conversations we're having how
we're moving forward with the projects
and the feedback we're getting
um so the further right we go into this
chart the more confidence we have that
we can close some of these projects
now at the very top if you look at the
y-axis we're starting at a timeline q1
means right in here and now this quarter
of the new fiscal year our ability to
close them as we go down to q4 that of
course gets into march to june of next
calendar year
so if you look at the number of projects
we have that's in that top top right
hand quadrant that's a very good sign
and what i really like about how this is
shaping up and it can't i can't we can't
bank on this
um
changes can uh can take place daily
um the new quarantine orders for example
have slowed down some of our new site
visits that wanted to come in and really
look at the sites that we were selecting
for them
uh but this is a good indicator of what
might come we have aerospace related we
have high-tech related we have
manufacturing and uh and a little bit of
value-added agriculture as well
and the size of the circles indicates
the number of jobs that could
potentially come with those projects
uh one in the last three weeks before
when we made this chart with about three
weeks ago but one new project within the
last three weeks has now jumped into
that quadrant as well
so
we're bullish about
closing projects this fiscal year
but keep in mind
most of these projects have taken
probably about nine months to a year to
develop
so part of our concern in not only
trying to close these projects here
is
now re-drumming up our pipeline
for next fiscal year because that's what
we're going to be worried about the the
longer it takes for us to get to trade
shows the longer it takes for us to be
engaging with site selectors on a
regular basis then our pipeline starts
to get a little bit slower along the way
we do have some ideas on how we're going
to overcome that for this fiscal year
which i'll be more than happy to talk
about in more detail if needed but
basically i wanted to give you a rundown
of what happened this past year
where we're at and where we think we're
going to go in this currency
and with that i'll open it up to any
questions that i might be able to answer
thanks to evan
uh councillor beta stewie
thank you thank you devon um for those
uh that presentation
um if you wouldn't mind going back to
your uh well to the pipeline um or maybe
you can just ask how many of those jobs
in the works are in las cruces and how
many are
for the region
so let's go back so the first dashboard
is based off of our metrics specifically
for las cruces
yes oh i'm sorry maybe i wasn't as
specific it's just for the last slide on
upcoming um items um how many of those
upcoming items would be for las cruces
and how many or for the region
um without trying to do the calculation
in my head uh one two three
five of those seven uh five four of
those six projects would be lost
okay
and then um
with the numbers of the jobs it looked
like um there was 230 new jobs that came
in to las cruces over the last year um
with your help and guidance
um from those jobs or there's companies
how many of those came in
um that needed assistance with
incentives such as lita or any others
well let me and just for clarification
230 was our target
it's actually 320 jobs that were created
um and i think it might be helpful to
give a breakdown of the types of
companies they were
um because
no matter how many times i i'll say it
we work with economic based job creation
and not all of them are new recruiting
companies so in this case
three of the companies that we work with
as a whole and that gets back to the
overall numbers for the the county as a
whole which includes lost courses
three of those projects were actually
existing companies that we helped grow
uh three of them were local
entrepreneurs we worked up we worked
with to help them with their startup
activity
and three of them were actually
recruiting new companies coming to the
region
so it's a nice diversification of the
economic-based jobs that were created
one was very large that was rich welded
182 jobs that they had company
but the rest were all between
you know five and fifty jobs um that
that were announced by each of those
companies so
the spectrum of the companies that we're
supporting is really across the board
different needs different size needs
different employee needs different
industry needs
and i'm sorry going back to your
original question
yeah thank you
it was how many of those companies
used uh incentives to either grow or
come here
i would say i'm thinking six of those
nine actually used in sales
exactly
you
and if you have it available um if not
it's something i'd love to see
afterwards um but kind of the the wages
of the different types of companies that
you were able to bring in what those um
medium or averages are for wages
so the the average overall was a 1770
that is illustrated i don't know if you
can see my pointer there
um
that is the overall average wages of all
of those projects we brought in
um if you wanted them broken down um as
to not
as to not uh violate
our confidentiality with the companies
or waiting until the job training
incentive program information actually
is is disclosed by the state
