Regular Finance Committee Meeting - Last Monday Mon, Oct 27, 2025 · Finance Committee https://santafeminutes.space/meeting/728 == Executive Summary == The Finance Committee convened to address a range of financial and regulatory matters, including staff recognition, grant approvals, and significant policy discussions. A key highlight was the recognition of the Fleet Team for their exceptional work in generating over $380,000 from a citywide auction of vehicles, showcasing their dedication and efficiency. The committee also approved a crucial Capital Outlay Grant Agreement for Fort Marcy Park Baseball Field Improvements, which will fund much-needed lighting and turf upgrades. Major policy debates centered on a budget amendment for homelessness services, the proposed Living Wage Ordinance, and a comprehensive update to the Land Development Code. Concerns were raised about the slow implementation of homelessness initiatives and the equitable distribution of micro-communities across the city. The Living Wage discussion involved extensive economic analysis regarding its potential impact on small businesses, employment, and the cost of living, with councilors debating the merits of a training wage and targeted business support programs. Finally, the committee approved the first phase of a significant Land Development Code update aimed at modernizing regulations, promoting affordability, and streamlining development processes. The meeting concluded with a unanimous vote to issue a cease and desist order against an illicit massage business operating without a license. == Key Decisions == - Approved the meeting agenda. - Approved the amended consent agenda. - Approved the Capital Outlay Grant Agreement for Fort Marcy Park Baseball Field Improvements. - Approved the budget amendment resolution to reappropriate funds for homelessness services. - Approved Amendment H to leverage the Small Business Navigation Program for targeted outreach to at-risk businesses in preparation for the living wage implementation and requested a report on program utilization and outcomes. - Approved Bill Number 2024-17 (Land Development Code Update) as amended, representing Phase One of the code overhaul. - Approved a cease and desist order against Chinese Massage LLC for operating without a business license. == Motions & Votes == - Motion to approve the Capital Outlay Grant Agreement for Fort Marcy Park Baseball Field Improvements — Passed (all present councilors voted yes). - Motion to approve the budget amendment resolution to reappropriate funds for homelessness services — Passed 5-0 (unanimous roll call vote). - Motion to approve the item regarding micro-communities — Passed 4-0 (Counselor Casset, Counselor Falner, Counselor Lee Garcia, Chair Romero voted Yes; Counselor Lindell's vote implied as part of 'yes' count). - Motion to call the question (on a previous amendment) — Passed (Councilor Cassid: Yes, Councilor Faulkner: Yes, Councilor Lee Garcia: Yes, Chair Marworth: Yes). - Motion to approve Amendment G (to add a training wage) — Failed (Councilor Cassid: No, Councilor Faulkner: Yes, Councilor Lee Garcia: Yes, Chair Marworth: No). - Motion to approve Amendment H (targeted outreach for small businesses) — Passed (Councilor Cassett, Faulkner, Lee Garcia, and Chair Merworth voted Yes; Councilor Lindell's vote not recorded). - Motion to approve Bill Number 2024-17 (Land Development Code Update) as amended — Passed (Councilor Cassett, Faulkner, and Chair Mars voted Yes; Councilor Garcia voted No; Councilor Lindell's vote not recorded). - Motion to approve 'rewrite phase one' (related to zoning/development code changes) — Passed 3-0. - Motion to approve the issuance of a cease and desist order to close Chinese Massage LLC — Passed 3-0 (Councilor Maroworth: Yes, Councilor Falner: Yes, Councilor Lee Garcia: Yes). == Public Comment == Public comments included Councilor Lindell's concerns about unspent funds for homelessness services and the need for better implementation. Councilor Faulkner advocated for a 'continuum of care' model for homelessness and equitable distribution of micro-communities. Director Nelson expressed concerns about the Living Wage Ordinance's impact on small businesses and the cost of living. Elizabeth West commended the committee's action against the illicit massage business, emphasizing community vigilance. == Topics == - Illicit Massage Business - Fort Marcy Park Improvements - Fleet Team Recognition - City Audit Delays == Full Transcript == I think we're ready to start if we have our technology working. **Speaker:** We are live. **Speaker:** Okay. At 5:02, I'm calling to order the Finance Committee for today, Monday, October 27th. And if we could get a roll call, please. **Speaker:** Thank you, Madam Chair. Councilor Cassid? **Speaker:** Here. **Speaker:** Councilor Mendell? Councilor Faulkner? **Speaker:** Here. **Speaker:** Councilor Lee Garcia? **Speaker:** Here. **Speaker:** Chair Mirorth? **Speaker:** I am here. **Speaker:** Madam Chair, you have a quorum. **Speaker:** Terrific. Do we have changes to tonight's agenda? **Speaker:** No changes from staff, Madam Chair. **Speaker:** Any changes from the committee? And if not, is there a motion? **Speaker:** Move to approve. **Speaker:** Second. **Speaker:** We have a motion and a second to approve tonight's agenda. All those in favor? Aye. Anybody opposed? That motion passes. We are on to the consent agenda. Oh, no. Yes. No, we are on to the consent agenda. Sorry, it's weird the way this is listed here, but okay. We do have a couple items pulled from consent. We have item M, item BB, item GG, item HH, item II. We need a new alphabet apparently. Okay. And I think that's it. Am I correct? **Speaker:** Yes, Madam Chair. **Speaker:** Okay. Do we have a motion to approve as amended? **Speaker:** So moved. And I should have asked, there isn't anything else the committee wants to hear, right? And if not, all those in favor, aye. Anybody opposed? That motion passes. We from here go to the presentations. We have the Finance Department staff recognition, results of auction and fleet staff contribution. And Director Oster, I will turn it over to you. **Speaker:** Thank you, Madam Chair, and members of the Finance Committee. I am excited to be doing a special group staff recognition today to recognize the fleet team. We have David Harmo, our Fleet Manager, and Juan Tapia, our other Fleet Supervisor, in attendance this evening, and they will be accepting the certificates of recognition on behalf of the staff of the Fleet Division. You will probably remember that we've recognized David and Juan before in staff recognition, and we decided that this was a great time to recognize the team as a whole for their contributions to the citywide auction. And that's just one of the amazing things that the fleet team does every day. But most recently, on October 18th, the city participated in a statewide auction, and we, the initial revenue estimate from the auction, is that we raised over $380,000, largely because of the efforts of the fleet team to prepare city vehicles that were no longer usable by the city to be sold at the auction. And with that, I'm going to turn it over to Dave to talk a little bit more about the specific work that went into that. It's a lot, I will say. But, I'll turn it over to Dave to talk about exactly what these folks did in order to help us raise that $380,000. **Speaker:** Good evening, Councilors. Yeah, I couldn't be more proud of the team with all of the work that they do, triaging the Police Department, making sure that everybody else's, all the other departments' needs are being met. It takes a lot of communication and a lot of collaboration, which is something that my team does very well. We use all of the resources that we can in the parts department as well, and you know, we fill in where we're needed and then go back to the shop and fill in there as well. And in this case, we had two weeks to really take everything down to the lot, which includes cleaning out the vehicle, making sure that all the debris is out. Although many departments helped us this year with that. Many departments brought their vehicles pretty much ready, but the staff still took out the radios, the bracketry, the lights in some cases, and labeled the vehicles, sprayed them down, made them presentable to get the best return on investment that we could. And we did it. We got everything down there. And the only thing that we have back in our lot are a couple of vehicles that are that we deem biohazards because there had been people living in them, and there's certain things that we just didn't want, we wanted to play it safe there, and so we're going to take them to be destroyed, and so, and we'll be going off that later. The team really does a good job in working together, and you know, when the load gets heavy, they split it, but when the joy gets passed around, it gets doubled. So, they never, they never ask how hard the task is going to be, they just, they just ask me what they need from us, and they, they do it. So, I'm just, I'm just really happy with the group that we have, and we're expecting to get two more, and I'm sure that they're going to do a good job as well. And of course, Juan, leading everything down there in operations, answering all the phone calls, that's not easy either. So, Juan does a good job in leading the group as well. So, I'm just happy to be part of the fleet team. And thank you for recognizing my staff. **Speaker:** Wonderful. Thank you, David. And of course, David and Juan, and also Scott Gunter, who is not technically part of the fleet team, but is sort of like an honorary member, were all integral to the efforts around the auction as well. So, we're excited to recognize the work of the staff, but also management played a huge role in ensuring that the vehicles that were ready for disposal were prepared appropriately and that they got where they needed to go on time so that they could be auctioned off. So, thank you very much to the entire fleet team. And with that, I'd like to read out the names of the folks that we're recognizing this evening. There may be some on Zoom. Michael, can you check and see who we have as attendees in the Zoom room? Just one moment. I'll check for my, I think they're probably watching on YouTube. So, to the members of the fleet team that are out there watching this evening, thank you so much for everything that you've done. So, with that, it is my pleasure to present certificates of appreciation to the following members of our fleet team. We have Merlin Pñena, who works in our fleet inventory section of the Fleet Division. Thank you, Juan. Next up, we have Ben Bla. Ben is the supervisor of our parts inventory section. Then we have Jerome Mandreon. Jerome also works in the parts inventory area. Next up, we have Jonathan Ruda Rodriguez. Jonathan is an equipment service worker, and so he works on oil changes and tire rotations, routine maintenance that keeps the bigger repairs at bay. That's a very exciting area where we didn't have staff for a long time. We're really happy to have both of our fleet equipment service worker positions filled right now. So, a big thank you to Jonathan. Our other equipment service worker is Justin Royal, and Justin is the newest member of the fleet team right now. Very happy to have Justin on board. Like David mentioned, we are hoping to have two new auto mechanics joining the team before the end of the calendar year, hopefully in November. We'll be bringing those folks online. In the auto mechanic group, we have three folks right now. We have Dwayne Canana. Dwayne is a heavy equipment mechanic. We have Julian Lopez. Julian is also a heavy equipment mechanic. And we have Andrew Andrew Padilla, who is our lone auto mechanic at the moment, but as I said, we're hoping to add two more in the next couple of weeks. And all of these certificates of appreciation say the following award is given to, in this case, Andrew Padilla. This certificate is given to Andrew Padilla in appreciation for performance, service, and dedication to the City of Santa Fe Finance Department. We really, really appreciate the work that the Fleet Division does every single day to keep the city's vehicles running. It is absolutely critical to every city department that we have reliable, functional vehicles. And these are the folks that make that happen. And when those vehicles have reached the end of their useful life, they prepare them to be disposed of and help us get the best price for them. So, really appreciate all of the work of the Fleet Division all the time, every day, and especially right now with the auction. Thank you so much. **Speaker:** Thank you to you, and yeah, thanks, thanks to the whole team, and thank you for the explanation about what you had to do to get those vehicles ready for auction. I hadn't really contemplated that before, but it makes total sense, and really interesting that you all are, you know, kind of the gatekeepers on making sure that the vehicles are presented in the best possible shape to be resold. So, congratulations on the amount that was raised. That's wonderful. And please extend our congratulations to the whole group. **Speaker:** Appreciate it. Thank you. **Speaker:** Okay, we are going to move on to our consent agenda, and the first item is item M, a request for approval of Capital Outlay Grant Agreement for the New Mexico Department of Finance and Administration for Capital Appropriations Project 25-J3152, Fort Marcy Park Baseball Field Improvements in the total amount of $500,000 with a reversion date of June 30th, 2029. At the podium, of course, we have our Project Manager, Scott Overly. And Councilor Lindell, I believe you pulled this item, if I'm correct. **Speaker:** Thank you. Thank you for being here, Scott. The question, the concern that I have with the expenditure of this money is that I'm concerned about the lighting at Fort Marcy Park, Sazobra Field. Those lights cost us a fortune to run. They're old. They're completely and totally inefficient. And we could probably save in a year, a really, well, it would have some zeros and commas in it, much we could save if we got rid of those lights. So, tell me that the lights are part of this project. **Speaker:** Thank you, Councilor Lindell. I would, I just want to thank you for asking about this question. The three top priorities that we have for the field itself are, and this is brought to us from recent community engagement meetings. Number one is lights. That's a big issue with a lot of the neighbors in the area. And so we have had that, actually, I've had that on my list for quite a while, knowing that the system that's out there now is very old and dated. So, number one is lights. Number two is the removable fencing so that we can have events. It can come down. The existing fencing is quite old and has been problematic. So, we're looking at a new system for that. And then number three is work on the turf field itself to make it more playable. Good news is, is that this money would go towards the lighting. We're looking at retrofit, and we are looking to reduce the spill light and glare by more than 50%, which is a big deal, and reducing the amount of energy and maintenance costs from about 50 to 85%. So, the new lighting that's available, the new technology that's available will help us take care of that lighting situation and really make it a nice place to play that's still adequate for play, but will reduce down the amount of glare and cost. **Speaker:** Great. I appreciate that. So, the lighting is part of this. That's all I have. Thank you very much for making the effort to come down. **Speaker:** Other questions, other questions from the committee? And if not, is there a motion? **Speaker:** Move to approve. Thank you. **Speaker:** We have a motion and a second to approve this item. Can we get a roll call, please? Director Oster. **Speaker:** Certainly, Madam Chair. Councilor Cassid? **Speaker:** Yes. **Speaker:** Councilor Lindell? **Speaker:** Yes. **Speaker:** Councilor Falner? **Speaker:** Yes. **Speaker:** Councilor Michael Lee Garcia? **Speaker:** Yes. **Speaker:** Chair Marworth? **Speaker:** Yes. **Speaker:** Motion passes. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you all for being here tonight. Appreciate it. Thank you very much. Okay. Item BBB. Request for approval of a budget amendment resolution to reappropriate unused funding from FY25 in the amount of $6,656,267 to FY26 for homelessness service contracts. We have Kristen Woods, our program manager with Youth and Family Services. Councilor Lindell, I believe you pulled this item as well. Chair, I just would like a little update on, I suspect this money is already contracted. I just want to make sure it's a lot of money that we didn't get spent that was appropriated, and certainly we have the needs. So, how are we going to get that money so that we can get some traction on it? And if we can, Councilor Lindell, will you make sure your mic is pulled closer to you because I know when people are listening on Zoom, they don't always hear you. Well, there are people who do watch. My dad usually watches. So, just speak up for all the parents who are watching. Thank you. I'm just trying to find out. It's a lot of money that we didn't get. I'm hoping that it's contracted, but it's a lot of money that didn't get implemented that has immediate needs. And I'd like to know why we haven't been able to do that and how we can do it better. Thank you, Madam Chair. Thank you, Councilor Lindell. That's a great question. It is quite a lot of money, the majority of which is already contractually obligated. And just as part of the city process, we need to carry the funds from fiscal year 2025 through to fiscal year 2026 in order to create a purchase order and continue to do the work that has already been contractually obligated. The rest of the funds are all allocated towards projects that have not been able to start or are eminently beginning, just depending on the different area of work. So yes, all of these funds have been allocated for good work and are either underway or will be beginning. Was there a reason that we couldn't get it implemented in this fiscal year? Well, there's a number of different projects. So most of them have been, a lot of the work has begun. So for example, there's a number of different contracts that are, that we've already allocated the funds towards contracts, and we simply need a purchase order for this fiscal year. The rest of them, for example, construction funds for the micro communities. We're not quite yet to construction, but we very much want to use those funds for this project that we're all very excited about. Okay. I just would encourage us to push on that as hard as we possibly can. We have critical needs, and when we have that kind of money sitting and not being implemented, it's concerning. So, thank you very much. Thank you. Can I actually just take a moment to acknowledge that today an incredible advocate and provider in the homelessness community named Chaplain Joe Dudziak passed away today. So, I just wanted to acknowledge that. May he rest in peace and honor the incredible work he did for our community. Oh, thank you for bringing that to our attention. Wow. Loss. Yeah, that is a big loss. Thank you for letting us know. Appreciate it. Councilor Lee Garcia. Thank you, Madam Chair. Just piqued my interest. What is this project that we're very excited about? Sorry. I was, there's a number of different projects under this carry forward, but I think you're referring to that I mentioned the micro community project. There's been a resolution to pursue the Richards Avenue micro community. So, that's the project I was referring to. Okay. Just making sure it's something that we had already kind of have our eyes on and something that we've approved. Obviously there's other things that through administrative can be looking at, and I would like to know about that before. Thank you. Madam Chair. Councilor Garcia, thank you very much. Yes, brief. Councilor Faulkner. I would just like to offer that as we pursue resolving the, well, we're not going to resolve the homeless issue, but mitigating the issue of homelessness, I think it's important that every district remember that we have to take some piece of it in order for it to work effectively. And I only say that because I've been extensively studying how to mitigate homelessness and unhoused, and it literally is a formula, and the cities that are following the formula, it is working. And one part of the formula is every district has to take a little bit in order to help the collective. And so I just want to keep reminding the council and the governing body as well as staff, and then also the general public has to play a role in this. We have to be able to accept some small portion of the burden in order for the city in its entirety to mitigate the unhoused issue. Okay. Anything else from the committee? Not. Is there a motion? Move to