Governing Body Study Session
Wed, Mar 18, 2026 · Governing Body
https://santafeminutes.space/meeting/1448

== Executive Summary ==
The meeting focused on resolving the long-standing jurisdictional ambiguity of Area 1B, which has been in "limbo" for over 15 years without clear city or county services and representation. City and County leadership emphasized a new era of cooperation and a commitment to addressing this complex issue through community engagement and transparent dialogue. The goal is to find a "common-sense solution" that respects the community's identity and rural character.

The historical context of Area 1B, including a 2008 settlement agreement, failed annexation attempts, and a recent court decision, was reviewed. A City-County Working Group has been formed to develop solutions, and two "action alternatives" for Area 1B's future were presented to the community. Residents were then asked to break into small groups to discuss these options and provide feedback, which will inform a joint report to be presented to the City Council and Board of County Commissioners for a vote by the end of May or early June.

== Key Decisions ==
- The "no-action alternative" (waiting for annexation to expire in May 2028) was immediately rejected by the working group.

== Public Comment ==
Public comments highlighted the historical significance of the Agua Fria area and the indigenous peoples and land grant families who have lived there. Officials, including Commissioner Lisa Kakati Stone, Mayor Garcia, Councilor Castro, and Commissioner Adam Johnson, expressed a strong desire to move beyond past inaction, rebuild trust, and find solutions that empower residents and preserve community identity. Councilor Castro emphasized the need for "action" over just "talking." A quote from Sid Monroe, shared by Commissioner Stone, underscored the core issue for Area 1B residents: "We can't vote for any of the candidates for city offices. We do not receive city services."

== Topics ==
- Area 1B Jurisdiction
- Community Engagement & Trust
- City-County Collaboration
- Policy Options for Area 1B
- Historical Context of Area 1B
- Indigenous Land Acknowledgment
- Rural Character Preservation
- Meeting Logistics & Structure
- Community Agreements
- Affordable Housing Input Session
- Easter Egg Hunt

== Full Transcript ==
Dr. Romero, is he around? Okay, come on up and bring, if we could, that basket. Olivia, Miss Padilla, the basket there. If you bring product for Dr.

Good evening. I'd like to welcome everybody. My name is Lisa Kakati Stone. I'm Santa Fe County Commissioner for District 2. We know your time's valuable, and I just want to thank you for coming tonight. I want to welcome everybody who's online. I think we have about 10 or 11 folks online. They might join us a little bit later as well. Before we get started, we're here to honor all of you. People matter, but so does the land and your homes and this beautiful place we live in. So, I'd like to invite Dr. Romero to come up and give a land, people, labor acknowledgment. If you guys could join them, they have earth from Area 1B. We're going to pass it around. I want you all to take a little bit and put it in your pocket for your intention tonight.

Can you all hear me? I'm going to have to use two mics. That's a new one on me. Another new one on me is I never read my presentations. I'm an orator, so I just talk. So, bear with me. I'm not good at this. So, this might be my first time in years. Anyway, land acknowledgment by me. We acknowledge that we gathered today on lands that have been home to indigenous Tano, Taywa, and Ketes-speaking peoples for time immemorial. Long before the founding four centuries ago of the historic village of Ojo Fresco, the Pueblo Kado, which is Agua Fria's original name and the correct name, this area was part of a vibrant landscape of public communities, including nearby sites such as Pindi Pueblo, Pueblo de los, and Pueblo de los Nogales, and other small outliers along the Rio Santa Fe. The place reflects a layered history of Pueblo people's Spanish settlement on land grants and the village communities that grew here over generations to continue to reside here today. Families of Ojo Fresco de Pueblo Kado, Agua Fria, including Area 1B, have long stewarded this land, water, and cultural traditions that continue to shape a living community today. As we gather, we honor the enduring presence and knowledge of indigenous peoples, the deep roots of land grant village families, and our shared responsibility for this land and for one another as we consider the future of our rural community.