um i could probably share with those
with you one on one but
right now the average is what i have
available through life
thank you yes i'd love to be able to see
that and how that relates
um
kind of
average worker to those in the in higher
management and what those look like too
yeah absolutely but i will say um
some of those higher wages are really
driven by the hemp industry
so
you know we can talk about job averages
across the board of one single industry
but
um that's why i'm excited about what
what camp has to offer because as i
mentioned in the past
and earlier in the in the presentation
this is really one of those industries
that we can we can grow and excuse the
pun but we can grow a vertically
integrated industry all here in this
region we can't say that with every
industry when you have supply chain that
comes from all around the world in order
to fabricate one product that we see on
the shelves nearby this is one of those
areas that i think we can do it all here
and which boats some exciting um it's an
exciting asset that we can talk to
industry about because they understand
the benefit of being close to where it's
grown
being close to where it's processed
being close to where we can have
advancement in the science of it
and uh really lead to pharmaceutical or
consumer products along the way
okay thank you um and i'd love to chat
later about some
ideas and just further questions but
thanks and thank you
thank you counselor
okay well uh devin thank you for your
presentation as usual it's always um i
think our for the amount that we give
you our return on investment is uh
is a minimal i mean you guys you guys
really make it so
you guys do a great job and we
appreciate all that you do and and keep
things um just keep things running
thank you mayor thank you councillor for
your support and uh thank you for your
team this effort to work with us this
past year i think it's been a beneficial
relationship for all
thanks dan
okay it looks like the last one is film
las cruces is that right uh
mandy
that's correct again i'm mandy gus with
economic development and so for our
final presentation we have
um a presentation from film las cruces i
want to just go over again
their metrics
hopefully you can see my my screen now
um and filmos chris has actually met a
hundred percent of their deliverables uh
and i'm just going to list out what
those were
um they had to get 36 production days of
filming in las cruces
with um those productions spending at
least 240 000 in our community they had
to do eight uh
film las cruces manages all the film
permitting in the city and so they had
to do at least eight non-student film
permits
they had to do a survey that showed
sixty percent of respondents um saying
they had a positive experience with film
las cruces
they have a crew database that we wanted
to have at least 60 in crew database so
because we're working on growing the
workforce in las cruces for film
film las cruces has a program of film
friendly businesses and we ask that they
added 25 new businesses to that database
we ask them to
have at least 294 locations in their
location database that they use as a
recruiting tool and lastly similar to
the past
two partners we ask that they raise
funding equal to the city's contract and
so again film las cruces was able to
meet all of those deliverables and with
that i'm going to turn it over to their
director who is don gray if he's on the
line
i am thank you mandy thank you
this is don gray for the record i'm the
director of film las cruces
and thank you mayor and counselors for
giving us the opportunity to present
today appreciate that
um since i'm relatively new here uh i'm
going to um
make some remarks and then i'm going to
hand it over to our film liaison john
foley for some more of the details and
numbers involved
um
you know i was trying to think of well
so i haven't been here that long so i
was trying to think of what could i
contribute to an annual report for film
las cruces
and um so i made some notes that i'll
that i'll read through here
uh about that and let me start with this
i i actually could probably be the one
of the poster boys for
what the film industry brings in terms
of opportunities for new mexicans
uh in the early 2000s i was a single
father
of a child
i
was running my own business doing
photography and printing and not raking
very much money at it at the time
i did not have any benefits i did not
have health care for my child
and i saw that the film
that the state had passed film
incentives and i took my photography
book over to the state film office
and i showed it to them and they said
well you can work in the industry you
could be a location scout
and then i asked them to explain what
the world a location scout did
and they did and
within a month i had my first job in the
film industry and i've worked in the
film industry
ever since uh for coming up on 20 years
with a good wage
with benefits and with thank goodness
health care for for my family
so almost 20 years of experience and for
14 of those years i worked at the state
film office i worked with both the santa
fe and the albuquerque film offices and
with film liaisons around the state
i've been a computing map contributing
member of the association of film
commissioners international and have
