9-10-26 SFFPC Meeting Notes

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Santa Fe City and County, Advisory Council on Food Policy
Thursday, September 10, 2026
9:00AM-11AM
Hybrid meeting on Zoom and
in person at Santa Fe County Extension Office
3229 Rodeo Road
Santa Fe, NM 87507-4892
A. CALL TO ORDER 9:10am
B. ROLL CALL
Susan Perry, Co-Chair - Excused
Peter Ives, Co-Chair – Present
nate crail - Present
Eric Renz-Whitmore - Present
David Sundberg - Excused
Coy Maienza - Present
Emigdio Ballon - Present
Erica Renaud - Excused
We have a quorum.
Staff:
Pam Roy, Coordinator
Helen Henry, Scribe
Guests:
Harrison Gibson, Consultant
Catherine Nolte, The Food Depot
Hvtce Miller, Santa Fe County
C. APPROVAL OF AGENDA – [ACTION] September 10, 2026
Prioritization and Agenda Order
Moved: nate
Seconded: Emidgio
Approved
D. ACCEPTANCE OF MINUTES – August 13, 2026 [ ACTION]
Moved: nate
Seconded: Eric
Approved
E. COMMUNICATIONS FROM THE FLOOR

Emigdo is being considered for an honorary doctorate at UNM and is requesting letters of
support. Emigdio explained a little bit about his work with quinoa and also with seeds and his
work to create sustainability practices at Tesuque Pueblo. Emidgio will send his bio to Pam so
she can circulate it for people to write letters by the end of September. Send to University of NM
Honorary Degree Committee. October deadline for submission.
F. INITIATIVES AND ACTIONS
1. Local Updates/Federal/State
NM State Legislative Priorities: Discuss, review and approve a tentative set of 2027 NM
Legislative food and agriculture priorities for the to submit to the County and City [ACTION]
Pam: All state agencies are required to submit their budget requests to the Legislative Finance
Committee (LFC). Pam is waiting to hear directly from them to see what their requests are this
year. We want to hear from the agencies directly because of the working relationships that we
have with them. We could possibly go to LFC to see what the requests are, although Hvtce
thinks that they are not publically available right now.
We want the City Council and County Commissioners to sign on early this year to our resolution.
Pam has sent out some examples of what we have submitted to them in the past. We can use
this material as a starting point and work with the City and County lobbyists to fine tune this.
Then we need to get Councillors and Commissioner to sponsor this.
Catherine shared about the gubernatorial forum that Roadrunner Facebook sponsored last
Friday night. She will share out some of the videos that were presented. There were a lot of
questions about food insecurity. Sec Haaland had a lot of questions that pointed to a lot of our
food priorities so we will be following up with this.
We need to be thinking about how these priorities translate into a resolution. One of the benefits
of the resolutions is so that we can get in front of the City and County to talk about our priorities.
We can work with Hvtce to get the resolution on the agenda for various meetings where we can
present our priorities. Peter will find out when the meetings are.
Hvtce walked through their process at the County.
Peter: The City has already submitted their capital outlay (ICIP) list. This also relates to “grow
funds” because there is a new requirement that the grow funds projects also be on the ICIP list.
We need to let Hvtce know if there is anything that we need to include on this list. Some projects
go through the County, but a majority go through the COGs. It would be good to get copies of
the City and County’s ICIP lists. If we know of any possible funding, we should let Hvtce know
about this.
Nate, Coy, Pam, and Hvtce can work on the resolution to the county. Eric will help with figuring
out the process. Peter will work on the one to the City. Pam will reach out to Commissioner
Johnson. We will get a draft together by next week.

Pam: We will continue to update the Legislative Priorities sheet. Emigdio commented that we
need to add a priority around seeds (under land conservation initiatives.) Helen brought up the
idea of putting a seed sovereignty policy in place to prevent incursion from outside interest that
would compromise seed sovereignty. There is an existing seed declaration from 2006 that we
can look up. Pam commented that some folks are doing work around water common water
rights and preserving overall water availability.
2. Update Food Plan from Food Plan Committee
Drafts of proposed maps for Food Plan (nate crail and County team).
Nate gave an overview the process of the Food Plan committee. After the last meeting, Erica
fed all of the material into an AI agent that allowed her to create a more summarized plan based
on all the input from the previous meetings. This is arranged as a strategic plan which is
structured to be more of an internal document. We can create a more succinct version as a
general document that can be shared.
Erica will do a new version that we will send out to the whole Council. The request was to
circulate the draft out to Council members and get comments back by Sept 28.
The next meeting of the Food Plan Committee will be on October 1. We will present a draft of
the document at the Oct meeting, we can adopt it at the Nov meeting and present it to the City
and County in December.
G. PRESENTATIONS: No Presentation this month
H. STAFF COMMUNICATIONS 5 minutes
Website re-build and transfer- Update from Helen Henry
Helen will present a draft of the website at the October meeting. She asked anyone who has
photos that are either of public places or accompanied by photo releases to send them to her.
Nate, Eric, Peter and Harrison all said they could share photos.
I. ITEMS FROM THE COUNCIL 5 minutes
Member update
J. ITEMS FROM THE CO-CHAIRS
1. New member update
Pam: Marco had to withdraw his application due to his increased workload.
Coy: On the County side, she will revise the posting. The vacancy needs to be posted for at
least 30 days and the applications need to go to her. She will revise the press release to better
represent who we are interested in applying. She will work with Pam and Sue on this.

Eric and Erica will check to see if we need to do anything on the City side.
Peter needs to be renewed at the City level.
Emido and Sue need to renew. Harrison and Catherine’s applications still need to be approved.
Sept 29 is the date that these renewals could be approved.
There are some other people who are who we are possibly considering.
2.. Next Meeting: October 8, 2026: Hybrid
4. Topics for future presentations
October: CONNECT Program, Jennifer Romero, Santa Fe County and Nataly Beltron, Food
Depot
Move Food Depot presentation to November
Invite Santa Fe area state Legislators
K. ADJOURNMENT 10:50am
Moved: nate
Seconded: Eric
Approved
These notes were taken contemporaneously and may contain errors and omissions.
Signed by ___________________________ Helen Henry.
I verify that these notes have been approved by a quorum of members of the
Santa Fe Food Policy Council.
Signed by Susan Perry, Co-chair or, Peter Ives, Co-chair
_____________________________________________________