Okay. So, I just want to double-check for the IT. We're good with everyone online. No problem so far. Great. We want to be sure we're inclusive. Everybody gets a chance to hear. So, I just want to talk a little bit about our purpose and then turn it over to our elected for Santa Fe, City of Santa Fe, and Santa Fe County. And let me see if this works here. It's not boarding, but that one. It's connected here. It's not.

So, I just want to recognize as we get started, and we're here with purpose. It takes a village, and it takes the city and the county to put an event on like this. And I want to thank all the staff, the IT, everyone, the constituent liaison office on both sides of the city, county. Could you all stand up? Everyone that's with us tonight, raise your hand. City and county that made this happen. We're working together for you. And I also want to acknowledge this incredible space of the Home Depot, the Food Depot, and all that you do for the community, opening this space for community forums. The staff of the Food Depot, please raise your hands so we can see where you're at. Thank you.

So, if you could pull up the slide on objectives and purpose. It's slide number four, please. We're here tonight not to rehash the past. We've listened to you. 15 plus years of Area 1B conversations. Are you city? Are you in the county? Where do you belong? Whose jurisdiction is it? Do you go to land use here? What sheriff? Do you call the sheriff? Do you call the city police? We're here tonight to take that important step forward to get out of limbo. Okay. And the purpose here is that we want to be sure as a city and county leadership that we have transparency to the public and to you, the residents who live there. We want to be sure that we have respectful conversations. We're here tonight to listen, to understand, but not to talk, just to be heard. We're also here tonight to help regain and rebuild trust with you. This is important. The starting point is those two decades of decisions that have been made about you, but not always with you. This is not just about jurisdiction. It's about trust. Tonight, taking action one step at a time. I'd like to thank Mayor Garcia, Councilor Castro, Commissioner Johnson, and Councilor Faggali. And I want to give you time to have opening remarks. And I just want to say the mayor brought a new day to open new doors. So, thank you very much.

Well, thank you, Commissioner Karstone and Councilor Castro and Commissioner Johnson and Councilor Faggali. This is definitely a team effort. I'm so thankful that we actually are working together, not working again. It's imperative that the city and county not only work together in regards to the present, but more importantly, visioning what the future looks like. And I don't think we've done that in the past. Are we always going to agree on everything? No, absolutely not. But it's critical that we have discussion, dialogue, and work together towards a more common future. So, one of my priorities when I came into office was to address a lot of issues such as Area 1B and really put it to rest. So, whether it's 1B or the monument or other issues that had been kind of cast aside these past few years, we're dealing with them now. Are they going to be easy? No. Absolutely not. But this is where you all come in because we can't get this done by ourselves. We need the wisdom, the foresight, and more importantly, your support no matter what decision is made. So, I'm just thankful to see everybody here today. Again, I'm here to listen. I'm here to learn. And ultimately, that way we can take this information and begin to move forward. I do have a couple selfish announcements I want to share with y'all in case you might not know about it. So, next week on March 24th, the city is hosting an affordable housing community input session. This is going to be an opportunity for again, your voice to be heard. I think this is if folks have maybe seen a common theme, we want to hear from you. We want your voice. You are part of the decision-making process. So, this is again, Tuesday, March 24th, 6:30 to 8:00 p.m., and it's going to be at the Eno Chavis Community Center community room. So, please show up to that. Now, just an equally but more importantly fun event, we've got our annual Easter egg hunt next week. I know y'all have some young ones. You're all probably young at heart. So, this is next Saturday morning, 10:00 a.m. when the Easter hunt starts, Easter egg hunt starts, and it's plenty of time for folks to head on to another major event that's happening that afternoon, which is the No Kings Route. So, you can go to the go hunt for some eggs and then go let your Democratic voice be heard. So, thank you. Thank you all. Thank you.

Thank you so much, Mayor. And I appreciate everybody who is here. I'll try to be brief. I tend to want to listen at these events more than speak. But I do want to say that it's time to have difficult discussions. The time for just sitting and talking is over, and I hope that today and with my colleagues sitting up here, we have agreed that it is time for action. I also want to acknowledge all of the city and county employees who are here to also take in the information and listen to what the community has to say. In the last two years of being a city councilor, I've had the fortune of working with the colleagues up here and with some new colleagues to really be able to do more events like this. Town halls, community input is the direction the City of Santa Fe is going and the way the county is going as well. I think we're finally on the same page, and that's something we can be proud of. So, we may not always agree, but we are willing to work together to move forward, and thank you for being here today.