approve. Second. We have a motion and second to approve this item. Director Oster, back to you for a roll call. Councilor Cassid. Yes. Councilor Lindell. Yes. Councilor Faulkner. Yes. Councilor Lee Garcia. Yes. Mayor. Yes. Motion passes. Thank you. Thank you for being here tonight. Okay, on to item G, and just or GG, sorry. Thank you. A resolution requiring a micro community in every City of Santa Fe council district by January 1st, 2027, or if that timeline is not met, a presentation explaining the barriers to meeting the timeline and recommending how and when the goal of a micro community in every district can be achieved. I don't know who we have here. We should have Director Henry Ham and Paul, but. Okay. Who pulled this? Okay. Councilor Lindell, did you pull this? Who pulled this? The micro. Yeah. Okay. So, I don't know. Did you have a statement about it? Okay. Did you, yeah. Did you have questions? Do you? I have a statement that District One has six or seven facilities at this point in time. And to just paint with a broad brush and say that everybody's going to get a new micro community, I don't think that that's assessing what the, you know, what the need is or where it would be the most effective. I also think that it's somewhat unfair. My district has six or seven, and Councilor Faulkner has always spoken to that. District Three doesn't have any, and I don't think that District One should be taking on more facilities until we even this up a little bit geographically around the city. So that's my point, and I'm not going to support it unless we have some changes to it. Sure. Councilor Faulkner. So, in doing much research and visiting sites where addressing the unhoused or homeless is successful, is that it's called, it's called the continuum of care. So you need a campus where you can triage, where you can provide wraparound services, where you can help people. We have to look at it more like we're educating human beings to get in a space where they can be more functioning than they have been in the past for a range of challenges that are beyond their control. The micro communities are an integral part of the continuum of care, but they're one of the last phases of continuing care. And what we have to look at is with this, with this issue, we're dealing with very complex and complicated challenges that go beyond dollars and cents. We have to look at human beings as in a place where they need to be given the skills to become, to help them get through addiction, to help them get through the mental health care, to help them find a space because they just fell out of the system. And one thing that is abundantly clear after doing tons and tons of research on this issue is that micro communities are the second to the last step in success. But they will not work unless they are distributed equally throughout the city. So you can't have a collective of micro communities. You have to find micro communities that make sense for each district. So like in District Three, we have the veteran center, the federal veteran center that would be a good place. We also have the fire, I mean, the police department headquarters. So we have a culture in District Three that is more conducive to veterans. So then I know Councilor Garcia and I have talked about this, and we are more than willing to take on the veteran homelessness. If that, if that's the place where we have to lean in, then we're going to lean into that because it really is unfair to all districts if only one district has to take the burden of the lift because it's not, it's not fair, and it doesn't exactly equitably disperse the micro communities in a way that's the most effective in the cities that are doing this, the continuum of care. And so I know that I'm, I encourage all of the city councilors, and I know I've been working with Councilor Casset and Councilor Chavez and Councilor Lee Garcia, and I have been working on identifying because our districts kind of overlap in interesting ways. We've been looking proactively to identify what populations that we can take as micro communities. And so I really encourage the general population to know that what we're asking for is an equitable resolution to this issue, and there is a formula that works, and continuum of care is that formula, and that includes micro communities. And I would just further say that these micro communities are not shelters. In order to be a part of a micro community, you have to be sober. You have to be addressing your mental health issues. There's security. There's so many things that make these not Pete's Place. And I know that the population is very afraid of Pete's Place being in their neighborhood. These micro communities are not that. And so it's probably going to take time for everyone to become comfortable with this approach, but I think we've seen with Urban Alchemy that this approach has improved conditions. And so I just ask that all of us as a collective recognize that not one district can take this on. It has to be the collective answering this problem, including the citizens of Santa Fe recognizing that they have a part in this as well. They have to be okay with taking a piece of the problem in their neighborhoods. And we're doing our best to find locations that are not near schools, that are not near residential areas if possible. We have to remember too that the micro communities are almost like little tiny subdivisions in that they're micro homes. So they're not shelters. These are people's homes. They're just a smaller version of people's homes. Councilor Cassid. Thank you so much. And thank you, Councilor Faulkner. You know, the conversation around the grander scheme of things I think is really important. You know, Councilor Lindell brought this to my attention a couple days ago, and I, thank you for bringing it back to my attention because I do think there's an interesting conversation about how we look at this from a geographic standpoint. Because our districts are not actually geographically equivalent. And also, one thing that I, you know, brought up a bajillion times before, who knows how many we could count if we wanted to, is the Cerrillos Road corridor. And technically, we could put a shelter or a micro community in every single district, and it still would be within the same part of town on the Cerrillos Road corridor. So, I think that that is actually a really interesting conversation about when we are looking at this from wanting to spread these throughout the city. I think we often go to council districts because it just makes sense in our brains to divide things up by district. But that actually does not necessarily mean that we're going to have that distribution. So, I'm not entirely sure what we do about that besides be very aware of the fact that I know District 4 is the smallest geographic district in the city. So, we could technically have a couple of—we actually do, we have Consuelos, and we do have the new Richards coming in. And it could be in a pretty compacted state versus some of our other districts where we have more space. But I think the most important thing is as we start to look at this from a neighborhood perspective, every neighborhood, every section of the city needs to be part of the solution. And so, I get district making sense, but I think that this is a really interesting conversation. I also think maybe getting a map of where our current facilities are would be important. Although I know that there are some of these that are—there's some sensitive information there because of the individuals who are living there. So, that does become a, let's not actually name them, maybe just dots. So, I don't really have a solution at this moment besides as we move forward with this, I think we need to be very cautious of if we're putting, you know, four and two already have our micro-communities assigned, and two, they've been operating for a while now. But we could ostensibly be putting one in one and three, and it's just compounding the issue as opposed to really getting them into different parts of the city. So again, I don't have a solution, but I'm just putting it out there that as we're looking at these sites, we really need to be thinking about this because it does have a really big impact when everything starts to get clustered. And I think that in order for these micro-communities to be successful, we also want to make sure that we are moving them out of some of the hot spots. Although the recent data that has come out from Director Hammond Paul about the changes since Urban Alchemy took over and calls for service has been pretty impressive. So, I think that that is important to notice. So, that is my only comment. No solution, just more thoughts. I think that's an interesting point, and maybe what we need to do is look at the language in the resolution to add something that says that needs to be in each district and not clustered, not in one particular area of the city. Like making some acknowledgment of what you're saying, Counselor, and it's something we can think about. Where's this going? It's going to the governing body next, so that does beg the question if we want to bring it back here. It goes on Wednesday. Governing body. Yeah, this week. So, it might be worth our while to... Bring it back to finance. Well, or hold it here. Yeah, I mean, we hold it. It's a motion. We table it until our next meeting, which is—hold on, let's think about that a minute. Our next meeting, we're starting to run down on the meetings. When is our next meeting? Do we have another one in October? No, we're done. We have one in November, correct? November 10th, Madam Chair, is the next final. Okay, well, that's not so far away. So... Yeah, and it is a resolution, so it doesn't have the—so then it would come in December. So, we'd still be able to get it in this year, right? The only thing I'm concerned about is while we're pausing and tabling, human beings are not getting spaces to live. Well, I don't think this is stopping the work, is it? It's just... Well, approving it or not approving it. Yeah, and the other thing is if we want to play with the language, we can provide it at the governing body, too. I think what we're attempting to do is, Counselor and Counselor Cassidy have good points, and that we can say let's do it by district, but that still means it's all on the Cerrillos corridor. No, I know. That's what I'm saying is that we should add some language that says there needs to be one in each district. And I don't know what the words are at this moment, but not clustered in one part of town. I don't know what the words are. Can we do that at the governing body? Yeah, we can, Counselor Cassidy. Yeah, that's my thoughts, is that if it's not going to be too onerous of a... No, we could do it at the governing body, and then... Yeah, I don't think this is rocket science, but I can't even though I can't come up with the language off the top of my head in this very moment. So, I guess I'm not sure I'd hold it. I don't think it's worth it. I don't think we need to hold it. I think we can do it at the governing body if we put our minds to it. Okay, is there any other comment on this? And if not, is there a motion? Motion to approve. Second. We have a motion and a second to approve this item. Roll call, please. Director Oster. Counselor Casset. Yes. Counselor Lindell. Counselor Falner, yes. Explain my vote. Counselor Lee Garcia. Yes. Chair Romero. Yes. Counselor Falner to explain her vote. Counselor Lindell, I promise we are working on making sure every district takes its share. This is—okay, hold on. We're explaining our vote. That wasn't really explaining your vote, but yeah. All right, we're going to move on. So, we are on now to HH, consideration of a bill number 2025-21, sponsored by Mayor Ellen Weber. A bill amending SFCC 1987 Section 28-1.5, Living Wage Ordinance, to increase the city's base minimum wage and update the formula for calculating the minimum wage annually. Looks like we have Director Nelson here with us to speak to this, and I believe Counselor Cassid and Counselor Lee Garcia, am I correct, pulled this item? I don't know, do you guys want to arm wrestle? How do you want to do this? We can take it. Exciting. What? One of you. I can go. Director Nelson. Hello. Thank you, Madam Chair. A couple reasons for pulling this is, first off, I do have an amendment that I introduced. And, you know, I think I have a couple, obviously from the beginning, I've had quite a lot of concerns about across-the-board increasing and mandating a wage. Even myself doesn't consider it necessarily a living wage. And so, you know, we've had a lot of discussion in previous committees. I was not able to be at the previous Public Works and Utilities Committee meeting. But I know there was a robust discussion around certain things, ideologies of going to $20 an hour. What is the true really living wage that a person has to make in order to live somewhat comfortably? And it's a big challenge. There's a lot of people out there that truly do struggle to make ends meet. And I think that some of the things that, you know, we focus on, and I know that we've had economists here, and Dr. Riley White is here. Dr. White, how are you? Good. Thank you for being here. Is what does this truly do to the overall economy of Santa Fe? And you're the Director of Economic Development, which means how do we continue to support a group of economic development, whether it's businesses, small businesses, large organizations, and so on and so forth? And so, we know that there's a need out there. We do know that there are people who, for many good reasons, if they're making more money, it would definitely help them. But I want to know what the true effect of increasing this wage is over the six months to a year. How does that increase the cost of living? And my biggest concern is to give somebody $2 to take away $3. Because it's great when you have it in your hand. There's going to be some people who will create that. And some of my major concerns about this is that as you increase this, there's a fear factor. We're already seeing it. I've heard it from people. Well, the city's going to $17.50 an hour. We're just going to increase our costs. We have no control over that. And it's already happening. And this hasn't even passed until 2027. We have a true, it is a free market where businesses will continue to charge what they need to charge, and the only thing that really mitigates that is the true competition in the market. My fear is that the only people who will be able to sustain these type of things are large corporations, the Walmarts of the world, the Targets. They'll pay the wage. They'll figure out how to get this done. It's the smaller businesses. And I know that an amendment that was being introduced that was, I believe, 15 employees or less, didn't pass a committee. And so, you know, I, for the lack of having some information, I see, I, you know, I, and I don't know what your experience is in running a business of sort, small business. And, you know, when you take a look at the base pay and you take a look at all the taxes that come out, I think somebody sent an email to us recently about the true cost of $17.50 to the business isn't $17.50. It's $23.50. $23.50. And that goes to taxes. It goes to Micah, Social Security. I mean, it's on and on and on. And so, what does that do to the overall cost? Look at the federal level. What are we dealing with right now in terms of tariffs? They sure are raising higher costs. There's a lot, there's a lot to think about. And again, my overall fear is that are we helping the people or are we actually doing more damage to our economy? Are we pushing our consumers to Walmart because they can sustain that, to Lowe's, to Home Depot? What does it do to Big Joe's True Value who employs people at a specific wage that, you know, maybe they work on hourly, maybe they work on a small commission, when people don't understand how to incorporate their healthcare? I mean, if you actually added healthcare and other benefits in there, you very likely will end up saying, "Okay, well, all I'm going to have to pay you is $10 an hour or $8.50 an hour because the cost of those things are high." So, do you want the hourly take-home or do you want the benefits? Well, they want the benefits. They're going to take less home, less money home. That's not money that they can spend. That's just a benefit. And so, it's so complicated that I don't think that we really know by passing this what it's going to do to our local economy. It really does. And you take away the ability for small businesses to figure that out because the only other option they have is to increase their costs. When they increase their costs, that takes the person who with their own free will to go give their money to that business, whether they have a good service, can provide a timely service, a good product, like, "Oh, well, I can just get it at Walmart. I'm going to go to Walmart." And so, we really are pushing, I believe, by doing this, pushing our dollars into large companies who are actually have a base that's outside of New Mexico. And it's just so challenging across the board, the way that we think of just paying an employee at $17.50. If you just look at that and that alone doesn't solve our issue with cost of living. And so, those are my really major concerns. I do have an employee who I just hired on at $17.15 an hour because I had to. That's the true competition in our market. I'll just go on to say when Los Alamos started to increase their wages to people, it completely reorganized what rents were in Santa Fe. And they said, "Well, they're paying this. People need housing. I'm going to go and just it's going to be $2,500 instead of $1,500." That's not going to help our people making $17.50. And so we play this cat and mouse game with other industries. And I just really feel that this is not going to be something that necessarily helps our local economy, including the small businesses. I really do think that the businesses on the south end of town will suffer tremendously because the businesses that are smaller here in the area where there's more economic growth and wealth, whether it's tourism or things of that nature, again, they'll sustain us. But not every business model is the same, and we can't always continue to think what's best for every single business because they are providing the jobs. Well, do we want Walmart to be providing the jobs? Hey, this is a good idea. Not everybody just gets paid $17.50 an hour. Some people get base pay plus a commission, plus have the opportunity for overtime. In my business, I like to create opportunities for people. And so when I try to make everybody equal, that doesn't work either because then you end up with a toxic environment because some people excel over others. And so there you have the decision of cutting hours on some people who just can't perform. Well, where do they go? Very challenging. Again, at the end of the day, when it comes to making sure that I can make payroll every two weeks, because I have people who are there, I either have to raise prices or cut hours. If I cut hours, then they go somewhere else, maybe, maybe not. And so for me and from my perspective, I believe that it's not necessarily a quick feel-good fix to what we're experiencing right now. And in six months to maybe a year, we'll be back at another bar. And the potential for this to be $30 an hour in 10 years, and again, we don't know what the economy is going to look like then. So, very challenging for me going through it. The other thing that I have as far as an issue with this, and I know I'm not asking very many questions, but how many amendments do we have now? A, B, G, or H. And when we have that many amendments, that tells me that there's not agreement here overall. There's not a consensus of this governing body because everybody wants it to change. Maybe we should have just voted on it from the get-go, up or down. But now we've had the opportunity to make some changes based upon what we're hearing from our community. It's not an overwhelming support for this in the community. There is an overwhelming support by the advocacy groups who really like this. And I've met with them, talked about it, very respectfully. If I were to say, "I'm going to give you a $2 raise, but then say your cost of living is going to go up an additional 30%," will you take it? Well, not if you're going to give it to your left hand and take it from the right hand. They don't really understand those economic numbers. I really think that it's very important to understand what this has done in other economies, such as California. I know they've done it. I was speaking to somebody just the other day. This is when California did this, and they didn't even do it across the board. They just did it at their own municipalities. Anybody doing business on city property. I used to go to this local place to buy a steak for myself and my pet. I used to buy a steak for $8. The minute this was passed, it went to $16 just automatically. And he couldn't control that. I think what we're doing is we're going down a path that we are trying to control even private businesses and force their hand to pay a wage that they may or may not be able to afford, which will then get passed on. It's all going to get passed on. Even if we just created the competition in the market of the City of Santa Fe paying $20, everybody else has to follow suit with the competition. And so those are my very large concerns. I guess before I move my amendment, I'll allow others to make their comments. But I really feel that now is not the time for this. I know that would be in disagreement for many because they think now is the time because of the cost of living. But when you take away the ability of free market businesses to do business here in this town, especially in the areas that are a little bit more impoverished, where are our businesses going to go? They'll get shut down because those people aren't going to shop in our small businesses. They're going to go to the large box stores or they'll go to Albuquerque. And I think that's where we're running a somewhat dangerous line with this. And so it's ambitious, and I really don't see why it needs to be pushed through this quickly and this fast. So with that, I'll yield the floor for the moment. Thank you, Madam Chair. Councilor: Thank you, Councilor. Councilor Cassett. Councilor Cassett: Thank you, Madam Chair. And thank you, Councilor Garcia. I appreciate all the feedback, and I know it's been a really big conversation. This is not, I would say this is not simple. Nothing about this is simple because these are really big concerns that we have across the board. What I'm really interested in is data. And so I'm actually going to see if Dr. if you would be able to come up because there were a few things that, well, and also maybe Director Nelson may also speak to this because I see that Director Montoya is not here, but in terms of community support, what that looks like. I only have anecdotes from District 4, to be perfectly honest, but I have spoken to some of my small businesses in District 4, and some of them are like, "Great, sounds good, already doing this, have fun." And some of them are concerned, and some of them are against this, and some of them are for this. And so I have not seen for my district businesses who I've spoken with, you know, an even up or down. But we do have some data from the Chamber of Commerce that, you know, I think is good. But Dr. Dwight, could you talk a little bit about impacts, impacts that we've seen in Santa Fe before, impacts that we've seen in communities before? You know, there was some conversation around housing, and housing is also not impacted by one factor like the wage. Housing is impacted by supply and demand. Housing is impacted by our own inclusionary zoning policies and our own, you know, planning and land use policies. So there's a few other things at play here. But Director White, you did a lot of the research and data around this. So can you provide some of that information now? Dr. White: I'm very happy to. Thank you for having me. I also want to address a few things. I'm not here to advocate for this legislation or, frankly, any legislation. I'm only here to report the economic facts. As Councilor Garcia pointed out, these are complex questions that involve a lot of different pieces to it. But that's why academics have been studying this topic many years. So the research I studied and the nature of what I studied was grounded in some of the best empirical research that we have right now. So let's talk about what some of those impacts are. Now, regrettably, those aren't impacts, those are impacts around the country, and those are impacts in different places that may be different than Santa Fe. So first, let's kind of address that first issue involving employment. One of the interesting parts about employment is that these concerns, and I appreciate so much, Councilor Garcia, your honesty and frameworks, said what a lot of people think on the back of their minds. It's intuitive indeed for economic theory to look this way. And I want to point to an article written by a very famous economist whose last name is Manning that wrote a study about these very effects just four years ago, and he called it "The Elusive Employment Effects of Minimum Wage Hikes." Intuitively, it seems like it would affect employment. Intuitively, by raising the price of labor, it seems that way. But the data doesn't pan out on this level. And study after study after study have shown little or no aggregate employment effects. Now, there is a side effect to this too that was pointed out here today that I think is worth noting. Small businesses in particular, particular concern. And how we define that, if they're 25 or less employees, 20 or less employees, 50 or less, 100 or less employees, or we follow New Mexico Small Business Administration definition of 500 or less. The majority of New Mexico businesses are in fact small businesses. So there was a study, another study, and I hate to be an academic here, but that's why I'm here. It's written by two, Ralph and Max Rich, from University of Michigan and Carnegie Mellon, both outstanding academics in their field, and you can look it up. It's on Oxford. They've got a bunch of data on it as well. It's the most thorough data set of small independent businesses out there right now. They've studied, they had access, priority access to individual tax returns and priority access to these business tax returns. They were able to match a huge number of effects across the market. Now, there's tradeoffs across the board. Everything we do possesses economic tradeoffs. And I can actually quote a few things from it if you give me a second here. So they looked at independent, and they had about 250,000 data points a year. So this is a massive, massive study. They actually matched people's tax returns with others, and independent non-publicly traded firms rarely cut jobs in response to minimum wage hikes. They had a focus on small firms. Workforce size remained stable. Now, there were not, they were not, there were still effects. So let's talk about what those effects are and the magnitude of what those effects might be. The firms absorbed wage increases by increasing revenues, not shrinking profits. That does imply that pass-along effect. Now, other studies have studied how much is actually passed along in those effects. So, for a 10 to 20% wage increase, we expect a 0.5% to 1% to 1.5% increase in prices. It's fractional, but it's non-zero. And that's important to know. Further, a small share of less productive small firms, as found in that study, about 1.5% of the total firms did end up shuttering after the wage hikes themselves. But the overall industry became more productive. What explains that paradox? Employers having to pay higher wages for the employees expected more from them. They demanded that they earn that money, and those employees, employers responded to that to those levels. And so productivity increases in response to wage hikes. And we also had, so there's another question that affected on this. So let's look at the other question is there doesn't seem to be a large effect in between the question of is it a small firm or a large firm that's intuitive to suggest there would be, but the effects there, there's not really a significant difference in what we find between them. There's also stuff about real estate and costs and other things, and I want to acknowledge that as well. And so, acknowledging the point that yes, Los Alamos does affect the market in Santa Fe. Santa Fe also affects the market in Rio Rancho or Albuquerque. As you will quickly know, I commute the other way. I live here, and unfortunately, for irrational economic reasons, I commute to Albuquerque every day. And every day I drive down and I drive back huge streams of cars on I-25 coming out of I-25. And they have an impact on the markets in Rio Rancho, Albuquerque as well. We're connected to each other for sure, and that's something we have to address. We have to acknowledge regarding other effects and price increases. We talked about employment effects. We talked about what other effects are on your mind. How can I help address some of these impacts? What they might look like. Yeah, thank you. I appreciate that. And can we get links to those articles? I know that you... Yes, I'm happy to. I can... We'll follow up with Johanna maybe. Yeah, Councilor Cassid, does that second study have a name or just Carnegie Mellon and the university? Oh, yes, I can tell you right now, actually. You can look this up. This is a wonderful little... it's called "The Impact of the Minimum Wage on Independent Businesses." And it was a recent study, the 25th of September 2024. It's great to fall asleep reading it. It's a very, very detailed data set. Thank you. I appreciate that. And I do think maybe Director Nelson, if I or Andrew, I'm not sure, because we do not have Director Montoya here to speak to some of the conversations that have happened around our study results or survey results. We did get a very robust response. I mean, and I also want to point out that the listserv that this went out to was the Economic Development, the Office of Economic Development's listserv. So we can surmise that that is likely going to include more businesses and people involved in the business world than our general listservs, or, you know, it wasn't necessarily sent out to the nonprofit listservs. It was, I'm sure they're involved in there too. And then the Chamber of Commerce also directly targeted business, smaller sample size, but still some interesting results that I think as we continue to have these conversations around benefits versus things that we need to look out for, because as Director White noted, things might be minimal but not zero, and that is really important for us to, or Director Dr. White, excuse me, and whatever. So, are you sure some people regret taking that job? But what those different conversations look like. So, could you, are you able to provide some of that information? Yeah, I've got everything. Yes. Madam Chair, Councilor Casset, councilors, thank you so much for illuminating the fact that we have collected a pretty good sample of not only business owners but employees, retired folks, and members of our community to provide their feedback on how they perceive this increase in living wage. So, you mentioned the survey that the City of Santa Fe's Office of Economic Development conducted. This did go out to our listserv, which as a reminder, is around 10,000 folks, mainly culled from business license holders, as well as our many members of the business service ecosystem. And when you mention nonprofits, that also includes community organizations as well as business service providers, which then have their own networks of businesses, like a chamber, like an association, etc. So, we're really dependent when we get information out that they're also amplifying that message and getting that out to their business members. So, roughly a pretty decent sample of our business community. In addition, you mentioned that the Chamber of Commerce sent their own survey out to their members, and they had a response rate of about 72 business owners, and that information is available. You can see the results there. And then we got about 1,500, a little over 1,400, 1,500 responses. I will note that early phases of the survey results were enhanced when we asked the Santa Fe Public Schools to send to their students and their families. And so that almost double, tripled the response rate. So what you saw, I believe this came up in the Quality of Life meeting, was we were getting a lot of feedback from one particular demographic set, but the moment that the SFPS helped us and sent that out to their families, we saw the results really give a more realistic picture of our families, including income brackets and household size that is much more reflective of our community. And I'm happy to go into results. So what you see is that the majority of respondents from our survey, the majority still is about resides within employees and workers. And then you also see that there is overwhelming support for an increase in the living wage, that $15 is not enough for a living wage. You see many of the trends that we have chatted about here, and we've presented those in previous committees. You do see about a 30% in support from the small businesses. You see some concern there about if I increase my living, my minimum wage, perhaps I will have to increase prices, but it's still a minimal result. You still see that split. You also see the majority of folks on our survey results saying that they already pay above the minimum wage with around $15 per hour. And I'm happy we have those results and laid out. So, I'm happy to go through them specifically. I think it'd be, it'd probably be helpful to send out. I know that we saw the presentation at Quality of Life. I think you guys also saw the, people in public works also saw the presentation, but I don't know if it's in the packet, and if not, I think it'd be helpful to send that out to everyone to upload. Great. And I have it pulled up. I'm happy to go through those results too. It's a pretty quick presentation if the committee... I don't feel a need. I've seen it, but I would leave that up to people who have not. I think my only question then, I'll stop here, probably for Dr. White again, is there has been analysis about what happened specifically in Santa Fe with our own increases in the living wage? Do you have that information off the top of your head at this moment in time? There are two competing studies that have been done. One was early, and the second one was by Bieber. And full disclosure, I'm also, as you know, a UNM employee. I have no... they wrote what I thought was a very thoughtful engagement that showed it resulted in very little negative outcomes at this time. There's something else on this note that I kind of, you know, it's interesting to think about because this is a question of, it is a question of free markets. It is a question of things where you involve those issues. One thing to think about as you approach the question as a council, the question of living wages and minimum wages, is labor like other things? So free markets work, you meet like you have a bunch of suppliers, you have a bunch of, you have a bunch of producers, you have a bunch of consumers, meet competition in both areas, make that work better. Markets like retail markets, like Amazon, replace it, have a bunch of goods, and that lowers the price. A lot of suppliers and a lot of buyers, that's a healthy... minimum wages are interesting. Labor is interesting because the supplier of wages are households, the consumer is businesses. And when we look at minimum wage from an economic perspective, we know how important supply and demand is for different parts of labor. One thing to consider, and I think where you look at different differentiators between economists and viewing certain issues, you come to the question of how you regard labor. Is labor like a free market good, or is it not like a free market? And we could argue we don't need any, don't need this. But there's some case to say that at least in a free market, if I sell a product nobody wants, that price goes down in value because nobody wants to buy it, and maybe I go bankrupt and I start again. Labor is different though, isn't it? Because families are involved, people. They don't have enough money to put food on the table. You just sort of, darn. And so when we think about the questions of labor, it is a type of good that we can view in the context of supply and demand, but it is not quite the same as other goods that we have supply and demand. Which is why across the country, and looking at minimum wage issues, we don't see those labor force changes, but they are impactful, but they're impactful in different ways. If I extended the question as to, and I also want to address this issue, who's up, what's the right amount, living wage or fair wage? If I raise minimum wage to $100,000, there would be a huge number of employment, absolutely huge number, absolutely stunning number. If I lowered it to zero, would it have any employment effects? Like my 11-year-old son be now gainfully employed by my... I don't know. The short answer is without that data set and that attribution, we'll know in the future. But in that case, the wage now of $15 an hour, it's not the source individually of why Santa Fe is expensive, nor is it the source of why what positive and negative outcomes that exist in this are. Those labor impacts as studied by Bieber were not highly significant. Is $17.50 too much? That's a 16% increase of wage. If you raise it to $20, that's a higher index. So what metrics would we use to evaluate that? So an economist by the name of Katz, K-A-T-Z, came out with a wage gauge, but how much is, and looking at a bunch of studies, right now the median wage in Santa Fe is about $20, $29, $29.40. And this economist, Katz, found that when minimum wages go above two-thirds of the median wage, it starts to create greater... two-thirds of the minimum wage is between $17.50 and $20. $17.50 is about 60% of the median wages. $20 an hour is about 69%. The higher the minimum wages, the greater likelihood of those employment effects magnitude. And this is a balance that depends. What you impose on Santa Fe is going to work in different ways than it would if it was in Biloxi, Mississippi, or if it was in St. Louis, Missouri, for the reasons that are specific to this economy. Now, Santa Fe has some robust elements to it that are worth noting. It's a tourist-driven economy. These areas typically are more robust to minimum wage jobs than others. Now, that what we say in aggregate doesn't say about the experienced individuals either. That's important to note. So although I say yes, my confidence is, you read my impact study, I studied this, I looked at this, is that the impacts would be very small relatively speaking, compared to individual business firms. If you're on the margin already and your fund is struggling with productivity issues, there is a risk that it would have a substantial government, but in aggregate, I'm not anticipating... Wonderful, thank you. And now I just want to go take economics classes, so thank you for that. I always appreciate when you're here, it gets to allow my come in. I will go ahead and yield the floor for now and pass it along. Thank you. Councilor Faulkner. Councilor Falconer, if you could turn your mic on. Thank you. Sorry, Chair. I find this issue fascinating because like many issues in policy, for every one economist who says that the living wage is a great idea, you can find equal amounts of economists who are like, absolutely not. And one of the things that I'm concerned about is that there is a risk that there is a percentage of the population who we are intending to help who will suffer from the decision to increase the living wage. It's in the study on page seven and on page nine that there is a possibility that the very people we are trying to help are going to be negatively impacted. I know that Councilor Garcia and I, Airport Road, and also for District 4, Airport Road is one of the economic drivers, right? So we have lots of small businesses on Airport Road that employ between 10 and 15 employees, and they're telling us that they will have to close. There are only two reasons someone is not paying more than $15.50 an hour: it's because they can't or they won't. And my concern is that in my district, we are dealing with that percentage of the population that will be negatively impacted. I have looked at studies. I know that there are studies out there that say, in Seattle, for example, the hourly rate is higher, but years after they've implemented the living wage, people are making $300 to $400 less an hour because their hours have been cut back. And so this is the argument about the living wage. It's like, where's the sweet spot? And my concern is we might be in the sweet spot for the whole city, not for District 3 and not for parts of District 4. I know that our small businesses along Airport Road, they employ five to 15 people each. If they go out of business, then all those people that we're intending to help will be out of a job, and they will have to be competing in a market that's already saturated as far as the hotels and all the places people would go to look for jobs if you're coming from District 3. So that's my biggest concern, is that there's no one who says that there isn't a portion of the population who you intend to help that you actually will harm with a living wage, especially with an uncertain economy like we have now. And I would love to say that $2 an hour would be enough to offset what people lose in SNAP and what people lose in Medicare and Medicaid. That would be fantastic if I could