taught and participated on panels for uh
for them both nationally and
internationally
um
i've interacted with film officers from
all over the world and i can say with
confidence that i would put film loss
group las cruces up against any of them
the agenda and mission of this
organization meets and in many cases
exceeds that of the other film offices
even many of the film offices in our
very own state
and i think that as a community you
should be
very proud of the level and the quality
of engagement
that you've built here
i'm going to use the
word film a lot in my presentation
and i kind of lament that in a way
because
film is sort of an outdated term and it
doesn't really encompass what the
industry is all about
obviously almost nobody's shooting on
film anymore but we've been calling it
the film industry since the late 1800s
and it's a kind of a hard habit for us
to break
but obviously the the film industry
encompasses
uh feature films television
online media products game development
imaging development special effects uh
it's a huge worldwide industry
and so uh so every time i say film in
the film industry please substitute that
with uh all of those other observations
about the possibilities that the
industry brings actually
uh most filament offices are charged
with marketing their areas to the
industry and often not much else film
las cruces certainly does those things
with direct marketing outreach a
comprehensive location database and
local business directory and an enviable
social media reach that exceeds some
pretty tough competition as john will
show you uh in a moment
um
and film las cruces has recruited
high-profile productions to the region
and made las cruces part of the
conversation for film production
in the state
um but film luscosis goes
above and beyond that uh rather narrow
film office mission
uh we've been very active in workforce
training locally uh
we need to build a
film worker
uh workforce here in las cruces uh that
obviously is one of our priorities uh
i'm
often admonished for doing this chicken
and egg thing but this is definitely one
of those industries where it makes it
easier to build the crew base if you
have work and it makes it easier to get
to work if you have the crew base so we
but we need to push on both of those
wagons at the same time
so
so we worked on that we established a
scholarship fund
the creation of film las cruces studios
as a place to do training
and the deal to bring sin a lease
equipment company to to uh film las
cruces studios
for educational use and that helped
bring donna dona community college film
technician training program from near
zero in enrollment to now near maximum
capacity
um when i hear
dr torres talk about things like
upskilling and re-skilling and even
short-term training i just think that
you know the film industry is the
perfect pipeline for those kinds of
efforts there actually are today
already
many people in las cruces that are
already qualified
to work in the film industry that have
transferable transferable skills from
working in other industries
and we want to put them to work
sometimes they do need some some small
amount of training so they understand
the industry and the language and the
culture of the industry and how it works
uh but after that they're ready to go to
work um
and and interestingly enough you know a
film project is is this really
interesting thing it's a whole group of
people of very disparate um uh talents
and creativity
all working together and when it works
together they create a beautiful piece
of artwork really for all of us to
appreciate
um in in the film industry there are no
low skill jobs there are only different
skill jobs
all of the jobs are of equal uh value
because if any of them dropped away you
wouldn't finish the project
so i find that kind of a discussion very
interesting and exciting
flc spearheaded the recently announced
designation by the southern workforce
solutions board of directors of film
jobs as a need for uh for the area in
the region and this is huge because
what this does is it opens up
federal funds
um
for those who want to study
film film industry and related jobs for
film industry and related jobs
um and it paves the way for donating
community college and nmsu to qualify
their film and digital media programs
with the workforce solutions um office
as eligible training providers which
they're in the process of doing right
now and what it what that does is opens
up federal dollars
for students and those federal dollars
can cover tuition can cover child care
transportation equipment and and all
kinds of other costs associated with
getting their education so that was a
very exciting thing to do
took a lot of
meetings and a lot of pushing in a lot
of bureaucracy but we got that done
that's now specified now and those funds
will be made available
uh flc was was really instrumental in
lobbying the state legislature for the
inclusion of that five percent
additional tax credit for shooting in
areas of the state other than
albuquerque or santa fe
and don't
underestimate the power of that
additional five percent by the way you
know when i was at the film office
before that five percent taxed credit
i would basically get the directive as
the locations coordinator not to show
their director anything that was outside
