Finance Committee FY26 Budget Hearing
Thu, May 1, 2025 · Finance Committee Budget Hearing
https://santafeminutes.space/meeting/755

== Executive Summary ==
The Finance Committee Budget Hearing covered several key departments, including Community Development (CDD), Planning and Land Use (PLU), Tourism, Film Office, and Arts and Culture. A major theme across departments was the push for modernization and efficiency, particularly through technology upgrades like the OpenGov system for permitting and business licensing, and digital platforms for planning documents and film locations. The committee also delved into the economic impact of various city functions, with a strong focus on tourism and the film industry as significant revenue generators for Santa Fe.

Discussions highlighted challenges such as staffing vacancies, the need for clear contractual agreements for public art, and the balance between supporting economic development and managing city resources. The Land Use Department's efforts to streamline processes and update foundational documents like the General Plan and Land Development Code were extensively reviewed. The Tourism and Film Offices showcased their successful strategies in attracting visitors and productions, emphasizing their contribution to the city's economy, while the Arts and Culture Department outlined its plans for increased cultural investment and public art initiatives. The Land Use budget was preliminarily approved.

== Key Decisions ==
- The agenda for the budget hearing was approved.
- The Land Use budget was preliminarily approved by a vote of 4-0.
- A motion to approve an unspecified budget item (likely related to the Film Office) was passed by a vote of 4-0.
- A motion to approve an unspecified item (likely related to the Arts and Culture budget) was passed by a vote of 5-0.

== Motions & Votes ==
- Approval of the agenda for the budget hearing — Passed (roll call vote due to virtual attendance).
- Preliminary approval of the Land Use budget — Passed 4-0 (Councilors Cassutt, Lindell, Lee Garcia, and Chair Romero Worth voting "Yes").
- Approval of an unspecified budget item (likely Film Office budget) — Passed 4-0 (Councilors Cassutt, Faulkner, Lee Garcia, and Mayor Worth voting "Yes").
- Approval of an unspecified item (likely Arts and Culture budget) — Passed 5-0.

== Public Comment ==
No public comment period was held. All comments and questions were from committee members and city staff.

== Topics ==
- Public Art Management
- UNESCO Creative City
- Planning & Land Use Modernization
- Community Development Budget
- Arts & Culture Funding
- Community Gallery Exhibitions
- Santa Fe Forward Initiative
- Technology in Planning
- Arts in Schools
- Film Office Integration

== Full Transcript ==
Mr. former City Manager, both of you, the City Manager quarter over there. Can we go live?

Madam Chair, we are live.

Terrific. All right. Sorry for the late start, everyone. It was a late night, as I think a lot of you know. Some of you were with us. So here we are back again. At 10:10, I'll call to order the day. Let's see, 345th, sixth day of budget hearings. If we could get a roll call, please.

Certainly, Madam Chair, and I wanted to note for the committee that Councilor Lindell is with us on Zoom.

Great, thank you. I was going to ask you if she had joined. Yep, I see her here on the Zoom.

Councilor Cassid.

Here.

Councilor Lindell.

Here.

Thank you. Got it.

Councilor Faulkner.

Here.

Councilor Lee Garcia.

Here.

Terra Marworth.

I am here. I have a quorum. I think that was an issue last night. Quorums are kind of important things, apparently. Approval of the agenda. Do we have any changes? We have one, two, three, four budgets to hear today.

No changes from staff.

Okay. Is there a motion?

Motion to approve.

We have a motion and a second to approve the agenda for today. All those in favor?

Aye.

Anybody opposed? That motion passes. Yeah, so we are going to break at noon. This is a hard stop today. I have another meeting that I have to do during lunch. So, wherever we are, we will stop.

Madam Chair, I'm sorry to interrupt.

Yeah.

Director Committee Liaison just told me that we will need to do roll call votes on all of our items today because we have a on Zoom. Apologize for the interruption and thank you.

Great. So, let's go back to approval of the agenda and do a roll call. Thank you. Sorry, councilors. Councilor Cassid.

Yes.

Councilor Lindell.

Yes.

Councilor Faulkner.

Yes.

Councilor Lee Garcia.

Yes.

Chair.

Yes. Yes, from Lindell. Thank you, Councilor Lindell. Okay. We have an approval of the agenda, and thank you, staff, for flagging that. You're going to have to keep us on our toes today, I think. All right. Again, as I was saying, we're going to do, we are going to break at noon. It is a hard stop, as I have to do another meeting over the lunch hour. So with that, we will move to our first budget and get started. Welcome, Director. You're, I think you told me, week two.