Hello, hello, hello everyone. I'm Adam Johnson. I'm the County Commissioner from District 4 of Santa Fe County. That's the southeastern part of the city and south to Lamy. So, my colleagues here are sort of the more appropriate representatives of this area. And in that regard, I'm here to listen. I'm here to support various community members and perspectives and to help, you know, moderate this discussion. I have been following this issue for a long time. I used to actually work with Dr. Romero in history, and I have an interest in just in general. So, this is a particularly interesting issue to me and one that's been tricky for a long time, and I, you know, echo what the mayor and what my colleagues have said. We're here to try to bring resolution because there's just been limbo for far, far too long. I just want to make a note that I'm very pleased at the collaboration between the city and the county. I think a new day has dawned, and the way that we work together is really, really important for our community because our jurisdictions, as you all know, are intricate. They overlap in sometimes labyrinthine ways. So, thank you all for being engaged community participants, and I look forward to meeting you. Thanks.

Hello. I'm Pat McGalli, and the other city councilor from District 1. And I don't have anything else to say. Thank you all for being here. Thank you staff all for being here as well. Let's get to the meat of the thing.

Thank you. So, I'm going to ask if you, the online IT, to go to the next slide and then the next slide, please. Here on the next slide, please. Thank you. So, this slide just talks about how do we get here and just hitting the reset button. I want to highlight that I want to thank Olivia Padilla for putting so much extra effort into so many details and giving us, and every slide you have a QR code, and on the QR code, if you hold it up, it's going to take you all to the historical documents. We're here for transparency. We're here to take record of what's been done, and so you'll have access to that. If you, if you, it's a Dropbox, so we want folks online and that to have it. Of course, you hold the lived experience and the wisdom, so we can't put that on a QR code. But I just want to highlight, you know, 2008 was a settlement agreement. And I want to read a quote by Sid Monroe, who might be joining us remotely tonight. He's in New York. "We can't vote for any of the candidates for city offices. We do not receive city services." This has been an issue of Area 1B was planned for annexation but never completed. And so here we are. And then we just look as we 2023. I want to thank Commissioner Anna Hansen and the county commissioners and former city councilors as well, but former Commissioner Anna Hansen put a lot of time into trying to move forward. You know, we all stand on the backs of giants and others, and so thank you for your work. In 2023, we did have a county made efforts for carve-out. This carve-out proposal. You'll see it kind of in your handouts. And but then the court decision, the city decided took it to court, and Judge Beel determined that the county was not able to do that. So, the county was put on hold. I want to put for record, I really respect my other Board of County Commissioners who aren't here tonight. Commissioner Bamante, Commissioner Green, and Commissioner Hughes. We've all been in support of Area 1B being in the county, and we also recognize the Agua Fria Village as a historical traditional area.

So that's been on the record, and that's in the documents. So, 2025, the residents have spoken. You put in a petition to the county. You've made your public looks clear from quoting from Sid Monroe. I think there's been over a thousand meetings since 2008. He's not lying. He gave me a breakdown number. And I think that there's been a lot of efforts made. So, we cannot push as government. We can't push you beyond the point of no return in terms of patience. But 2025, there was an effort in the fall between the Area 1B leadership and key stakeholders, including Homewives. Many of you saw the op-ed that was co-authored, and I'm going to quote from it: "The area has been in limbo for 18 years. It's time to address the situation with a practical, common-sense solution that works for everyone." We're here for a common-sense solution, and shortly my colleagues are going to introduce two doors, and we're hoping that each door is no wrong door. There's always a better door. There are things to think about. There's planning, there's land use, there's water, there's the future, but we're here to take a mini step tonight. What we're not here to do is rehash the whole history. We're not here to have a debate around development. We can't put the cart before the horse. We're here to take this mini step because we cannot keep a community in limbo anymore. So, I just want to be really clear, and that's the good faith effort. And then finally, here we are working together to find solutions.