of the santa fe or albuquerque area
they didn't want to travel outside of
those areas
as soon as we got the additional five
percent
that conversation changed to well now
we're actually willing to look at other
places outside of those two areas it was
a huge game changer in terms of those
conversations
um
and also remember this you know
um
some
part the main intention that that five
percent actually was to create a
situation where productions could feel
like they could bring crew from
albuquerque and santa fe to areas like
las cruces to produce their projects
and that's because we don't have enough
crew here yet
um and so that offsets the costs of
hotels room putting people up and per
diem and that sort of thing but what
will happen is over time as we build out
our crew base more which we will do what
will happen is eventually
that won't be used for reimbursing the
production they won't think of it as a
reimbursement for uh bringing crew from
albuquerque they'll think of it as an
additional financial incentive to
filming with local crews in las cruces
and then you'll have a competitive
advantage over albuquerque and santa fe
so um and the other thing i want to also
point out by the way is we do talk a lot
about film crew jobs as being the
economic benefit
but that's not the only jobs created by
the film industry because
uh you know the film industry runs on
the backs of
small businesses the the businesses that
service the needs of the film industry
typically
are
businesses of
five employees or fewer those are all of
the local businesses that uh film
production needs
our media production needs to to live
and and work in a community
and so
so they actually create are creating
jobs by creating demands with local
businesses
so that five percent what's interesting
about that five percent by the way is
that five percent is for expenditures
made locally in las cruces only
so you can't rent a truck in albuquerque
and drive it to las cruces and get an
additional five percent by shooting here
and using that truck you have to find
that truck locally so that's actually
going to create other business
opportunities locally as well
uh so as as as many mentioned flca has
met or exceeded all the contract metrics
required one of the contracts provisions
is for us to match the funds provided by
the city last year we almost doubled
that amount by raising an additional 170
thousand dollars from uh donaiana
community college dona ana county nmsu
and the artsy film union as well
um we've also been a good pandemic
partner obviously a lot of things
changed in the pandemic but we stayed
hard at work we produced the at-home
movie contest for locals to uh to enter
and win win prizes and get exposure and
have their films and projects
shown
and we also partnered with the
governor's office to produce four wear a
mask psas using three local filmmakers
and a filmmaker from the navajo nation
as well you can see those on television
now and social media outlets as well oh
and by the way uh film oscars this also
manages maintains and markets a 75 000
square foot stage facility
uh which i can guarantee you no other
film office is doing um along with a lot
of the other things that that i uh
talked about
so has the pen date pandemic changed
what we do
well yes or no obviously the industry is
in at a standstill right now worldwide
by the way yes there's some pockets of
some things happening here and there
they're sort of test
cases for production moving forward but
uh we are at a standstill but the
planning for when they come back is not
at a standstill at all
so we're going to continue doing the
kind of outreach and marketing that
we've been doing all along
um and frankly honestly personally i've
never been busier than i am right now
because as soon as the we get the okay
to go back into production there's pent
up demand for content and the industry
will come back in a big way
and we're just going to make sure that
we're positioning las cruces to be in
that mix and in that conversation
um
but we are trying to also anticipate you
know the film
film industry in general is pretty
brilliant they're gonna find ways to
make content there's no question about
that there's demand they have the money
they're gonna find ways and so we're
trying to position film las cruces to be
in that conversation as well so the last
time we had one of these working
meetings um i brought up the idea of
this led based virtual production um
which could be done in facilities in las
cruces um could be done in 2100 south
valley could be done in the
um purpose-built film studio um but lots
cruises is already in the conversation
the pandemic is actually as i mentioned
last time has sort of presented some
unique opportunities for las cruces and
um we're just making sure that we stay
in that um
in that conversation
um
let me just wrap up my comments when
turn it over to john with this
i don't know if you saw recently uh in
the paper that the garrity relations
public relations group did a survey of
industries in new mexico and found that
the film industry has a 70 percent
favorability rating
amongst new mexicans
um tying for number three overall
interestingly enough with community
colleges in the state
um
that is in my mind an extraordinary
number
of favorability