Yes, I am. I actually am missing the new employee orientation to be with you today. Bummer. I'll be sure to make that one up.

Yeah. If you could just introduce yourself to the public so that they know who you are and what you do. And then, as I've been saying to everybody all week, it's really important that if you get asked a question, please introduce yourself because as we all know who you are, your recognizable faces, sometimes people watching may not. And so it's just important to take that opportunity to say who you are and what you do for the city. So with that, I will be quiet and let you take it away. Welcome.

Thank you. Thank you, Madam Chair and members of the Finance Committee. My name is Alisa Montoya. I am the new Community Development Director for the City of Santa Fe. I am just so excited to be here and so proud to be working with such an expert team in the Community Development Department. I am from Santa Fe. I went to Chaparral Elementary and St. Mike's High School. I returned home. I left for school, worked in DC for about 14 years, returned home about seven years ago where I've been with Meow Wolf, and I am just so happy to be diving into this opportunity. So, our Community Development leadership team representing Planning and Land Use, Tourism, the Santa Fe Film Office, and Arts and Culture are here today to take you through the highlights of their Fiscal Year 26 budget request and to answer any outstanding questions that you may have. I have a few introductory slides to provide you with an overview of the Community Development Department. So on this slide, you see all of the divisions in Community Development. Most notably is our new division, the Santa Fe Film Office, has joined the Community Development team, which totals all divisions together. We're over 140 strong in total. So, next slide. As you know, we are committed to fostering a high quality of life through the integration of initiatives, programs, and regulations which promote the city's community and economic development. This budget continues that commitment to smart planning on a citywide basis where we will see more housing, jobs, and entrepreneurial opportunities for the people of Santa Fe. Next slide. This is a summary slide. All of this information, as you know, is in your budget book, but it gives you an idea. Generally, all of the department divisions are pretty flat with a small increase. I do want to point out that there is a notable increase in both the Office of Affordable Housing and Economic Development. However, this increase does reflect the one-time funds transfer approved by Council in early 2025. On Monday, when we dive deeper into these budgets, Johanna Nelson will be available to answer your questions. I also want to point out under the Arts and Culture budget, there is a very small omission in the budget, and you see it shows an actual reduction, but we will likely aim to borrow additional funding from their lodgers tax revenue balance to cover any gaps as they may arise, and Chelsea Johnson is here to answer your questions specific to that later in the day. So, Madam Chair and members of the committee, I would like to ask Heather Lamboy, Director of Planning and Land Use, to join us and present on behalf of her department. Heather brings over 25 years of planning expertise, and over nine of those years has been with the City of Santa Fe. For the remaining 16 plus years, Heather has brought her know-how to the City of Aurora, the Town of Castle Rock, Hillsborough County in Florida, the City of Tampa, and the City of Burien in Washington. She's also certified from the American Institute of Certified Planners. Now, real quickly, in 2025, Planning and Land Use advanced major planning initiatives, including Phase One of the Land Development Code. They hired a general plan consultant and launched Santa Fe Forward. The team invested in continuing education and professional development for their employees, and they began to modernize the permitting and review systems with an aim to implement electronic review for all building permits in Fiscal Year 26. So, Heather, take it away.