Now, if we can go to the next slide, I want to wrap this up so we can get to the conversations. What have we learned? I think I put in here in the working group that we have, which is two city councilors and two commissioners here, we looked through a lot of historical documents. I put all those documents into an analysis, and here are some three key takeaways. There are others, but a community cannot continue to be in democratic limbo. In many of these documents, you are subject to city land use decisions, without city voting power, without reliable city service delivery, and without a decision point that clearly honors where you want to belong. Identity of place was really critical across the many years and all the documents. And what was very obvious is that you have emphasized the rural character of your community, the long-standing community identity, the historical nature, some of what Dad Rometo recognized tonight, and the land. So, we want to preserve existing neighborhoods. And finally, the recurring theme already is this need for a common-sense solution. So, I just wonder if we can go to one more slide because we're here to be transparent and share. If we can go to the next slide, please.

Thank you. First, oh, there we go. The City-County Working Group. The mayor had the foresight as soon as he was inaugurated: "Let's get a working group going." We hit the ground running January 16th. We met in the City Hall in one of their rooms, and we had a discussion with legal counsels, city man, deputy city manager, the county manager, everyone sitting at this table except Commissioner Johnson was appointed because of his sound decision-making and to be non-biased and because of his land use experience. Then in February, we're moving very quickly. We went on our living lands tours. We took a senior van. We took the party senior van out, and we were hosted by Amy and Jared and some community members just to talk about the land and the people and kind of really look at this because you have to root yourself in where people live, not just sit in an office, right? And then finally, we're here with the community forum. We do want to move to, we're going to compile everything. We want to move together with a decision. We're going to have a debrief. The mayor said, "Yeah, agreed to another debrief." We bring everyone together. We look at all the analysis. We had this county do an analysis and the city do an analysis on both of these policy options you see tonight to see what the pros and cons were. But you're doing your analysis. What are the pros and cons? We hope to have a joint rep to go forward to the City Council and the Board of County Commissioners for a vote no later than the end of May. And here we are. So, knock on wood. Let's hope, and if we have to push it forward, we will, but we don't want to push it past June. So, if we can go to the next slide, I'd like to turn it over to Commissioner Johnson and Councilor Them just to appear that we don't have different opinions on this.

So, you see that there are three bubbles on this slide. We initially considered three options. The first was a no-action alternative, in which we would just do nothing and wait for annexation to expire, which happens in May 2028, according to the agreement. We decided immediately not to take this option, sick and tired of no action. So, we have two action alternatives. The first, and I'll read the text that's on, and I'll be quick, that is on the discussion sheets that will be at each station. So, the first is to drop presumptive annexation. In this, Area 1B would no longer be part of the presumptive city limits. So, the city would act, would pass a resolution or ordinance to drop the annexation. The jurisdiction is land use and business licensing return to the county for the area that is no longer part of the presumptive city limits. So, Area 1B would be part of this, the county would take on land use decisions and other services. Property owners could petition the city for annexation within a specified period of time, and property owners could petition the county to be recognized as part of the traditional historic community of Agraphia within a specific amount of time. The implications of this, as stated on the sheet, it empowers residents and landowners to control jurisdiction over their property.

So, the next option, the carve-out option, is a targeted carve-out approach. In this approach, Area 1B would be divided into two areas: Area 1B County and Area 1B City. The jurisdiction items: Area 1B County would be off-limits for annexation with land use and business licensing returning to the city. Excuse me, returning to the county. Thank you. So, in this option, those that did not petition for annexation after the specified amount of time would never be granted license to petition for annexation in the future. Other items: Area 1B County would become part of the traditional historic community of Agraphia through an ordinance adopted by the county. So, the county would proactively take up such an ordinance, and Area 1B City would be slated for annexation by or before May 2028. So, the city would take part of the carve-out, and that would be adopted into the city limits of Santa Fe by May 2028. The implications of this are this allows for city residents while preserving community identity for those that choose to remain in the county.