um the study says that that favorability
cuts across all demographic group groups
by the way
state economic development department
um attributed the number to the fact
that the industry provides high-paying
career path for local students who want
to work in the inten entertainment
industry
and it also indicates support we hear
from business business owners who
receive benefits from in-state
production spending
on goods and services services
and and i agree with those conclusions
and and not to to that i'll also add
this about the industry
i think that the high favorability
rating of the industry comes from the
high visible nature of the industry
people are drawn to the film and media
industry
media content is a part of our lives
and when a locality works to bring the
industry sector into the community in
addition to immediate economic impact
they receive a positive exposure benefit
and not just in new mexico by the way
but a positive exposure benefit that
can't really be bought in marketing or
advertising dollars
so um thank you for indulging me in that
and my contribution even though i'm new
in the game here i appreciate your time
very much and your support and then i
will hand it over to john for
more details
well thank you very much don
so john are you ready
uh yes ma'am
good afternoon mayor council my name is
john foley i am the film liaison for
film las cruces and i've been with them
for about three and a half years now uh
please bear with me for one second while
i figure out how to share my screen
i've never been able to figure it out
myself
it looks not too bad let's see
i know how to do it you just won't let
me
all right do we uh now see the uh report
on everybody's screen we do
fantastic give me one second
all right well thank you don for uh
giving that summary of film las cruces
and what we have done over the last year
once again we are film las cruces we are
a non-profit 501 c 3 organization
we have four employees um
two of them are full-time that would be
myself and don gray and then we have two
part-time employees christine shepard
our operations coordinator and guillermo
portillo he is our studio coordinator
and we have a board of directors that
you can see here senator steinborn is
our president matt burns from the acc is
our vice president and jerry rozaska
our metrics are broken down into five
deliverables uh that is develop and
execute and then develop execute and
implement a promotional program process
approve and manage all film permitting
on behalf of the city
develop partnerships with local
institution local educational
institutions to create and fully grow a
trained workforce
our film friendly business program is
how we list all of the local support
services available for film productions
and we provide site location assistance
within the city each of these
deliverables have metrics associated
with them and i will dive deeper into
them throughout the presentation
uh so here you see the the type of
inquiries that we receive they're
typically
location driven crew vendor or location
scouts that are held in person
we receive multiple types of inquiries
throughout the year these inquiries come
from projects preparing for a production
in las cruces as well as projects that
we are trying to lure to our area
in addition to the inquiries that we
receive we actively market to film
industry professionals and content
producers this includes directly
reaching out to funded projects with the
tools like variety insights and imdb pro
another important piece to this is our
ability to foster relationships with
producers and decision makers so having
don with his 20 years of experience and
20 years worth of relationship building
is very beneficial to our organization
uh so included in that we do marketing
and outreach materials
um we that with the help of our new
director don gray we have increased our
newsletter industry contacts from 360 to
over 1300 contacts
our marketing and outreach materials
include pitch decks promotional videos
and a doubles4 campaign
and here you can see a few examples of
some of the marketing materials that we
put out
the graphic on your left is a piece of a
pitch deck specifically created for a
contracted los angeles marketing
representative ken haber who we worked
with at the end of last year to
be on the ground in los angeles
marketing the city of las cruces to the
film and television industry
the material on your right is a snapshot
of our latest pitch deck
which takes an in-depth look at why
productions and studio management
companies should be interested in las
cruces
uh so with one-third of the fiscal year
unavailable for film and media
productions we were still able to
surpass our goals set by the city's
economic development department with 653
worker days 50 production days and a
direct spend from productions of 1.1
million dollars
these are a few of the productions with
the largest direct spend here in las
cruces the feature film death in texas
tops the list with an estimated direct
spend of 914 thousand dollars
these numbers are derived from a
combination of production surveys afci
guidelines that's the association of
film commissioners international and
conversations with producers working on
the project
if you would like to learn more about