believe that was true. Those $2 an hour are not going to make a difference. We already have complaints in our district about rents for businesses going up just based on the living wage. That it's a possibility, $300 a month. Two businesses have had to pay $300 a month each more just because there's the living wage on the horizon, and that's what the landlord told them. And that's going to be the case all up and down Airport Road. So my concern is not that the city won't be okay. My concern is that my district won't be okay. That we will have people unemployed or their hours cut back while facing the consequences of a federal economy that is out of control and not predictable, and much of the resources that we depend on in New Mexico are going to be cut. And so to me, I'm looking at this, I'm like, I don't think this is the right time for this. And I'm concerned that our district in particular is going to be that part of the city that takes the hit because we are poorer. Our we have smaller businesses. We did a I did a calculation with an economist from the state, and we looked at if you had a business of 25 people and 10 of those people made $15.50 and you had to increase them to $17.50, and you added a 3% increase on payroll tax, which is kind of an average because for some businesses it's one, for some it's five, so we picked three, trying to hit the middle, it would be $50,000 a year. I don't know a small business in Santa Fe that could tolerate a $50,000 a year increase in what they'd have to come up with to pay people. They would have to cut hours and increase the cost of goods and services. And when I look at that number, I'm looking exactly at Airport Road. And that's my biggest concern. I don't know a business on Airport Road that could take a $50,000 hit. And they're going to have to cut back on hours and services, if not close some of them. So if you close a business that hires 10 people or 15 people, where are those people going to go? Airport Road is one of the corridors that actually this could have a negative impact on. That's all. Manager: Thank you, Councilor. Other comments? Okay. We I there are a couple of amendments in the packet. I think I heard at least one is being offered tonight, maybe two offered tonight. We do need a motion in order to consider those to approve. >> Second. Manager: We have a motion and a second. Councilor Lee Garcia, did you want to offer your motion? Councilor Lee Garcia: Thank you, Madam Chair. Manager: I'm sorry, your amendment. Councilor Lee Garcia: Yes. So I have, along with Councilor Faulkner, an amendment that I've offered up, which would allow for a business up to 90 days to, mostly for training purposes, to basically state that the living wage or the minimum wage, it's basically what this is going to be, it's a minimum wage, would not the business could opt to not pay that in its first 90 days of employment for the purposes of training and evaluating that employee based upon their abilities to perform the job that they would need to be performing to earn the wages that would that eventually be paid for under full-time employment. And so, with that, you want anyone that wants to read that, but I'd like to move Amendment G. Manager: For discussion, we have we have a motion and a second on Amendment G, I think essentially creating a training wage for 90 days. Are there is there discussion? Councilor Cassid. Councilor Cassid: You know, again, I would I'd be interested to hear, Dr. White, again, I don't know if you have this information at this moment in time, what the literature says around training wages, if it says anything. Dr. White: It's a good question. So, the literature I looked up on training wages and engaged on training wages looked at the question from the perspective of its complexity to actually a pool. State of Minnesota got rid. Councilor Cassid: I'm sorry, I didn't I didn't hear that last part, the its relationship to what? Dr. White: To the complexity that it is to enforce. That's the. Councilor Cassid: Okay, thank you. Dr. White: So that's the hard part. If you if it's possible as a as a complexity standpoint, there are broader questions that minimum wage policy looked at are, for instance, is it comparable to I mean, what would keep a firm from paying somebody a training wage indefinitely? This has a time limit on it, so I'm reacting to this is the first time I've heard of this this amendment. So, this has a 90-day time limit attached to it, which is interesting. Most critique has has been around the question of training wages in aggregate, which is if you institute an open-ended training wage, you create a situation where somebody could be perpetually in training, which creates an in an adverse labor impact. See, see, training wages in general also are more challenging to enforce. The state of Minnesota had so we look at the question of carveouts and minimum wages, and carveouts often produce the more complex it is, the more it creates greater risk of other employment disincentives like that. And the state of Minnesota, I think, got rid of theirs. Councilor Cassid: Was Minnesota's indefinite or did it have a time frame? Dr. White: It's a good question. I would have to verify that separately. A very good question to that point too, you know, this is interesting, Tero. So whether you're you know, you're up here and doing these things and again, only reporting the the data that's out there, only saying that that's that's rational in that respect, there are economists I can bring you economists who say the sky is purple, do other things as well, and that's also a possibility here. I'm only reflecting on the most recent studies, which are widely detailed and something that Mr. Abby may not be as familiar with. Councilor Cassid: Thank you. Well, that makes that if is there potentially more information out there if we were to take a deep dive into this type of I would imagine so. I mean, I imagine that if we do some research around training wages and the impact and indefinite versus a time period and what those time periods might look like, that could be. Dr. White: Highly depends on structure, I would say. Councilor Cassid: Okay, it's fair. So a fixed and finite time frame is if it's enforceable as it was, its impact would likely be small. Okay, thank you. And then I guess a question for the sponsors is just why 90 days? And who who qualifies for a training wage? Is there is there a difference between somebody who, you know, is very experienced in the field and is just popping in or somebody who's who's, you know, it's entry level? Councilor Lee Garcia: I can answer that. I I. Councilor Lee Garcia: Thank you, Madam Chair. I think it's very subjective. If somebody comes to my business and has a resume from here to Arkansas and they've done X, Y, and Z, and yet I still want to know what they can do once they're hired on. It you can offer offer a step ladder within the first 90 days to the again, not everybody, every business works off of a contractual exact amount. I understand that the minimum wage would be a contractual exact amount to start. However, I'll just go for, my intent on this is that there's many times where we have youth who come to work and they basically can perform less than minimum requirements for a job. We're not going to hire them. We have people who come to apply for a position at a skilled labor position who come out of a local high school and a local community college who are not prepared to work in the industry that they are working in, and it and 90 days is not even enough to really train them up to what you need. So, the answer to your question in regards to 90 days was just based upon most companies have a 90-day probationary period. Some go to 180 days. I know the state has an MDOT. They they evaluate people after 180 days. And so we did want to basically put something in there that was that would be kind of a compromise. Do you want to put a year? No. I think that most businesses upon hiring of an individual kind of get a feel for them within the first two weeks. Are they going to make this or break it? Do they have can I train this person? And so if you're going to give them at least 90 days, which is three months, to say, okay, once you make this in 90 days, you will learn the we cannot control what a person's skill skill sets are, what their abilities are. And that's the challenge with this trying to create equality amongst everyone. And we we can't get there. We can all agree that $17.50 isn't enough. I can agree that. But where I have an issue on this and and that's where adding this amendment in there would get me a little closer to say, well, okay, I can hire somebody at $15, which is the current wage. We didn't go to the to the state's minimum wage, which is $12 something. We went to the current city of Santa Fe's minimum wage, which is even difficult for a 15 or 16-year-old person that wants to come in and work. A lot of these guys aren't even in apprentice programs. And so all of those cars don't really even matter. You know, I've I'll just use an example for my business. I've had individuals coming out of the public schools, and I commend them for doing this. And I've talked to their principals and to their teachers, and they said, "This person can operate a tire machine and balance a tire," and they come in, and after a month's worth of time, they can't do the job. They got passed, they can't do the job. Not the job, but the demand of what people want. So this gives us an opportunity to give these young individuals or unskilled people the opportunity to train. And I think that really is important. I as a business owner would bring in a person that's performing at the higher level. You move them right into the next bracket. And so those are my because you want to keep that person. They come to work. They're showing up on time. They're doing the things that you're teaching them because we actually are teaching these people. School systems aren't teaching these people. They're passing him through, passing him to another level and say, "Here you go. Go get a job completely unprepared." And that's where the brunt of individual businesses, especially ones that are training a person, have to pay them. Whereas if they went on to a school, they'd have to pay a fee, a tuition fee to get taught, to get passed, to then go into the job market. Then they come to the business and they say, "Well, I got all of this stuff." Well, they really don't have all this stuff because they haven't ever worked as an apprentice in anything. So, that's your 90-day period of possibly potentially giving an individual the opportunity to get into a job where then they could make this. I'll give you just an example in my own business. Early on, about five years ago, I hired an individual who didn't know anything. I just needed somebody to answer phones. That person started off at a very minimal entry-level wage. It took them time to understand through commitment, my commitment and their commitment. This person is now in the $23 to $25 wage area. They went to school. They decided to stick with my company. They saw the opportunity. They've learned. They come, and through all of this, do I run the risk of losing this person off to another company? Sure. That's where I've got to get savvy in keeping this person, whether it's wages or benefits or time off, all of the above. And so the 90-day period basically allows us to give unskilled people the ability to work their way into a job, and or our youth market who really are struggling finding work because at $17.50, the competition at $17.50 is going to actually be $18.50 to $20 because we're going to have to compete with everybody else. I'll leave it at that. Thank you. Yeah, thank you. So, a couple things. The way I'm reading this is that the escalator, if this were to pass, the escalator would remain the same as the current escalator. So, one escalator would be going on only CPI, another escalator would be going on the combination of the percent increase in CPI and the average of CPI and the percent increase for HUD fair market value for a two-bedroom home. It's quite a tongue twister. That's how I'm reading that right now. Am I correct in understanding that? I think that again, it's just going to be based upon what our current minimum wage escalator is. Okay. So, that would, okay. So, it would, this is actually not quite correct as described in paragraph B. So, that's one thing that I think to look at. So, for me right now, I'm on the fence. My gut reaction is I don't like carve-outs. I've been having a lot of conversations and I know that that's hard. I haven't had a chance to look at much data and information around this. So, I would like to take a look. A couple things that I'm curious about just in the literature, if there is a definition for what a trainee is. If somebody has been through an apprenticeship, do they get to skip that if they've gone through these processes? So, that's where I am at this moment in time. So, yeah, I would just like the opportunity to take a look at some information and take a look at what any data says around this. And Dr. White, if you have anything that you would recommend I look into. I'm pretty proficient at academic research still. So, I'm sure I can figure it out with Google Scholar if nothing else. But yeah, that's my thoughts on this at this moment in time. I still have some questions around this both on impact on how we would manage this as well as what some of these definitions and the escalators would look like. So, thank you. Other discussion on this, Councilor Falconer. So, I have a question. How many studies did you look at to come up with the 17? Approximately 115. Of those that you looked at, how many would say that this isn't a good formula? Most studies, the studies I looked at, the ones that are, let me put it this way, the vast majority, about 105, were saying it was positive. There are other, didn't have any negative effects, is how we frame it in economics, not positive, let me make that clear, not positive, that the negative effects are minimal. So, on that regard, it's an extensive literature review that studied also studies of studies, which are called meta-studies. So, these study the studies that are out there and they evaluate the techniques that were used, what are the techniques that are most accurate, which measured things best, were the most thorough in these circumstances. And so it is something that belies us to you, Councilor Falconer, it seems very logical to worry about the employment effects in these regards because we all have them. We're all taught in the strategies of supply and demand, and everybody with a PhD with their weight in salt has considered it, and that becomes a valid concern. And it's not that there is no effect to it, not that it has no effect, but it is a very minimal and at most studies, virtually non-existent employment effect. The studies that I've studied, but that doesn't mean that there won't be effects at margins. And to your point, one of these things comes down to, and I want to address also a previous point you made, because there are effects that happen and thinking of the people on Airport Road and the small businesses. You know, there are many things right now when this is studied years later. Let's say it does pass. Let's say this goes through council and it passes and you commission a study, and I would advise you to commission a study with anyone else that you choose to do a study on this. The most challenging part about this is attribution effects. What are the effects of things at the end of the day? Right now, to your point, we've got tariffs happening, and I think one of the biggest effects for a lot of businesses, right, we see a massive decline in immigration. That's labor. Labor has cost associated with it. When we take out a bunch of labor that might operate at the minimum wage level or at the low times around that level, that creates a labor shock in the market, makes wages more dear, makes labor itself more dear. And so agnostic to this question and the fact of doing nothing in this level as well, we'd also present a situation where I would expect to see effects due to the economic policy everywhere this particular moment. And those are all good points and I want to address them too. And I guess it comes down to the margins and looking at aggregates. If it helped 80% of the people and hurt 20%, that the affirmative helped 60% of the people, 40% of the people that we looked at in margins, and then we look at the question of how big are those impacts? Are they significant or less? You can see how complex these studies go. We look at the benefits to people who receive that minimum wage and then the resulting increases in wages that people have across the board and then price effects and who bears those price effects even if they're small. That does affect bottom lines. You looked at rents too. Rents are in effect too and they're a non-zero effect. I want to point out as well, they're short-term and then they level off. Landlords do occasionally increase rents to that effect, the benefit of a minimum wage. And so an example being if we compare it to studies where minimum wage have increased similarly to others in the 10 to 20% category. You see that there are rental increases but they are not as high as the take-home benefit the people earn and the market responds to those effects. It absolutely does. So, I want to acknowledge those facts. So, I would offer it doesn't matter if you're in the 80% that is positively impacted by a living wage adjustment, but if your district holds the 20% that is going to be impacted, then as a counselor, you have to consider, especially when your district is one of the more challenging districts around poverty and at-risk populations. It appears to me, and by the way, I have talked to former director Abby, but I've also talked to other economists who are younger and more cutting edge and who are studying this from the same perspective you are. There is a risk that some of the people we intend to help the most are going to be the ones who take that 20% hit. And my fear is that's my district. The rest of the city is already making all more than $20 an hour. In District 3, there are a lot of people who are making $15 now and will be $15.50 in 2026. And those businesses cannot withstand. It's not that they don't want to, it's that they cannot. And Airport Road is like our economic driver for our district, a primary economic driver. And so if I'm looking at my district and saying, "Okay, our district's going to take the 20% hit." So the 80% that's already making $23. It doesn't make sense to me as a leader. That's where I'm struggling. It's like this already, most of the people in Santa Fe are easily making $21 to $28 an hour. So then when you put this into place, District 3 is going to be the district and parts of District 1 likely and some parts of District 2. The poorest people and the smallest businesses are going to take a hit or what? We're intending to help them, but they're the group that's going to take the hit because everyone else is already making above the living wage. And this group of people, these small businesses who can't afford to pay the $17.50, they're going to close or cut back hours. That's in the study that you presented. That's in every study that I've read, pro or con. All of the studies show that there's a population that's going to take the hit, that 20%. And my concern is that 20% is exactly the 20% that we are trying to help with this legislation. And so that's, those are my concerns and I keep repeating it, but it's absolutely true. And I do, it is frustrating for me in doing research because I am getting my master's degree and I have access to a ton of research. For every study that says great, good idea, there's a study that says absolutely not. And so that's, this is where I'm having a hard time with this issue. Thank you, Councilor Faul. I appreciate your perspective. And by the way, thank you so much. When I get passionate, it has nothing to do with you. You're an awesome presenter and I appreciate everything that you've shared with us tonight. Same, Councilor Falconer, and likewise, I don't disagree with you as well. There are people who will not benefit when it's served. All I'm saying is that in aggregate, in the research looked at and studied, yes, those are effects, right? So there is a cutting of hours and there is a potential risk of cutting hours, and where we do see employment effects is that expectation of higher, employers adjust by expecting more from those employees. They also might reduce hours. Also, to a certain extent, one of the other effects that you point out, you know, it is uneven. In aggregate though, people who studied this further is that more people are helped than hurt, most of them around those. But, and that's an important distinguishing fact, and I would say right now there's a general sense, and I want to acknowledge this again, agnostic of the question of minimum, say this never had, let's say I was never up here. I was at home enjoying dinner with my family and we were just, this was never a discussion that we had right now. And it would still be troubles. You'd be worried about your districts and your people within them because of less of lack, lack of labor, labor concerns. You'd be worried about the same issue, worried about firms experiencing tariffs and margins and other issues, all the other economic, that's what makes this stuff so hard as you kind of alleged, allude to, and so why there is that. effect, and looking at it in different ways. I don't know, is there, what is the, I mean, is it, I can't, it's hard to say because the way we separate districts isn't the same as the way we separate zip codes. I can tell you from zip codes, different income in different areas, right? You know, what is, you know, 85705 has a, has an average household income of $76,000. It's lower than the Santa Fe average, but it's still not, it's not nothing, right? And so there are effects here, but there are also people who live on the South Side. I live on the southern part of town as well, and it's a, to where we can afford very expensive place. So it is a, it's an issue that we have to grapple with. So good points, and I want to look at that. But that is the question. I'm saying in aggregate, what studies show is that people are helped. There is a risk, though, that some people will not. And even in the study, I point out in independent businesses, 1.5%. And this is a very thorough study. 