Thank you, Alisa. So, next slide, please. I'd like to introduce our budget for the Planning and Land Use Department. With me are Amanda Incinius. She's our administrative manager and the force behind all of the numbers and really super helpful in helping me keep things running in the Planning and Land Use Department. Also, Tom Graham, our Assistant Director for Development. Maggie Moore is the Assistant Director for the Planning Branch, and she's actually at a leadership training right now. So, education is a really important part of what I feel is a way, a career ladder for our staff. As you can see, we have approximately 68 people that are part of our team in Planning and Land Use. And our services include the, let me just move this so I can see it here. Our services include the historic preservation planning, both current planning and strategic planning, which you see a lot of the current planners here in front of the governing body, code enforcements and business licensing, building permitting, inspections, and engineering and technical review. Next slide, please. So each year we create a work plan for our department, including all the different divisions in our organization. And this is really critically important because we need to have a checklist of things that we need to do and we need to accomplish. So for this year, in collaboration with the management team of Planning, align all the division directors as well as the assistant directors, our aim is to improve our permit review timelines. This is a critical top of list effort by our team. Also, identify those operational efficiencies that need to be done to bring our department into a more modern position and really be more responsive to our community, including the community at large as well as those who come to our department for different approvals, including building permits and current planning approvals as well. As part of this, the governing body was gracious enough to approve one-time funding for a development guide. This development guide is going to give us an opportunity to help lay out in simple terms to the development community and the community at large all of our processes that are related to planning and land use and also provide actionable links and easy to understand information for our processes because it can be a bit befuddling. I've helped people through the process before, and it's like, well, what else do I need to do and what's this other thing that I need to do? So, it's really critical that we provide that service to our community. And this development guide will also give us an opportunity, we've put into the RFP for us to take a look inward and see how we can improve our processes and use the experience from other jurisdictions on how to perform better with the Santa Fe Forward effort. We're developing a general or a digital platform, and that digital platform will be GIS-based. So as you can see in the graphic here, this is the Monica Roybal Center, and I've selected that as part of our GIS. This is something you can do now. However, that's the only information you can get is basically the county information. And so we are working with the county to actually have a more robust data sharing. But we are also going to upload data, for instance, the Historic District's Cultural Properties Inventory form, as well as any subdivision plan, as well as any development plan, so that we have all that historic data available. This will represent a huge cost savings to the city because of the public records requests, and I'm sure you're familiar with the large volume of those. Somebody at 10 o'clock at night can go to our GIS system and get all of that background material. It's going to take a while to upload all the data, and we are really strategically trying to make sure that we pull things together. We're hiring some high school interns to help us with uploading data, and then also there's a lot of scanning that needs to be done, and we have been using some of our funding from FY 2025 to implement a scanning of over 250 boxes related to current planning approvals. So, and also as you all know, Santa Fe Forward has launched. We're very proud of this process, and it keeps marching along quickly. Right now, we have, we are reviewing as staff the assessment report, which is an inward look at our community and will help to inform policy development going forward. That will be hitting the streets in June as we initiate our first public engagement open house on June 14th. And also the Land Development Code. The governing body will be hearing the Phase One Land Development Code in May and June, and certainly has to go through a committee process. It is Planning Commission, Historic District Review Board, and the like, but during those months, you will be seeing the Phase One adoption. So our initiative is implementing appropriate technology. We've made investments in technology. Computers were freezing with large Adobe PDF files, and so how can we do e-review if we don't have the technology? And so that we are expending available funding for that. We're also training for file share and review software, which is known as Bluebeam, so that all staff, different staff from different departments, can be in a document together at the same time, be doing reviews.

So that means that a paper plan doesn't have to go from one station to the next, but rather it's something that is concurrent. And I mentioned that we're coordinating with Santa Fe County, and also we are engaging with our partners in the building community, the New Mexico Homebuilders Association, Miles Conway's group. You received a letter from him relative to our budget requests, and the AIA as well, Tom Spray. And we are working with the land use working group because certainly they're the users of our services, and it's really important to get their feedback. And we are developing templates for permits as well as other development approvals.

There are teams that come from all over the country and develop plans that you and the Planning Commission, other boards and commissions review, and each place is different. I think that all municipalities strive to confuse everybody because they have different standards. So we're trying to hand that to them with an AutoCAD file so that they have what they need to be able to plug and play, and it makes the review process faster. And we're also really looking forward to robust community input on the land development code for the phase two, which are the key issues, as well as the general plan and other community plans. We're working with our partners also with parks and recreation, the bike pedestrian community, and other plans. We certainly do participate with them as well as to the analysis of the budget.

So the overall increase of our budget is 2.9%. Much of it is eaten up by a 3% COLA pay increase, which we really need to compensate our employees and our team, recognize them for their hard work, and also the class and compensation adjustments that has been a phased process over four periods. So there will be increases at the beginning of the fiscal year as well, reflecting that. So we did not request any increase in funds. I think that it's important to really acknowledge that we're in trying times right now from a fiscal standpoint, and we truly need to be mindful of that. So the focus is operational efficiency. But in order to do that, there are some critical things that we need. And we are setting the framework for growth. So there are two very foundational processes that we're undertaking right now, which is unusual, and that is the general plan update as well as the land development code update. And so that is sort of a remarkable piece of our budget that you would not normally see.

So our frozen positions include civil engineer. We actually were in the process of hiring a civil engineer, and family matters caused him not to join the city. But that was a frozen position that was called out that we were almost very concerned about because he was almost on board, and then we wouldn't have had the funding for him for next year. Oh, I'm sorry, Amen. I haven't been telling you to advance. So, thank you. So that affects our terrain management review timelines. We also have construction inspector and construction inspector supervisor. Those folks, there were over 24,000 inspections last year in the calendar year of 2024. So with that large number of inspections, those positions are critical. With the class and comp, we've been given a little bit of relief in terms of being able to advertise these to the community and gather talent. We also do have a unique situation now where with the federal government, we're getting more labor, available labor to us, and so we're seeing an uptick in applications.