how we track this data i believe our
operations coordinator christine shepard
is still on the call and will be
available for questions after the
presentation
and continued this is a dashboard of our
goals
and the metrics that we track
as you can see we continue to provide a
good roi on the city's investment we've
matched the city's funding with other
funds raised over two to one these
funding partners include dona ana county
dona ana community college nmsu and the
new mexico film union ayati local 4-h
we have managed to exceed our targets in
our service agreement for production
spend worker days location database
development among others
we have a very active social media
following
often exceeding the reach of film
offices all over the country including
our own new mexico film office and on
the right you can see a snapshot of kind
of what that looks like the the bar
chart on the right
is um the reach that we hit so that's
the amount of shares uh comments likes
that we would get within a week time
period so that is a snapshot of a week i
believe in june
uh we have able uh throughout uh uh this
last year we have reached over 310 000
people uh through instagram uh facebook
um and we have managed seventy thousand
page views on our website and we are
currently sitting at over four hundred
thousand video views
sorry give me one second
uh like don said uh we have been very
busy uh once the state home orders it we
had worked with the state of new mexico
city of las cruces and new mexico state
university on a series of masked psas
and all of those psas online have been
viewed over 150 000 times
and at the beginning of the state home
orders we produced a very successful
home movie contest with 21 entries
including many young filmmakers from the
las cruces public school system we had
over 600 votes from community members
here in las cruces and dona ana county
and five of those entries came from
families
we are also tasked with handling the
city's filming permits uh and in the
last year we did seven production
related permits
somebody give me one second
uh and so with these permits they
typically entail street closures crime
scenes in public view and any film
activity taking place on city property
and out of those seven uh film permits
they were five different uh productions
and out of the five productions that
received film permits from our office
the two that responded gave us an
average rating of nine out of ten on the
entire permitting process
and so when when we work on uh building
up the local film workforce a big goal
of ours is to continue and foster
relationships with nmsu dacc the bridge
and the las cruces public school system
we just like don said succeeded in
getting the state to make film and
digital media priorities opening up
federal funds to pay for training
as part of this we're working with dacc
and others to get their programs to
become eligible uh providers for the
training funds that are available uh
this will result in growing the funded
training opportunities for local
residents as well as the types of
training that can be available
and our crew database uh of specifically
to las cruces residents sits at 102 and
overall we have about 150 listings
so not only does film las cruces studios
help us attract productions to las
cruces it is a very important tool in
our workforce development efforts this
includes workshops training space for
donated community college and msu
students and is home to the film
technician training program
and we continue to partner with cinelys
they're one of the largest gripen
lighting providers in the world and they
hold a package at our studio space that
is free for
student use so that's students at dcc
nmsu or lcps
at the beginning of the fiscal year we
partnered with the bridge on an
externship program with sarah campbell
and stephen gabaldon from chaparral high
school
film las cruces was one of three
organizations involved with the
inaugural externship program this effort
was very successful the teachers came up
with a blueprint for how to get a job in
film
we took that film or we took that
framework edit it and it is now
available on our website and it is a
very comprehensive look at
at how you get started on looking at
jobs in the film industry and what it
takes to
kind of succeed in that arena
our film friendly business program is
quickly becoming a go-to tool for
productions filming in all of southern
new mexico we currently have 52 local
businesses signed up
and you know people think of the film
industry as dragging in everything from
la but that is not the case as they want
to take full advantage of the new mexico
film rebate that don talked about and
according to the motion picture
association alliance 87 percent of the
businesses impacted by film are small
businesses that employ fewer than 10
people
and a good example of
a local businesses servicing the film
industry in las cruces came when death
in texas had a male schedule mishap and
they approached sie senor with a very
large last minute order uh they were
hesitant at first to accept the large
order uh but were able to overcome the
challenge and provide over 80 meals with
a quick turnaround in addition to that
the film alone accounted for two months
of hotel rooms and our yearly total for
room nights ended up at 1562.