1.5% of businesses could have left 98, but that's still 1.5%. And that is a non-zero impact. And as much as I could explain that, and I, I empathize with the position you're all in, because as much as I could say yes to somebody who's earning $17.50, that 1% of workers are the people I'm going to, 1% of business owners are the people I'm going to see in my inbox, are the people that are affected, and that their experiences are not, not important. They are important, and I just want to acknowledge it. I would only offer in follow-up that 98% won't be impacted because they're already paying more than $17.50. The part that I'm concerned about is the part of my district, which is our economic anchor, that cannot pay that. And so that's the percentage that's going to be impacted negatively is primarily in our district. And in District 1, some of District 1 and District 2, there's some places that are going to be impacted as well. And it's, it's what I'm struggling with is we're not helping anybody who's already making more than $17.50. They're already making more than $17.50, and that's the majority of the business in Santa Fe. So in an effort to try to help the group that isn't making that, they're likely the population that will be negatively impacted by this. And that's the ironic thing that I'm struggling with. It's a paradox of sorts for me. Okay, I'm going to remind the committee, we still have two other things, and they're not short. I don't want to cut you off, but just making note of the time. Councilor Cassid: I'll be, I'll be speedy. I just want to point out that, you know, there's, there's like this assumption that if people live on the South Side, they're working on the South Side. We know a lot of our community is working in the service industry. We know that while there were a number of people in the service industry who are already making $17.50, there are those who are not. So I, I mean, I, I think that the problem is, is, you know, Dr. White has pointed out that there is no universal statement that we can say about this thing that is true. It is not necess, it is not true that there are, nobody's going to be helped because everybody who would be helped is already making $17.50. We have people at La Fonda or El Dorado or whatever that I'm sure are not. And guess what? They can, they'll be able to afford it. They'll raise, probably raise some rates. Guess what? We don't have to pay those, a tourist too. So, you know, I, I think that that is what is so challenging about this is that there is no, I don't think you can make a blanket statement that every single, you know, that all these businesses on Airport Road will be hurt, or that every single person who is making the current minimum wage is going to be assisted. This is, this is tough, and this really does have to do with the fact that we are looking at, you know, what [clears throat] what are the averages, what are the potential, you know, negative impacts, what are some things we can potentially do to assist, which I do have an amendment, I'll be speedy about it when we get there. And that's, you know, I think that that's what's really complex is that everything here is very nuanced. So, I think we should remember that, that the blanket statements, you know, correlation's not causation, you know, one of those favorite things about rents being raised and all these pieces. There are different factors that are coming into play in all of these places, and that's, that's tough, and again, that's something that we have to deal with. Thank you. Councilor Lee Garcia: Thank you, Madam Chair. And I'll just, I'll just briefly make, make a comment. I, I appreciate the, the request for data, and I think data is very important. If I ask all the data and maybe even AI on how to ride a horse, it'll tell me all these wonderful things on how to get on that horse and how to gallop that horse and maybe how to run that horse. Until you get on that horse, it's very difficult to understand. And then I, I could break down an employee, what they make, what the employment taxes are, what, what the, what the FICA, the Micas, the, the state withholdings, all of that stuff, what the true cost of that employee is to each business. And until you have to struggle on how to figure out, I work on the 30/30/30 rule, costs, you cost of goods, cost of labor, what your markups are, margins versus margins versus markups. And when you're, when you're constantly putting a fine pencil to that, again, I, I think that the large corporations and bigger corporations aren't, are, they'll figure this out very easily because they absorb it. They have the backbone. Small businesses don't. And I think that's where we go down to taking away their liberty to run their business how they want to, whether it's a base pay, an hourly wage, an hourly plus commission, an hourly flat rate for mechanics. I mean, there's, it, it's so complicated. And I think what we're doing here is we're taking that liberty away from them. Or maybe not. We're just, we can't control. I can take the average of what my employee makes, divide that by the hours that they work, and come up with $17.50 and justify they're already getting way above that. But I think what the negative effect overall in our community, maybe it's a positive effect. We'll see. We're going to see what happens on all of this. Any single person who has never run a payroll or operated a business doesn't really understand what it takes to do it because at the end of the day, I've got to go in there, any small business owner has to go in there and make sure that everything is paid before they get paid. And for some, they don't make it. And so with that statement, I'll go ahead and move my amendment. Ask, call the question. Councilor, you've already moved your amendment. Okay. We have a motion to call the question. Do we have a second? Second. A motion and a second to call the question. Director Oster, if we can get a roll call vote on calling the question. Certainly, Madam Chair. Just a second. Let me get up here. Yeah. Sorry about that. It's okay. Okay. Councilor Cassid. Yes. Councilor Lindell. Councilor Faulkner. Yes. Councilor Lee Garcia. Yes. Chair Marworth. Yes. Motion passes. Okay. Now we're on to voting on the amendment to add a training wage. Director Oster, if you could call the question. I mean, I'm sorry. If you could take the, wow, if you could take the roll. Roll call. Certainly, Madam Chair. So, on the motion to approve Amendment G. Councilor Cassid. No. And I'd like to explain my vote. Councilor Lindell. Councilor Faulkner. Yes. Councilor Lee Garcia. Yes. Chair Marworth. No. Motion fails. Councilor Cassid, to explain our vote. Thank you, Madam Chair. As I said, you know, there's, I'm, I'm actually a little on the fence with this one. There's some things about this that one, I just need to understand more, and I just, I don't, I don't have that opportunity, or I have not had that opportunity. So, we'll look into that. But I also think, you know, the, which escalator is it, wasn't specified, you know, what that definition looks like. There's a few things that even if I, you know, go and see that, you know, training wage with an end date, eliminates some of those complexities and can be beneficial. At this moment, I would still have some questions in those arena. So, that's why my no is no for now. Thank you. Thank you. All right, we have one more amendment, I believe, that's being offered tonight. Councilor Cassid, back to you. Thank you so much. I will be speedy. So, this amendment, that is Amendment H, and I, I believe Councilor Faulkner is co-sponsoring this. However, what it, what it essentially does is we do have a small business navigation program that is currently operating that is funded only through 2026, but it is currently funded right now. So this amendment says that in this year, you know, pause or preparation year, that there would be a targeted outreach to businesses that we specifically know could potentially be at risk. So again, looking at that conversation on the Airport Road corridor, those smaller businesses, if there's industries that we know are going to potentially be at risk, to provide those navigation services and supports in preparation for the living wage going into effect. This also would have the Office of Economic Development provide us with a report on the program utilization and outcomes of the program, both in preparation for the 2027 fiscal year budget, because again, this program is only funded through the end of calendar year 2026. And then as well, towards the end of the 2026 calendar year, as implementation would potentially be going into place, so for us to understand that landscape, and if there's, you know, anything that we decide to do at that time, we can. And so with that, I will move for approval. We have a motion. Do we have a second? We have a motion and a second to approve this item. Is there any discussion? All right, I... Just a quick question. Oh, okay. Councilor Lee Garcia, sorry, Councilor. How successful are we with people reaching out for this help? I mean, you know, I, I, I think that it's very important, and I, I will support the amendment, but how, how, how successful are we with, not only the outreach that we give, but when businesses call back, and is it 5% of businesses, maybe 10% of businesses? Madam Chair, Councilor Garcia, councilors, thank you for the question. This is a question that our Office of Economic Development faces every day when we talk about our success rates and how well is our messaging about our services getting out to the community. As you know, in government, one of our challenges is how are we utilizing information channels to get information to the public. When we talk about the services that the Office of Economic Development provides, we have a newsletter of over 10,000 folks. We do social media. We do newspaper ads. We go to community events every single week. We have a staff of seven folks that is constantly at events, and we, when we talk about reach and is this information about what help we provide getting out to the businesses, I'm going to say we can always do better. We can always do more because guess what? Not everybody opens up their email. Not everybody is on Instagram. So we're constantly having to be creative of how we're promoting our services. And when you talk about how successful, I think you're referring, and correct me if I'm wrong, I think you're referring to the small business navigator program and how successful is that program? I want to point out that Councilor Cassid mentioned that this program just got kicked off at the end of the summer. So we've seen about 30 businesses so far sign up without a lot of promotion yet. We have yet to really kick this off and really launch the awareness that, hey, we've got a coordinator located on Airport Road at Santa Fe Business Incubator, providing connections and resources for our businesses. That's one service and one program amidst a portfolio of many ways that we are providing our businesses assistance. We also track things like traditional economic development statistics around, did that business start? If you come in to me and say, "Hey, I want to start an automotive business," my success is, did you actually start? Did you get a business license? Did you form your entity? Did you expand your business? Did you increase your sales? Did you hire people? Did you retain people? Did you achieve more financial income? Meaning, did you get a grant? Did you get a loan, etc. Did you get a contract? Those are also ways that we judge success. So, regarding some of the more hard statistics, because this program has only been in operation for a few months, we have many soft successes where the connection was made from businesses to be able to have a website and increase sales and making connections with our resource partners. That's good. But that information, my question is just how, you know, I guess going down the road here is to find out how many businesses are actually calling us for help on things and what kind of assistance we are providing. Not collecting the data, so to speak, but truly, how many numbers of businesses overall, over the 10,000 businesses? I don't know, not that many in this town, but There's 11,000. Okay, see, there you go. Out of 11,000 businesses, how many are calling the City Economic Development Division for help? So, is it 1%, is it 2%, is it 3%? And Madam Chair, Councilor Garcia, and counselors, I would love to echo that again. If we're looking specifically at the Small Business Navigator program and acknowledging, roughly, it's around 30 that have done the intake form, they have met with our coordinator, Caroline Lee, and gone through that process of identifying a specific project. 30 out of, you know, 11,000 that are rough, and you have to Very, very, very small percentage. Exactly. But when you look at the businesses that our office connects with, utilizing our business development team, our downtown coordinator, our soon-to-be hired Southside coordinator, as well as our business growth manager and our workforce specialist, you can see that outreach also affects and connects with our business community. I will say that utilizing ARPA funds has allowed us to enact and deploy a system called SourceLink that many economic development organizations use, which will allow us to track all of the business interactions and business clients that we engage with. So, at the end of this calendar year, not only will we be in a good place to report on the metrics, the volume of the Small Business Navigator program, we'll also be able to do a really good job to report back to you all and the public on our office in general, which I'm thrilled about. Just one quick question. Do you, and I mean, there's also a percentage of businesses that may not need this help, the 11,000. So I think we should just think about that. I don't know what that number is, but okay. Anything else on this? Is there anything we can do to help? Please let us know. Certainly, District 3 needs the help, and so if there's anything we can do to expedite, to make Looks like Director Nelson is dying to tell us something. Madam Chair and Councilor Faulkner, as well as Councilor Garcia, I'm going to take you up on that. To Councilor Garcia's point, we can always use help to promote the services that our office provides, as well as the Small Business Navigator. And as we know, those are drips in the bucket regarding the services that we provide to our business community. Help us get the word out. We are having our La Posada on the 18th, and we're going to have a resource room at the Teen Center. So, please let us know if you want space, and we often use these events to let the families have fun, but also help the adults find the resources they need. And so, we're more than happy, a thousand percent, to have you participate in that event. Thank you, Councilor. We will. Okay, we have a motion and a second. Can we get a roll call, please, Director Oster? And did you get the motion and the second? Motion was by Councilor Cassett, and the second by Councilor Faulkner on the amendment to do work promoting the Small Business Navigator program. Thank you, Madam Chair. On the motion to adopt Amendment H. Councilor Cassett, Yes. Councilor Lindell. Councilor Faulkner, Yes. Councilor Lee Garcia, Yes. Chair Merworth. Yes. Motion passes. Okay. We are now, we have a bill that is now amended once in this committee and multiple times in others. We do have a motion and a second. And if there's no discussion, can we get a roll call on the bill as amended? Councilor Cassett. Yes. Councilor Lindell. Councilor Faulkner. Yes. And Senator Garcia. No. Chair Mars. Yes. Motion passes. Okay. Thank you. Thank you, everybody, for being here. Thank you for the conversation. We are going on to the last item pulled from consent, and that item is, and apparently I have a recording that is going to speak for me about what this item is. Yes, Madam Chair. Are we ready to play the recording? Yes, please. Okay. Oh, you go whenever you're ready. We'll stand in place. Okay. We need to put the mic next to the speaker. I don't know how to fix that. That's not working, guys. You know what? Is it a problem if we just read it? We can read. I'll read. We'll read it. Councilor Cassett and I will trade off. Consideration of Bill Number 2024-17, adoption of Ordinance Number 2025 to be determined. Sponsored by Mayor Ellen Weber and Councilor Jamie Cassett. A bill, second. Yep. Also a sponsor. I don't know why I'm not showing it. Okay. Councilor Faulkner, also a sponsor. A bill repealing and replacing SFCC1987, Chapter 14, Land Development Code, clarifying and consolidating various references to code violations into one violation section, specifying that the applicant and the applicant or the property owner have the burden of proof for establishing legal nonconformities. Reducing the early neighborhood notification requirement for city capital improvement projects to those exceeding $250,000. Renaming special use permit to conditional use permit. Removing Historic District Review Board's authority to recommend personal property acquisitions. Requiring AC archaeologists to hold a New Mexico State burial excavation permit for certain work. Removing waivers of qualifications for archaeologists by Archaeological Review Committee. Increasing permit building heights for residential districts and non-residential development. Establishing density and height by right in central and certain residential zones exceeding 10 units per acre. Creating a parks and open space zoning district. Permitting additional flexibility for certain structures and situations regarding setbacks. Eliminating residential suite, hotel, motel, and ecological resource protection. Overlay zoning districts. Reducing the length at which an archaeological clearance permit is required for sewer and utility main construction. Removing alcohol sale regulations in the Airport Road overlay. Identifying a strategy to review and approve land uses not specifically listed in the summary table of allowed uses. Clarifying that duplexes, triplexes, and townhomes and residential complexes are permitted uses. Creating use categories and subcategories and reorganizing some existing uses into new categories within the table of allowed uses. Requiring trees to be integrated into stormwater infrastructure in the Airport Road overlay district. Removing certain prohibitions for vehicle parking at residences. Allowing accessory dwelling units to be the maximum allowable height of the zoning district. Establishing design and dimensional standards for residential compound development. Regulating in-ground and above-ground pools. Regulating agricultural home occupations. Reassigning the use laboratory research or testing from industrial to commercial. Councilor Cassett, you want to take it from there? Sure. Regulating outdoor dining, updating telecommunication facilities code to be consistent with federal standards. Yep. No, it sure isn't. Establishing new subdistrict regulations in the historic district overlays. Specifying primary facades for significant structures and the strategy for identifying primary facades on contributing structures. Updating definitions for facade and elevation. Prohibiting enclosure of existing porches and portals on primary facades of contributing structures. Requiring window depth and other characteristics of windows and doors