And Councilor Forgi can add one thing. So, these are the options that we have come up with. If you, when you look at the sheets, you'll see that it says, "What are the pros and cons from your perspective, and are there other considerations?" And that includes if there is an option that we missed. If there's a better way to do this that we have not considered, please tell us. These are just what we have come up with so far. So, we're not quite taking public comments right now, but we will have an opportunity for questions in just a second. The next part of our discussion. Oh, definitely. So, we just want to make sure that we're posting the correct worksheet for folks so that they're able to follow along with us in those handout discussions. We will get that for those who are online shortly.

Next slide is the community agreements. If we could get that up on the board. Thank you so much. And I will follow suit and just read very quickly what you have in your handouts and what is on the screen. We want to make sure that this is a productive conversation. So, please speak your truth and respect others doing the same. Of course, all of our voices matter, and we all want to be heard. So, there is a technique of step up, step back. If you are speaking a lot, you might want to give opportunity for others to be heard. Listen to understand, be curious about perspectives different from your own. We are here to learn as well as to give our perspective. This is a working group. So, we are trying to develop new ideas of how to get to a common place around this very contentious issue. Build conversation, not confrontation. Focus on solutions. As I said earlier, we are hoping to come out of this with action steps. We don't want to just have a discussion, but we want to have actionable things that we can come out of this meeting with. Be open to new possibilities, moving beyond business as usual, helping communities move forward. This conversation and this working group, I think, is a great start. Now we hand the ball to you in creating a good community conversation and think of what possibilities, as Councilor Fgali mentioned, we have not thought of. And number five, we all share responsibility for shaping our community. With that, thank you so very much.

I think we are going to break into groups. We might, could we? So, we're going to break into groups of six or seven. And it looks like we potentially will have two online groups because we have enough participants. So, it might be 10 each. Quite a few of us. So, we're going to do our best to make these equal groups. We have the four of us who are facilitating, and we have some staff members. So, we're going to divide in about as many people as we can. We want to make sure that we capture all your information. So, there will also be a note-taker at each group for each option. Please make sure to discuss and fill out the pros and cons so that we can take that back for consideration. And if there's anything that we missed, let us know, and we will have a debrief. And I think I'm right on time. Thank you, Commissioner. Okay, next slide, please. I think we're ready to break out in groups. And Olivia, do you want to help us do that?

Oh, hi everyone. My name is Olivia Padilla. I'm the Constituent Services Liaison for Santa Fe County District. So, I work closely with Commissioner Kakari Stone. Thanks so much for being here. This is a packed house. This is awesome. So, we have estimated there's about 10 people near every table. We're going to stick with those groups, and for those of you on the edges, we'll integrate you. And then we are going to assign a facilitator to each group and a note-taker, as the councilor said. So, be patient. We're going to try to do this rapidly so we can get talking. Okay.

Yes. And there's about a table. So, just hang tight, and we'll configure you. Okay. Can I get city and county staff here at the front, please? Let's see. This is lovely, Shauna. Hello. Okay, back here. Who's next? Well, Jav, gracias. Can you be with this lovely group back here? This is Javier. Say hello. Okay. Okay. Sarah is going to be up here. Cycle. Awesome. Yeah, that's good. So, Javier, hi everybody. We need our. I'm just not start to be here. The main purpose of that is for everyone to participate, and let's keep. Double check. Do we have a note-taker and facilitator here? Facilitator, raise your hand. Okay. Note-taker and facilitator here. We have Sarah. You do both. Love you. Okay. And I'm going to sit at this table. So, we got a note-taker facilitator. I'm sorry. And if we can get Commissioner Johnson here, and do we have a note-taker here? Do we have the sadena tickers?

Terrific. And then back here, do we have? No, you guys got it. I love it. Good. Okay, started.

And online, I'll let. Just try to be mindful of.

Okay, some of the questions we will try to relate to the counselors there. They have more information about that. But still, I mean, we are taking. So thank you so much. I think the first result, that means that eventually it will follow. Yeah.

Yeah, you're right. Yes, yes. So the question starts with, you got that?