and so one of the last bullet points
that we hit is a site location within
the city um so first you know i'd like
to uh close the question you know what
does site location assistance entail uh
it's not cut and dry but a typical
location assistant starts uh with
receiving a script or a location
breakdown from there we take the the
locations that are inside of the script
develop a location package uh spark the
interest in the director or the producer
get them down here for a location scout
uh we scout local businesses and the
local uh
locations for these uh filming
activities to take place um and then
from there uh we start working with um
the schools to get uh some um students
involved in sets in in pa roles and
often times like in death in texas uh as
high as roles um
uh even taking in union positions so
there was at least one student on death
in texas uh that became a union member
just from this one film
and the toughest challenge we face right
now in regards to tracking productions
is our inability to host in-person
location scouts fortunately we have
built an expansive location database
that has allowed us to get directors and
producers excited about the potential
looks available in las cruces and the
use of location package is a normal tool
that we use to market the city of las
cruces but it is quickly proving it's
worth now more than ever
and i believe with that i will open it
up to questions
okay well we have counselor sorg and
then counselor beta stubby
counselor
yes of course um
just got to get the mouse moving
um
so
uh
i don't know i think some of our newer
members in the council may not realize
that
las cruces has had a film liaison all
the time on the council except for when
um
there's been some
uh people that have left the job and the
time it takes to hire somebody new but
it's always been there and so having
this
film las cruces uh
501c3
really helps out the city as you can see
from all the things that are happening
there
but i also want to shout out to don and
john
excellent presentation excellent work
and uh but not to forget chris and
guillermo uh part of a
a big team there
um
i i just have a question that i think
maybe staff can answer a little better
than than john or
or don
last june just in june we had a
a meeting where we were discussing the
funding for a cinematic infrastructure
and we had a long discussion about
what to do with the the funding and what
to do with film and and so on and so
forth um
but i just wonder if there's been any
movement on
the
use of that funding um one of the main i
believe correct me if i'm wrong
john and don
uh one of the
things that we could use some of that
money for is to sound proofing the 2100
valley
uh facility has there been any movement
any action done on that
mayor
yes so dr martinez this is christelle
martinez economic development director
for the record mayor uh councillor zorg
we have explored uh whether or not this
equipment
is an eligible expense within capital
appropriation
and we have also been working on a lease
agreement that would allow us to list
this out to a non-profit organization
and define
a possible model for that to be
a doable solution for both of us film
las cruces but also the city and now
running to anti-donation issues so we're
still looking into that
okay
okay thank you
um
that that's all i have mr mayor right
now
okay thank
mm-hmm counselor beta stevie
thank you and thank you don and john i
know i sent in some questions earlier um
on the weekend and so a lot of them
you've touched based upon um i did have
a
couple questions on
your roster of um eligible uh employees
how many of those are unionized or union
eligible
the employees but the for the production
workers
yes uh so mayor council um so we we
don't have a hard number on the actual
union members for the city of las cruces
but it does hover around 20 and that
includes sag the screen actors guild pga
the producers guild of america and
ayatse local 480.
okay awesome thank you
and i know
film is going to be looking a little bit
different
right now
i know
and i'm only saying this from what my
brother does and it's in la but they're
basically working in pods
um where they're able to do the small
productions um and everything's testing
um there you go test right beforehand
you get there you work um you don't
leave your little pod unit
um so that everything's really contained
um are there any talks of being able to
um bring those types of productions this
way um during the time since kova is
going to be with us for a while and i
think that you know as a state we're
doing
better than other places um as far as
testing tracing and so i don't know what
those types of talks look like
yeah
mayor and
uh council
thanks so much for that question i i
you're absolutely right that those are
the ongoing discussions your the pods
system seems to be what they're working
on they're sort of
subtesting it with some smaller uh
productions there actually are some
larger productions that are actually
using those protocols mostly overseas in
other countries other countries that
maybe have lower covert rates than us
right now unfortunately and also i would
point out too in other countries that
are somewhat less litigious than we are
in this country
there are still some insurance issues to
work out uh with
with some of these i do think that
probably some of the bigger studios are
actually going to end up self-insuring
or maybe i think ultimately probably
what's going to have to happen is
there's going to have to be a federal
solution for covid not just for it for
the filming film and television industry
but for a lot of different industries
industries to protect people against
covet claims um but yes there
look there are definite there are
productions right now that are
tapping on the door that are waiting for
us to open to be open and that are ready
to hit the ground using um good protocol
procedures as soon as we're ready to
they're ready to be open they're they're