to be preserved in historic districts. Increasing affordability incentives, including administrative review and density bonuses, specifying that open space requirements in the C2 district are per dwelling unit. Expanding options to reduce on-site parking and exempting the business capital district from parking requirements in table 7-4. Reducing required off-street parking spaces, requiring electric vehicle charging stations for all new developments. Distinguishing parking regulations applicable to bicycles from those applicable to vehicles and requiring long-term bicycle storage and parking. Eliminating content-based sign restrictions. Imposing a variety of new regulations protecting the city's terrain and stormwater management. Imposing new landscaping standards for plants and trees, eliminating allowance for high and low-pressure sodium lamps and mercury vapor, adding LED, not lead, as the permitted lamp type, and decreasing the permitted incandescent watts from 160 to 150. Sunsetting the Business Capital District Design Review Committee and Long Range Planning Subcommittee. Defining numerous terms, embedding geographical depictions of processes, and making non-substantive chapter organizational changes. And we have Maggie Moore, Assistant Land Use Director. Phew. Okay, we can all go home now. Yes. I'm going to, I pulled this item. I believe you do have a presentation about this, which I think would be helpful. Yes, we do. And if the, it can pull that up. There we go. Right. Do you want me to move the screen so you guys can get a little better? No. No, you're good. Okay. Fabulous. [clears throat] Yes. Thank you, Chair and counselors. We're excited to be here bringing Phase One of the code update to you tonight. My director, Heather Lamboy, and I will have a kind of a concise but, you know, presentation, but we want to go over a lot of these changes and amendments that we're proposing with this legislation. This, I'll just take a brief moment, it's been a monumental effort. I want to thank, obviously, those in our department, past and present, who've worked on this. Also, throughout the city, our colleagues at Public Works Department, the Fire Department, Public Utilities, who we were, and certainly the City Attorney's Office, who we worked with to bring this forward to you today. So, thank you all those folks, and also to our advisory committees. We had several advisory committees that we assembled with members of the public to help us draft this legislation. So, thank you there. And I'll just briefly kind of go over our engagement efforts. This was a culmination of two-plus years of engagement with the community. We started in the spring of 2023 with a virtual open house because there was a snowstorm and the city shut down. So we had to pivot and went virtual. Then we followed that up with an in-person open house, just really kicking off the project, identifying issues, and we also conducted many stakeholder interviews. These were both internal to the city and external stakeholders. Based on all of that initial feedback, we drafted the assessment report, which is part of your packet. And with that report, we held another round of open houses and meetings with the Planning Commission to get feedback on that assessment report. Then we used that to guide our drafting process. We launched our Community Engagement Group and our Technical Engagement Group and met with them on several occasions. We met with the TOG six times, the COG 10 times. Not sure why one or the other, but we had a historic subcommittee that focused on that section, and then of course, we had a Planning Commission subcommittee that worked with us throughout the process as well. We brought the public draft out, held another round of open houses, and received comments. We had a study session with the Planning Commission, and then we scheduled drop-in events at City Hall, Southside Library, to just kind of catch people as they're coming and going and see if they had any comments and host that. We also gave additional presentations to the Planning Commission on October 16th and April 17th. So this is our adoption timeline. We are getting very close. We introduced it on October 8th, had our first public comment on October 9th in front of the Governing Body. We went to the Historic District Review Board and the ARC at a joint meeting on October 14th. We were at Planning Commission on the 16th of October, Public Works and Quality of Life, and now present for you this evening. The adoption hearing is scheduled for November 19th at the Governing Body. I just want to take a step back. The last time the code was updated was in 1987, a comprehensive update. In the nearly 40 years, there have been several amendments. There have been additions to the code, and it has created what we have today, which is a layered, sometimes contradictory and complex set of regulations that governs land use within the city that has become notoriously difficult to understand, interpret, and to enforce for the department. To solve that, in 2023, the Planning Land Use Department, at the direction of the Governing Body, initiated a contract with Clarion and Associates for the comprehensive three-phase update of the Land Development Code. Phase one goals were to improve the organization, the clarity, and the user-friendliness of Chapter 14. I also just want to highlight some of the additional items that you have available to guide you through the review and analysis of this legislation. We've included the bill, the legislation itself, over 700 pages, or maybe over 600 at least. And then we have a disposition report. So, the disposition report is a three-column crosswalk for you to review. The far-left column is the current code citation. The middle column is the proposed new citation and location. And then the far-right column is a brief description of the change. Then we've chosen to highlight certain changes as substantive for you to review. One of those is the change of the name of the conditional use permit, not necessarily substantive, but we want to highlight those types of changes to just alert the public and the counselors of what we're doing. So you'll have that in addition to the disposition report. As I said, I've attached, I've included the LDC assessment report, which really goes over our community, our public engagement efforts, and our goals and priorities for phase one for reference. I've also included the enhanced affordability incentives report, which goes a little bit more into detail into the use of development incentives around affordability. So we thought that was a useful tool for you to review as well, and of course, the supplemental memo. Through our engagement efforts with the public and with discussions with city staff and our technical working groups, we have included several items that go outside of the scope of just user-friendliness and clarity, particularly the enhanced affordability incentives package, which Heather will tell you a little bit more about in the detail there. But we also just want to highlight that change to, or really an addition to the code. But really, there's something in the code for everyone. I think just listening to the caption be read out loud, you kind of get the depth and breadth of what Chapter 14 covers. So parks and trails, open space, conserving tree canopy, reducing light pollution, promoting walkable infill development, protecting archaeological resources, supporting green building. So really, you just kind of go through that, and the code has something there for everybody. I do want to highlight an example of how our new code really meets the three goals that we've set for ourselves. One of those areas is the reorganization of our zoning district information. On the left, you kind of see how the information appears in the current code. It's incredibly text-heavy, very complicated language. And what this doesn't show is that the information on zoning districts is really disparate around the code. It's a little bit here, a little bit in this section. You got to go over here to find out what the purpose is, and then you got to go over here to find out what the setbacks are. So we took this opportunity to consolidate information on the zoning districts and make it consistent and try to remove some of the legalese and use just a little bit more direct language. And we've added some images and tables, which I think are really nice and lend to a more user-friendly perspective for the public. So what we've done is we've consolidated purpose statements into these, you know, kind of one, one and a half page zoning district areas. We have used new illustrations to represent the kind of an example of development for each district. This helps people understand terms like setback and step back and things that are, if you're not a land use planner, might be a little complex to understand or difficult to understand. So we want to have illustrations to show those items. We've simplified and reduced table notes, and this is one of the items we wanted to highlight is the height increase by 2 feet. We're proposing this in residential and mixed-use zones. This is intended to accommodate green building practices. So that change you will see represented in these zone district tables. Some of the other changes we're proposing with zoning districts is removing a provision that requires developments in the R12, 21, and R29 zoning districts to achieve a development plan approval from the Planning Commission where one may not be otherwise required to maximize their density. So we're proposing that that is removed, and they can enjoy their density as it is described in their zoning district. So an R12 would be R12, and R21 would be R21, and R29 would be R29 without having to seek special approval by the Planning Commission. And really, this is going to help small, kind of infill projects in the downtown area where most of the zoning occurs. And we had a recent project from the Habitat for Humanity. Thank you. Habitat for Humanity, who got tripped up. This is another one of those things that's kind of buried in the code. And so, you know, you have R21 as your zone district. You kind of assume that you get to have 21 dwelling units per acre, but hidden somewhere in the code is this little provision that you actually have to go get a development plan from the Planning Commission if you want to enjoy that density. And so we're just removing that, hoping to make it a clearer and more smooth process for some of these small infill developments. We've also added the Parks and Open Space District as Councilor Casset described in the caption read. And our intention with the Open Space District is to establish standards in Phase 2. So it really kind of lays the groundwork for that work to occur with our overlay zoning districts. We have added images of the overlays into the code so folks, when they're reading about the regulations, they can see and connect it to an image on the map and start to understand where that might apply throughout the city. We're hoping to improve those in Phase 2 as well. So there's a little bit more clarity there. As we heard, we did not carry forward the Residential Suite Hotel Motel Overlay and the Ecological Resource Overlay. We found that neither of these existed nor were applied to the ground in the city. And so we thought that was a low-hanging fruit to remove those and remove just a little bit of the complexity in Chapter 13 or 14 rather. And with the Escarpment Overlay, we reorganized that and edited it to simplify language. That one is notoriously complicated. So we tried to simplify that as much as we could. In the Airport Road Overlay, we eliminated restrictions on the sale of alcohol. It's a great story in the paper over the weekend on this proposed change. And in the Historic District Overlay, we made some clarifications, added new descriptions of architectural character, and removed the public view limitation on application of standards. And so with that, I'm going to do one more. So just to kind of end my presentation, then Heather will take over and continue. With the changes we made to the summary table of allowed uses, we changed the name. It's now the Permitted Table of Uses. It's going to be called the Summary Table of Allowed Uses. As you stated, we renamed Special Use Permit to Conditional Use Permit. There's really nothing special about it. It's really more about conditions that we can impose on a type of use at a particular location. And so we think that that name is more specific to what the request is. We have added a lot of new uses to the table: breweries, doggy daycares, uses that certainly in '87 and even five years ago didn't exist. And so we want to acknowledge that those are current and quite popular uses within the city. We have added accessory and temporary uses to the table. They were kind of outside of the table, and it was a little confusing as to where they needed to be. We have expanded the housing types in the table of allowed uses. They were not listed explicitly, although they were permitted. We just wanted to make sure that they were shown in the table as allowed housing options within the city. And we've added the column on the far right. So certain uses, we have adopted use-specific standards. Think accessory dwelling unit; there is a set of use-specific standards associated with that use. So we want to allow, show people where to navigate if there are specific uses, and they can find that in the far-right column of the table of allowed uses. And then I will hand it off to Director Lamboy. Thank you, Director Moore. One of the things that I would like to do is express my gratitude for Director Moore. Daniel Alvarado originally started this project and poured his heart into it. When he left, we were left with a gap, and Director Moore definitely filled that gap and has been very organized and helpful in continuing this effort. As Director Moore mentioned, the sections have been edited to make simpler language available to the public. It's very difficult sometimes to read a document like that and understand it when you're a home builder, a local home builder, and we certainly have gotten feedback about that from the community. We also reorganized the landscaping with reference to parking perimeter parking lot standards. There's a lower threshold for applicability. It provides for a better urban environment, as well as helping to provide for a more attractive environment. Then there's new information on permitted fence materials and explicit prohibition on barbed wire. Oddly enough, we did not have that. One of the big things that we accomplished, and certainly one of the questions we received, is why are you doing all of this? I thought it was supposed to be reorganization, but as we were engaged with our technical working group and the citizens working group, there were a lot of issues that came up that it was determined that these things could be addressed during this phase because it's something that's overdue. And with reference to our parking standards, this is a case in point. So, we've untied our parking standards between bicycle parking and vehicle parking. We've untied those two and have a separate bicycle parking section. We also do provide for more ability to have off-site parking. So, for instance, street parking can be counted as the overall parking count instead of just having everything on site when it's not absolutely needed. Also, there's a distance in which, for instance, in downtown, where there's parking that's required, somebody can walk to that parking lot instead of having to be immediately adjacent, except for those spaces that are required to be Americans with Disabilities Act accessible. Proximity to transit and trails: We're really trying to forward multi-mobility and providing a reduced parking count because of a transit stop with regular transit service or a trail that allows for reduced parking and provision of structured parking. There can be a reduction in the overall parking count that's required if structured parking is provided. As well, my father lives in a senior housing development. Not everybody has a car because really they don't need to be driving a car, especially my dad. So, we also have a reduction for senior housing as well. We have also included electronic vehicle charging as a requirement because we certainly are moving in that direction. And we did work diligently with Daniel Lopez of Public Works on updating our Americans with Disabilities Act requirements. We also removed parking in the Business Capital District. That requirement became really obvious, a real obvious impediment, especially with outdoor dining. This is what we really discovered. So, are we going to provide extra parking because there are more people who can be served? And it just really was determined not to be appropriate. Downtowns across the country, medium-sized cities or large cities, parking isn't required. And we feel like that in this case, it would be important to do the same. It also becomes more business-friendly as well. And like I referenced the bicycle parking, it's based on, and we worked with the Metropolitan Planning Organization to develop the guidelines based on the Association of Pedestrian and Bicycle Professionals. For instance, there are different bicycle parking requirements for schools. I rode my bike to school, and I know a lot of folks did during my time, as well as there are a lot of middle schoolers and the like that don't drive, or even like my kids did, preferred not to drive until they got to New Mexico. And so that was, and that's an important thing, is to be able to accommodate for all those bicycles. We have removed content-based regulation from sign regulations. There was a court case that regulated that signs be content neutral so that local jurisdictions, because it was seen as a form of free speech, local jurisdictions cannot regulate that. And so we're catching up with what is happening nationally with judicial review. The impact fee section has been reorganized. No changes to the fees have taken place, but it's making the content more accessible and understandable. The street design standards that were worked on by the Bicycle and Pedestrian Advisory Committee, as well as the Metropolitan Planning Organization, that's going to be part of our first tranche of code updates beginning in 2026. There was an effort to address our street design guidelines, which are outdated and not context-sensitive. And so we heard the message loud and clear from Public Works that this needed to happen, and in fact agree with them, but just did not get the opportunity to put it into this draft. And then no substantive changes for architectural design review, also known as the point system, no changes taking place in phase one. It will start in phase two, and we'll be launching into that early on in phase two. We've also outlined common review procedures, and now there is a chart in which people can look at and say, "I have a subdivision, what boards and commissions do I need to go to, or is it administrative?" And then there's a flowchart also that is provided so that people can understand the steps. Right now, the early neighborhood notification and public notice is couched in one area, but then you need to use that public notice for public hearings also. And so that referring back and forth can be really difficult, especially for people who aren't used to our form of governing here. And so that is considered a really important improvement to the code. So we've reorganized that and provided common review procedures for those standard steps, and also provides clarity on the approval criteria, which haven't been changed, but the approval criteria is more understandable. So we have had a great partnership with our technical working group, as well as our community working group, and out of that came a movement, Creating Affordability Now. I believe that really has had an impact on our community with the general plan update. The statistics that we revealed was that out of the 67% of our single-family housing types, 49% are renters and 39% are homeowners. And the average price of a house is $572,000, and the capacity, or the livable wage that you were just talking about earlier, the capacity to purchase that home is low. Approximately 40% of our workforce has to commute from outside of town. They can't live in Santa Fe. And so it is really not enough even at this point. We do have some leveling out because there has been a lot of construction of apartments. We've seen a reduction in the increase in rent rates, but it has increased 74% since 2016. So, partnering with our technical and citizen advisory groups, we developed these more proposed standards. These are all voluntary. There is no requirement to comply with these. But it does provide for additional market-rate housing as well as affordable housing. As you know, there's pressure if you have a market-rate person trying, or a person who has market-rate capacity, trying to find a home, and there's not enough homes, they'll compete with what we call naturally affordable housing. And so right now, 20% of dwelling units for sale are required to be affordable in projects of over 10 dwelling units. 15% of the dwelling units in rental projects are required to be affordable. There's also the fee in lieu that can be utilized and was adopted fairly recently. So the density bonus right now is 15% for those multifamily units. There's no incentive to build additional affordable units beyond the requirements. So there are three different scales in which affordable housing can be built to provide for a more realistic bottom line when it comes to the pro forma that a developer does and analyzes how many affordable units need to be provided. And in a recent Los Altos meeting, Homewise provided a statistic that a home, an affordable home, it costs approximately $184,000 to construct. And sometimes they really have to, when you consider or factor in all the infrastructure, the roads, the utilities, all of those things that need to be brought to that house, the price goes up radically. And it's basically a zero sum or maybe a bit of a loss in terms of that affordable unit. So the intent is to catch up with the market, catch up so that we can produce more housing and therefore maybe have the same impact as that multifamily housing metric where the prices have leveled off as well. But we do have a deficit at this point of housing for our community. So, in the 30% affordability option, the density bonus is one and a half unit per dwelling unit. So, just for instance, 20 base dwelling units includes 14 market-priced homes, six affordably priced homes, plus a density bonus of nine additional market-rate homes for a total of 29 homes. In that particular case, that's 30% affordable housing. So we're capturing more affordable housing above and beyond the 20%. This is voluntary, but it really will make an impact in infill development, like Director Moore was referring to with the Habitat for Humanity project. It's really important that we provide for that gentle density that Councilor Cassidy refers to a lot, that infill development that we traditionally had here in Santa Fe with the family compounds, and people would just build additional homes to accommodate new generations. We still need to accommodate those new generations. It's just maybe in a slightly different way. So there is a density bonus of three dwelling units on a one-acre property in the R1 zone district, with one affordable unit being provided. So if you think about that with our, with the city's ability to allow accessory dwelling units, there possibly could be eight families accommodated for, whereas previously there was one or two with an ADU. So other incentives include that administrative review set by the precedent in Midtown and flexibility with parking requirements and other open space standards. So there's a lot of text on here. I decided to do a deeper dive just because there seemed to be the desire for that. I'm going to go through this relatively quickly because we have covered quite a bit already in our overall PowerPoint presentation, but I think it's important, certain things that's going to happen right now with our early neighborhood notification meetings. A meeting could occur, and then a year down, or a year and a half down the road, the applicant could by code just apply for their development application. And what has happened with all the folks that may have moved in or out of the neighborhood there? It's basically a stale project in terms of the public eye. And so we're putting a requirement that if somebody doesn't apply for a development within six months of their ENN, then they'll have to have another ENN. Generally, we do require that, but this will give us the code backup to do it. So, there are also some application submittal standards. There's a new requirement for a pre-application meeting and an early neighborhood notification meeting for all annexations. a one-year requirement between requests to annex the same property once it's been denied, and a limitation or resubmittal of any land development application that has been denied as well, just to decrease the number of cases we have to see over and over again. With reference to the historic districts, this was an important issue. We had a really great meeting with the Historic Districts Review Board in combination with the Archaeological Review Committee. There were a lot of good things that were put into the district standards there. The standard section was reformatted to have similar headings and subheadings and reorganized. The standards focused on defined qualities rather than subjective styles. This was established in 1957 as a historic styles ordinance, and we've moved beyond that into historic preservation. The city is evolving, the housing types are evolving, and so we need to really be careful about that. As you've read about specifying what is a primary facade, on those primary facades, there should really be no major changes. That wasn't really spelled out in the code, and it is now. And there's a clarification that we found with porches and portals on non-contributing buildings that had to get an exception, whereas now it does not require that. For contributing buildings or significant buildings, that remains. So, there were some clarifications that we've run across over time, and staff typically keeps a list of things that just don't work in the code, just to make sure to address them over time to clarify them. And then Maggie, I'm sorry, Director Moore mentioned the green building code allowance. And it's really important because with construction techniques, solar arrays, and the like, we don't want to punish somebody for wanting to have a little extra height to accommodate for those things. With reference to archaeology, the distance for utility mains has decreased depending upon the district. The reason being is that we have a lot of archaeological sites throughout our community, not just in the downtown. And since this archaeological ordinance was adopted in the late 80s, early 90s, we've gathered a lot of information, and we need to be careful and work with our partners in Suk PBLO to ensure that they know what's going on as well. So, an archaeological clearance permit will also be required when there's ground-disturbing activity within 25 feet of a documented site. And those documented sites are based on the reports that are issued by the archaeologist whenever there's a reconnaissance done. For the use regulations, we mentioned the different housing types that are there now. There are also regulations relative to urban farms that we don't have now. Religious, educational, and charitable institutions are permitted in all residential districts. Police or fire stations are subject to use-specific standards to address things like noise or other external impacts that may occur. A hospital heliport is permitted only as an accessory use. Developing just a heliport freestanding is permitted right now, which is sort of odd. We are having a lot of change to our daycare system, especially with recent state legislation. So, in-home daycare was added to the residential category, and a conditional use category was added for daycares in industrial districts. One might think, why would you want to put a daycare in an industrial district? We've run across it already with one provider. Typically, the rents are a little bit lower in those industrial districts. And so, we've set forth some standards to make sure the children are protected, set back from cannabis institutions, for instance, but it does provide for lower rents for facilities that were businesses that typically have a low bottom line. We've also set forth square footage and hours of operation limits on arts and crafts galleries and dance schools, and those were moved to use-specific standards. The film production use was only created for Midtown. We want that to be throughout the city, and so that use was created. There are changes to the cannabis code as well, and so those changes were moved to the use-specific standards for cannabis facilities. And a commissary kitchen was a special use previously, and it's just going to be a permitted use. Commissary kitchens can include the ghost kitchens, for instance. We all, or many people, use Uber Eats, for instance, and sometimes there are ghost kitchens that produce those meals for Chili's or for Olive Garden, and it's just housed under one group so that the restaurant can continue to function in a more efficient way. And then I'm also going to try to go through this a little bit faster, but there's a lot that's going on. So, food truck, mobile food court, and outdoor dining are all new uses and are being addressed. Campground and RV park is also allowed as a new use. Outdoor commercial recreation and outdoor music is a new use that will be subject to specific standards. Seasonal sales like Christmas trees, that was not part, it was sort of an informal thing that we did. Now, it is considered a new use. Warehouse distribution is also a new use, like we have the new Amazon facility there near the airport and Hart Business Park. Fast food drive-through restaurants are now prohibited in the BCD and mixed-use districts. There is a change to the parking calculation for fast food drive-through restaurants outside of the downtown. And theater live production has use-specific standards. Telecommunications, we really needed to update to be consistent with federal law. Home occupation, there's compliance with standards to maintain residential character. Sometimes home occupations can get out of control, and we have some better standards to address that. We certainly want home businesses to be successful, but we want to mitigate impacts. Residential compounds, there are new standards once again to provide more flexibility, setbacks, and development to allow for that infill development. There are new categories regarding sound amplification, planters, fencing, and other criteria. Maggie went over the R12 to 29 density requirements in terrain and stormwater management. We allow for a single cable strung between posts to be constructed in or across an AOYO. This has come up several times. We have limits on compacting fill slopes, and that's really especially important in our foothills subdistrict. And we require a notice of intent for federal stormwater protection pollution prevention plan. Rainwater runoff tends to be an issue in that area, as well as flood hazard areas are designated by FEMA to be submitted for minor developments and an HOA. We've dealt with several HOAs who are dissolving, and they've had structures, drainage structures they've had to maintain, and so this lays out a third party that will have to continue to maintain those drainage structures so that I don't impact city streets or other properties. And then plant material standards have been changed for affordable housing, reducing the minimum size of trees and other plants so that it can be more affordable in terms of landscaping for affordable housing developments, and drip irrigation systems are permitted. Once trees are established after a certain period of time, the property owner does not need to irrigate that anymore. So that temporary system is allowed. I'm going to skip parking and loading. Talked a lot about that already. Outdoor lighting, there's a definition for light trespass and glare that was not there before, and it adds units of measurement. It updates the standards to align with New Mexico's Night Sky Protection Act and eliminates the allowance for high and low sodium pressure lamps and mercury vapor signs, once again, that content neutral. There are more incentives to come for affordable housing. Oh, I'm sorry. Don't go to sleep, please. All right. One of the big issues is for fee-in-lieu projects. Mayor: Your computer or us. Well, there's that, too. Fee-in-lieu projects may not get a density bonus. So, right now, if they pay a fee-in-lieu, the 15% is allowed for multifamily to increase their density, but the ratio is not right. And so, multifamily developers still can pay fee-in-lieu, but they will not get that density bonus, and that was in reaction to some of the feedback that we received. And I don't know what is going on with my computer, but let me just go over. It's frightening. So, let me get to just this is my last slide. I'm hoping that it's going to come back just a minute. So, one of the other things is nonconformity. We really want to address non-conforming uses. Right now, there's a 365-day period where a property can be vacant and continue to have its non-conforming status. We've reduced that to 180 days. And there is a new section for code violations that we've added just to make it clear what is the code violation process, how do things progress over time, and will hopefully provide a clear road path, a clear path forward for those folks who are trying to adjust or address their violations. So, with reference to definitions, we have a ton of them that have been added. So, one quote that I like to add is, "We abuse land because we regard it as a commodity belonging to us. When we see land as a community to which we belong, we may begin to use it with love and respect." Aldo Leopold was the one that authored that. And I think it's really important that we think about that in terms of our land development code, and I know our community embraces that a lot, and Santa Fe is special. Finally, I just wanted to provide an overview of the Historic Districts Review Board and the steps that Director Moore set forth. We have not received any comments from the Planning Commission, the Public Works and Utilities Committee. Quality of Life, you know, they were spared this presentation, but I think it's important that we really do provide this context for the public as well as for our elected officials. The Historic Districts Review Board has requested in their recommendation to the governing body that the district standards themselves remain the same. So, for instance, the Downtown East Side Historic District, the Historic Transition, the Historic Review, the Westside Guadalupe, and the Don Gaspar Historic District standards remain the same for now. They felt like that was just going too far, too fast. And so, the simple request there is just to bring back those standards, leave everything else the same. They felt like the rest of the changes to the Historic District's ordinance is fine. So, they really wanted to have additional dialogue on that Phase Two. And that concludes the presentation. Councilor: Great. Actually, I pulled this item, so I'm going to go first. All right, you go first. Councilor: Lee Garcia, please stand up. We're three-quarters of the way to a standing ovation for [laughter]. Okay. Thank you, Councilor Faulkner. All right. So, did the Planning Commission have any changes? Did they recommend changes? Marathon. Okay. I actually got the opportunity to work with them a lot over a year, year and a half. So, their concerns were addressed, right? I, you and I had a conversation about this earlier today, and I believe they had, well, you mentioned at the beginning, sorry, trying to get that page, that there was a Planning Commission subcommittee and that the Planning Commission also had a study session, but that didn't happen with the H board. Correct. Chair Romero, we did actually have a subcommittee with the historic districts. That was a historic district subcommittee with different stakeholders. There were only three meetings and probably should have been more. It's 2020. And so, yes, we did have a subcommittee for the historic districts. But not a study session with the H board. They just saw it. We did have a study session back in the spring. Okay. You didn't mention it in your, or I didn't see it in your, in that first slide that Director Moore provided. It wasn't called out the same. So just curious. Okay. Yeah, and I guess I am interested in some of the H board's recommendations. And I guess I want to understand this getting rid of the, let me get to that page. Sorry. The getting rid of, I think it's getting rid of the public view limitation. What does that mean? Chair Marworth, that means that, for instance, people can have buildings that there are divided lights on one side of the building, there are not divided lights on the other side of the building, which is not considered publicly, not in the public view. And the H board feels strongly that the design standard should apply to the entire building instead of just to portions thereof. Okay. So I think we've had some of these cases come before the governing body and it's always been a point of conversation about, "Well, you can't see it, so it doesn't matter." And so essentially what's happening here is we're saying that even if you can't see it from the streetscape, essentially, it's still an important part of the whole. Yes, that's correct. Okay. Just want to make sure of that. And I have some questions about the accessory dwelling units. You said something about removal of the provision on enforcement on private covenants. What does that mean exactly? What is that provision? And some of this comes from problems in my district with how these fit into neighborhoods. So I'm concerned about what this means. So does it mean that you can't have private covenants, that private covenants can't be enforced on accessory dwelling units? So I'll provide an example, Chair Romero. For instance, there was a house in the Escarpment District, and this is more dealing with the house, but I can provide an ADU example as well. And there, the building site was much smaller than the minimum house size that was prescribed by the covenants and the city code. And the city does not acknowledge covenants except in some very old developments where that was done maybe inappropriately. So at this point, covenants do expire or covenants are changed without city knowledge. And so it's truly not appropriate, but we do enforce the city code with accessory dwelling units as well. There are certain size limitations and different funky things that can show up in HOA documents. And we just want to be clear that the city enforces the city code, not covenants. Okay, that's helpful. Thank you. And the height increase on accessory dwelling units, I think, to match wherever they're situated in terms of zoning, is just making sure that we don't have something that's sticking up way higher than everything else. It's to be more uniform. Correct. Yes, that's correct, Chair Marworth. Also, right now they're only allowed to be one story. So, somebody can't build an accessory dwelling unit on a second level. So, it gives them more flexibility. Okay. But if you don't allow a second unit in a particular zoning area, you can't do that. Well, with reference to, they're allowed in all districts with the exception of the commercial and industrial districts. Oh, yeah. Thanks, Heather. Yeah, Chair, I think, Chair Romero Worth, I think what you're asking is, you know, are second stories allowed or where they might not be allowed. They're allowed in all residential districts. So, we regulate by height. And so the height standard is being proposed to be increased to 26, I think, from 24. Yeah. So, yeah. So, in residential zones outside of the historic district, it's currently 24 everywhere. And then now we're proposing to go up to 26. Right. But that's overall and that's for green building stuff, correct? Just overall. Yeah. Yeah. Not so for, not specifically for accessory dwelling units where there was something in there about height. Yeah. Who needed to match the zoning in which it was in. Right. And right now the height is 15 feet or 16 feet for an accessory dwelling unit. So this allows them to have a second story where it's appropriate. Yeah. Or like Heather was alluding to, if somebody wanted to put an ADU on top of their existing garage, this might accommodate that as well. Yep. And is there anything about accessory dwelling units needing to be compatible or similar to the housing that is in the neighborhood? Chair Romero, I believe that there are general guidelines as to the points in architecture, but there's no specific standards. I know you're thinking of an example. Yeah, I am just curious. We're not fixing that. Not at this point. And that's a broader issue because of Fair Housing Act and the like. Right. Right. That will be a Phase 2 thing should have discussion about. Okay. I think that's all I had on this. Yeah, at least for now. So that list, those last couple slides that were really small print, are those in only this presentation or do we have them somewhere? Have we been emailed those or I'd like to be, I couldn't follow all of them and I'd like to be able to review them. We will send them to you. Yes. You like maybe? And maybe upload it to the... Yeah. Could you, yeah. And it sounds like, yeah, if we could put them in the packet, but so that we could get them sooner or