coming back for sure thank you also i
want to say
councilman uh
you mentioned your father who was a
welder which by the way is one of those
those jobs in the industry that is
always in great demand so if he's
looking for work i could probably find
him work in the industry he has
transferable skills
thank you i'll let him know using him
for child care though right now oh okay
well that's that's that's really
qualified
well thank you um one of my last
questions that i have for you just for
today and i'd love to be able to chat
with you guys more at another time
um but i know that
when i visited over
the election cycle you and had invited a
lot of candidates and stuff out and you
had talked about
kind of that small business roster
business preferred
uh items um at the time
um
businesses on those lists it was
encouraged for them to give an
additional um discount or incentive
i was little
hesitant about that but is that still a
current
practice for them or and how does that
look like for businesses to get on your
list
it is no longer a requirement and i had
the same une uneasiness that you did
about it i think
and my uneasiness was that we want to
identify any and all
local support services and businesses
that could be engaged in the film
industry period regardless of whether
they're offering discounts or not now
the the the offering of discounts
certainly sort of gives us another
incentive to pass along it's it's like
having an additional incentive that
makes las cruces um uh
more interesting to filmmakers and you
can you can literally figure that in oh
they give a 10 discount on this service
which we normally pay this amount okay
so we've saved some money actually by
going to las cruces so we're still
encouraging that and i would encourage
any local businesses that are interested
in listing to at least consider that if
that's a realistic process
probability for them but um but i ask
that that that provision actually be
removed um so that any local business
whatsoever could actually list in our
directory because we want
the first thing is what does it look
like the second thing is is can we live
there can can we actually get all of the
services that we need to to exist in las
cruces that's the next question out of
any producer's mouth and so we want to
be able to identify all those local
support services plus as i mentioned
before if you want your five percent
additional you have to source it locally
you can't drag it from somewhere else
and get the additional five percent
fantastic well thank you and thank you
both for the presentation
thank you
thank you counselor
okay anybody else
okay well thanks john uh and don we
appreciate your presentation and um we
appreciate all that you guys are doing
now it's amazing how you all are able to
put things together like you do and and
bring oh look looks like counselor
flotus has a question here council
flores oh i just have a comment i just
want to say hi to john
and welcome to dawn and i
haven't been to those meetings in a long
time
but um i just want to thank you
john for the wonderful work you've done
along with chris and guillermo i haven't
even met so it's been quite a while
and don i met you at a presentation you
did for a municipality i think it was
truth or consequences or
i remember talking about you and how
wonderful it was and then lo and behold
here you are yes i am
so welcome don and thank you so much
john for all the wonderful work um
and um i really salute you and kudos to
you
along with chris because for a while
there it was just you
and then chris came along and then so
the two of you got to uh pity have a lot
of pity for each other you had your
little pity parties but um seriously
though i'm kidding aside i've done a
wonderful job and i just want to thank
you the two of you know and well the
four of you
for all of your efforts thank you thank
you
okay thank you counselor well um again
thank you for again this presentation
and we appreciate all that you do and um
just keep up the good work thank you
mayor thank you man
okay so
looks like this is it uh dr martinez
we finished
the presentations
mayor it's uh this is griselda martinez
for the record i couldn't find the
buttons yes sir this concludes the ed
partners presentation uh and i really
want to thank you all for for staying
engaged and for the wonderful comments
you had for all of us
okay fantastic
all right well if there's nothing
further i guess that's it david we'll go
ahead and close the meeting
for this meeting uh we do i believe we
have an agenda setting yeah i'll stick
around for that very good thank you man
if there's nothing further entertain a
motion to adjourn move to a german
sorry
second whatever
okay um motion made by councillor sorg
second i believe by councillor flores
correct
okay
all those in favor signify by saying i
6 46 p.m and i'll stay on the i'll stay
on the uh
zoom to do the agenda setting meetings
thank you everyone have a good evening
thanks you too
thank you sir
okay mayor i'm ready when you are
okay this is the agenda setting meeting
for the august 3rd 2020 city council
meeting number one consent
one consent
two consent
two consent three consent three consent
for non-consent for non-consent five
non-consent five non-consent six
non-consent six non-consent seven
non-consent
seven non-consent eight non-consent
eight non-consent nine non-consent
nine non-consensus and non-consent
10 non-consent 11 non-consent
11 non-consent 12 non-consent
13 on consent 13 non-consent 14
non-consent 14 non-consent 15
non-consent 15 non-consent
16 non-consent 15 non-consents 17
non-consent 17 non-consent and actually
i'm going to add an item number 18. okay
uh it's a resolution supporting the 30
by 30 campaign
non-consent and i'll get you the
counselor's org sent me the
the heart of the resolution i'll forward
that to you all tomorrow um
that'd be nice
perfect got it guys you can figure out
what the 30 by 30 campaign is until
tomorrow
okay