later, will you email them directly so that we can take a look at those? Certainly. Okay. And I'll just add for clarification, all of those items are in the disposition report. That's where Director Lamboy pulled all those items from. I know, but I like them all in a list. I know. Well, yeah. And we'll give it to you both ways. I mean, I was looking at the disposition report, but there's something about like, yeah, yeah. All right. That's all I have. Anything else from the committee? Councilor Lee Garcia. Thank you, Madam Chair. Can you give a little more information on the EV requirements for, is it all new construction or a little bit more? So I guess in a direct question would be... So yeah, thank you, Chair Marworth and Councilor Garcia. Yeah, so the EV requirements apply to new construction. And so if we could pull up the table, we might be able to go into a little bit more detail. It's scaled appropriately. So larger developments, residential developments or larger commercial developments would require more numbers. And I'm, maybe there's a cutoff, I'm not exactly clear on exactly what it is, but... Can you please put up the screen? Yeah, can we get a little presentation up there? Just again, my direct question is, if I'm an individual and I'm building a home, is it automatically a requirement to put in an EV charging station, which I may or may not want? I don't know. So, here's the table. So, requirements. So, single family dwelling, we've got one level two outlet. So, we're asking for that to be, you know, added to the, I guess it's not applicable. So for that, for multifamily, it says 25% EV compatible and three EV initiated, I think. Installed. Right, or installed. Yeah. So that would be, you know, 25% of overall spaces are EV compatible and then an additional 3% past that. Are those developments? That would be for a multifamily development. So, and new construction. Yeah. And then you can kind of go down through the retail and personal, you know, and personal services again, you know, down through all of that. And again, just new construction, not existing construction or, you know, existing businesses. So, are those again charging stations that are tied to a dwelling unit or just a parking area that would have EV charging? Right. Like, yeah. Oh, sorry, Chair Member Garcia. That would be for just the parking lot. So, capable means that you could expand it beyond, but generally it's just 3% right now. But as more electronic vehicles are being used or electric, then, you know, there's going to be the demand for... Who's going to pay for the charging stations in a parking lot of a development? Councilor Garcia, if I may, I have a little bit of experience with this. I have installed a charging unit at my house and my nephew has one at his house. I'm not a... They're not expensive. They're like nominal. They're like a hundred bucks. I, and I guess, and maybe this is just, I need to just learn a little bit more about it, but if I'm putting up a small development with 10 houses and I'm required to put in three EV charging stations in the parking lot... Who's going to... Chair, Member Garcia, single family dwellings are not required to provide charging stations. So a lot of market, the market is demanding it. So that in a garage you have the EV capability where you can plug your car in into the garage. And so, but that is only market driven. We're not requiring anything for single family development, just for multifamily and commercial uses. Yeah, I'm not again, I just, I guess I need to wrap my head around how it all works, but that was my question. Thank you. Okay. I don't think we have anything else. We need to approve this. Correct. Yes. A recommendation to... Yes. So, do we have a motion? Motion to... Second motion and second to approve this rewrite phase one, I guess. I don't think we have any discussion. Can we get a roll call, please? Councilor Faulkner, yes. Councilor Lee Garcia, yes. Chair Marworth, yes. Motion passes. Yeah. Thank you. Okay guys, we have one more thing. We'll do it quick, I promise. But it is a process thing. So we have, that's our consent agenda down here at the bottom. Where are we? We have a public hearing and it is a request for issuance of a cease and desist order to close Chinese Massage LLC, 4985 Airport Road Unit B. Is it Euang Bao, operator owner? It's code enforcement case 20254553, violation of SFCC18-1.7 notice of violation penalty operating without a business license and in a manner contrary to the public welfare. We do have Director Moore with us to help and Frank is here too from City Attorney's office. And there is a little bit of a process. This is a quasi-judicial public hearing. So I have a list of steps that we need to take and the first one is to disclose for the members of the finance committee to disclose any pre-hearing communications regarding the merits of the request and recusal if a member cannot be fair and impartial. So just pause here for a minute if there's anything anybody wants to disclose. I don't see us needing to disclose anything. So, we, the next thing we're going to do is announce the order of the hearing. We'll have a staff presentation. The business owner, if they are present, can have time for presentation. There's public comment. Then there's questions from the finance committee, closing statements, motion, deliberation, and voting. So, the first thing we're going to do is a report of up to 10 minutes, a summary of the staff report, and we will get that from Director Moore and code enforcement staff. So, I'll turn it over to you. Thank you, Chair Romero Worth. And if it, oh, fabulous, it's working. Great. So yes, I have a brief presentation for the Enforcement Division, case number 20254553. This is for the property located at 4985 Airport Road, Unit B, currently identified as Chinese Massage LLC. The Santa Fe City Code, Chapter 18, requires that all businesses in the city obtain a business license and pay associated fees. All of those businesses must renew their licenses annually, and they must not operate in a manner that is contrary to the public welfare. The code requires that violations of these standards be heard by the Finance Committee. I'll just go over a brief timeline of our enforcement efforts here. All of this information is in the staff memo. We conducted an inspection, myself and some of our enforcement staff, on March 19th of 2025. We did gain access to the business at that time and obtained a number of pieces of evidence that I'll go over later. We then directed the owner to apply for a business license. They did not have a current business license at the time, and they failed to do that in a timely manner. We followed up with an inspection on June 17th to follow up on our direction from March 19th. We were denied access at that time. The front door was locked, the back of the property was gated, and no one came to let us in. We also received a constituent complaint on August 2nd, with several photographs describing inappropriate and suspicious activity at the business, which we acted on by issuing the notice of violation on August 29th. We issued that to the business owner that we could identify and then the property owner as well. That was posted on the property physically. They were sent certified mail on the 29th of August. The violation specifically was operating without a business license and in a manner contrary to the public welfare. Part of that notice of violation was that we gave the business owner a compliance date of October 6th. This was basically that they needed to apply for and be issued a business license by October 6th, and they failed to do that. The next step is issuing a cease and desist order, or requesting that from the Finance Committee. On the notice of violation, we listed the hearing date of this evening so that the business owner or property owner could attend and provide their testimony. I just wanted to give a little bit of background on this property. There have been several businesses and business owners identified with this property since 2015, since the records that I could obtain. Here are a few of them. Fang Ying Woo was the person that we interacted with on our first inspection of the property back in March. I just wanted to add the definition of a massage parlor as a place of business where massage is performed and which employs two or more persons. That's from our code. The most recent business owner we could identify is Euang Bao, who registered Chinese Massage LLC with the Secretary of State on June 19th of 2025. I checked today, and that LLC has since been dissolved according to the Secretary of State's office, and Euang Bao has not applied for or received a city business license for the property at Airport Road. Again, we are requesting a cease and desist order, which would officially close the business. It is my understanding that they are closed essentially, but it is very important that we continue with this request. Based on our interaction with them and trying to get them to come into compliance from March, they failed to and they continued to stay open and operate. So I think it's really important that we issue this and make sure that the operations there cease. Our rationale is that they are operating without a business license and in a manner contrary to the public welfare. This table is in your memo and really kind of talks about the bigger picture of what we're looking at when we compare an illicit or potentially illicit business with a legitimate business as it pertains to massage therapy. Illicit operations on the left tend to cheat or manipulate requirements to appear legitimate, while legitimate massage therapy businesses have professional training, education, and licensing. The illicit side advertises to people looking for sex or sexual activities online, which I've included some of that in your packet. Legitimate operators advertise for legitimate health and wellness purposes. At these operations, what we have found is unlicensed personnel on site. When you have a legitimate business, there is a licensed massage therapist who is present during operating hours. Another component of this style of business is no records of treatments or of clients, whereas a normal legitimate massage therapy business would have traditional recordkeeping of their clientele and their bookkeeping. The illicit sex and human trafficking businesses tend to have very long hours. They're open late. People are often living on site, or there's evidence that people are living or at least spending time there for a period of time, whereas a legitimate massage business has normal nine-to-five business hours, Monday through Friday, maybe on weekends, and kind of normal operating procedures. An illicit operation's front doors are locked so that you can't have immediate access to the business, whereas at professional massage parlors or businesses, their front doors are unlocked. There's certainly security, but there's access for the public to enter those spaces. They also tend to advertise at lower than market rates for services in illicit parlors, whereas at legitimate businesses, they offer kind of standard market rates for their services, for their professional services. I just wanted to end with a few of our photographs that we've taken on several visits to the property. This is a more recent one from August 15th. Certainly, they did not have a business license at this time. I'm not sure it's super clear in this photo, but you can see the multiple kind of flashing open signs that are on. There's one on the front Airport Road side and then on the side there. This was at 7:38 p.m. I think it was a Friday night that I drove by there. This is an image from the March 19th inspection that we did. It's 3:00 in the afternoon. We did interact with one individual there, but there was kind of evidence that there were other people there. This is a room with a massage table and a bed, which is suspicious looking to me. They had their security cameras active. That's our city van that we arrived in, so they clearly know who's coming and going from the inside of the operation there. This was another bed where somebody appeared to be or had left. There was a kitchen where she was making lunch. It appeared these kinds of things led to the sense that maybe people were living here or spending time here, more than just a traditional massage business would be. There was another bed with a backpack and shoes and evidence of somebody being there, maybe recently. Another kind of lounge bed area. And then quite a few materials in the shower as well. This was the closet, which had a number of shoes and just kind of random personal items in it, also not something that you would think you would find at a legitimate massage business. And then here's another photo of another room on the property. Okay. And that is it for my presentation. Okay. Thank you. From here, we go to an opening statement and sworn witness testimony from the business owner, who I do not see in the chamber. Do we have anybody matching the name of the business owner on Zoom? I assume that's acceptable if they were to appear that way, but we don't have anybody on Zoom, correct? No, Madam Chair. All right. So just let it be noted that there is no business owner present to make a presentation. From here, we go to the public. If we have anybody who would like to make sworn public comment, now would be the time. Good evening. You have two minutes, and we'll swear you in first. Do we know how to do that? You know how to swear her in? I think there's an official way. Try again. I can't hear you. No, I don't think it's on. Oh, okay. A bright light. A bright green light. Not a... I swear to tell the whole truth. And oh, excuse. State my name and address. Right. Elizabeth West at 318 Senna Street, Santa Fe, New Mexico. And I swear to tell the whole truth, all the truth, and will not be, or else what is it? I've forgotten. The whole truth and nothing but the truth. And nothing but the truth. And I know that I'm being... Oh, yeah. Oh, under the penalty of perjury. Thank you. We need a planning commissioner here. I know. Under the penalty of perjury. There we go. I'm really glad that this, I happened to be here tonight. I had no idea. I wasn't aware that this was going to be on the agenda, but I think it's really good that we pay attention to what's happening in our neighborhoods, and especially after hearing from you all from that particular district, which is especially important in what could be called somewhat more vulnerable areas of town. I'm not sure that's exactly the case because I go and eat at that wonderful coffee shop all the time. But I think it's really, really important we do this. And I've had an experience where something like that happened to me in a funny place, and I got up. I said, "I'm not paying for this. And if I come by here again tomorrow, I'm going to report you to the police." And when I walked by, this is about 10 years ago, they were gone. And I never reported it because they were gone. But I don't know where they went actually. And then in the neighborhood in which I live, there are several of us, or many of us, probably 40 different people in the different neighborhood, have noticed a certain house. It's gotten better, but the police are coming by and monitoring it. But what you're doing here is following a procedure that I was not aware of, and I think it's terrific. So I approve of what you're doing, and I want to register that in case I need to speak about this at another time. Thank you very much for what you're doing and your very clear presentation, which I think is fair to everybody. And I know this could be touching on something extraordinarily scary. Thank you. Thank you. Anybody else in the chamber? I don't see anyone. We don't have anyone on Zoom, I'm guessing. Madam Chair, there is an entity called STE Shelter on Zoom. Are they raising their hand and wanting to speak? No, Madam Chair. Okay. All right. We're going to close the public comment section. From here, we go to the Finance Committee. Questions of staff, parties, witnesses, and the public. And anyone testifying to facts outside the record must be sworn. So questions from the committee. I don't see any questions from the committee. Again, we do not have the business owner present. Does the staff want to add anything? Thank you, Chair. No, I have no further information. Okay. At this point, we would allow the business owner to make a closing statement. Again, the business owner is not present, so I'm going to close the public hearing and I would take a motion on this from the Finance Committee to approve. Second. And is that the form you want the motion in, or do you need it in the, do not written, but do you need, yeah, Frank, do you need a, say word? I, yeah, I'm looking at it right now. Did the propri, oh, I don't have a sample motion though, is the thing. So, so basically you're asking us to see if Approve this, approve a cease and desist order. Is that correct? Yes. You can make one or two decisions. If you find that the proprietor of the massage parlor did not pay a business registration fee and obtain a business license prior to engaging in business, you can, if you find no, they did not obtain that license, then you would, you would enter a finding that they did not have a business license. If you find they had a business license, then you would go on to consider whether they are operating in a manner contrary to the public welfare. Sorry, I should have had a sample. Okay, let me try it. I move that we approve the issuance of a cease and desist order to close Chinese Massage LLC, 4985 Airport Road, Unit B, operated by Euang Bao, Code Enforcement Case 2025-4553, which we're finding in violation of SFCC18-1.7. Second. We have a motion and a second. Can we get a roll call? Do we have any discussion on this? Can we get a roll call, please? Councilor Maroworth? Yes. Councilor Falner? Yes. Councilor Lee Garcia? Yes. Motion passes. Okay. Thank you. Thanks everyone. With that, matters from staff. I think we had a couple matters from staff. Sorry about the hour. Yes, Madam Chair. I do have one item that I would like to brief the committee about. In Governing Body several meetings ago, I brought up an issue that was affecting the completion of the FY25 audit of the city, having to do with the federal compliance audit, the federal single audit. There is a document that auditors need in order to complete federal single audits called the compliance supplement that's issued by the Federal Office of Management and Budget. And that document has been delayed, which is affecting not only the City of Santa Fe, but all governmental audits and nonprofit audits that include a federal single audit. The Office of the State Auditor issued guidance on October 17th, laying out several options for how to move forward. There is the option of issuing two separate reports, issuing the financial statement audit as one report and the federal single audit compliance audit as a separate report. In the past in New Mexico, that has been required to be issued as one document. However, in response to the delay with the compliance supplement, the Office of the State Auditor has allowed for this year only two separate reports, or there is the option to take a wait and see approach and wait for the release of the compliance supplement. Either way, all agencies are required to submit a draft of the financial statement audit no later than January 20th to the Office of the State Auditor. I wanted to make you aware of the updated guidance that we've received from the Office of the State Auditor. We are currently meeting with our external auditors, our accounting consultants, and with management here within the City of Santa Fe to evaluate these two options. We did discuss this issue with the Audit Committee on Thursday of last week, the 23rd of October. The Audit Committee members recommended taking the two cover or the two report approach so that we could complete the financial statement audit on time in December. Either way, the deadline has been revised to January 20th, 2026. So there is no longer a report due in December for the city. However, we do have a path that would allow us to complete at least the financial statement audit closer to the original timeline of December. So it's a little bit confusing and we're working on sorting out what the best option will be for the city, but I wanted to share this information with you right away, Madam Chair. So we are evaluating the guidance that was issued by the Office of the State Auditor and staff will make a recommendation on how to move forward and we'll provide further updates in the future on this issue. Great. And when you come up with that, you'll be letting the council know, sending an email or something. Yes, Madam Chair. Okay. Matters from the committee. Matters from the chair. Our next meeting, Monday, November 10th. Thank you guys. Appreciate hanging out here till the bitter end. We're adjourned.