In addition, there's the construction plans examiner 3. We've talked about this before. Really, we are trying to train up people within the department. Many of our vacancies actually were created by promotions within the department, and I think that's really critical and important, and that's why training is important. So we are seeing promotions and seeing advancement in education, but it does take time, and this is something that will also be accounted for in our class and comp. So, in order for us to maintain our levels of service, when we have changes in staff and all of that, we do require some support services. We want to get to a point where we don't have to require these, but we are such a lean team that those support services are critical for us to be able to meet and improve our timelines. So in a historic preservation division for grant funding and other initiatives, we have support services for that as well as training.

For engineering division, we need support services because, next slide please, for engineering division, we need support services because we do lack a civil engineer. So in order to manage the workload, the planning division support services, we have had some shuffling of staff, and so that provides a stopgap. Inspection division, there are some special fields that sometimes are hard to fill, like an electrical inspector, a plumbing inspector. We've had success in doing that as of recent, but when we don't have an electrical inspector is when we need that assistance. Third-party plan review is also part of the support now and in an effort to improve our timelines. But the hope is that we can actually lean off of that third-party review. And then the two big projects that I mentioned, the general plan update as well as the land development code update. So our request for contracts was approximately 1.6 million. We were granted 755,000 of that. So those will be hard decisions that we have to think about in terms of what may or may not be impacted. Please know that we are going to try to provide levels of service that will still provide the best possible outcome.

So with reference to opportunities, one of the opportunities that we've run into is the initiation of the use of OpenGov for our asset management team and in finance and purchasing. And I have been working with InterGov because the governing body, once again, was, next slide please, was, thank you, was able to grant us some funding to help finish the build-out of InterGov. Right now, the portal, the public-facing portal, is not available for many of our processes, just basic ones like re-roofs, stucco, as well as fences and window replacements outside of the historic districts. So people can't access information on a regular basis. So that is priority number one. Priority number two is it's difficult to configure or adjust. So I was working with it to see how we can connect Bluebeam, which is that review software, with InterGov, and it's not possible. So we have to go to a third platform like a SharePoint or something like that in order for people to have that dynamic review process.

And also, it is heavily dependent on IT. They're super busy and doing a lot of great work, but for every little thing, we have to request IT assistance in order to be able to modify or configure it. And in reporting, because one of the things I like to do is to see how we're doing regularly. And so in reporting on our timelines and how we're doing in that regard, it's very difficult to get that data. So OpenGov, actually, Travis Dutton and some of the members of the finance team, Travis applied for a permit, and it took forever. And one of the reasons was because InterGov did not provide notification to him that an invoice was ready for him, and we did not get notification back. So each time I create an invoice, I've helped out with some of the processes, I have to create the invoice in InterGov, attach it to an email, and then write to the applicant, "You need to pay this invoice, and please let me know that the invoice has been paid," because I don't get a notification on my end. So having that, having done some of that work, has really highlighted how cumbersome it is.

So OpenGov, we investigated that based on the good experience in other portions of this, or other departments of the city. And so there's faster permit processing, there's automatic applicant updates, and really one of the weak areas is business licensing right now. That is even more cumbersome, and we've really been trying to work with InterGov to make that process faster and more accessible to the public. And that's one of the major weak points. Configurations can be done in-house. So if there's something that needs to be done, we realize that can work better, then we can actually configure that so a process is run differently. And there's real-time data for our executive leadership as well as for the governing body. One of the initiatives that I would like to do is to provide constant reports going forward to the governing body on how we're doing, and it is a better experience for all involved.

The next slide please. OpenGov is also very accessible. So it's available on a desktop, it's available on a laptop, on an iPad, and it's configured for mobile reporting. One of the things that we're planning on doing also is improving the technology as part of those technology investments so that inspectors can in the field dynamically finish their inspection report on the results. And if there's some corrections that need to be made, that can be sent immediately email to the contractor so that the contractor can actually make those changes and call for an inspection, reinspection right away instead of having the inspector go back to the office, write down the results, send that information to them, and that just is time, and time is money for our development community.

Next slide please. So our deliverables for fiscal year 2026 really is to, some of them are bleeding over from FY2025. So they are accomplishments from FY2025, but critical to the next steps. And so the adoption, as I mentioned, of the phase one land development code will begin, will happen at the beginning of fiscal year 2026, likely once it's effective. Phase two, the initiation of a key issue identification and management as well as the community engagement process of the Santa Fe Forward plan will be part of that FY2026 deliverable, and the assessment report as well will be part of that deliverable. In addition, the digital platform, we are currently working on it. It will be, have to be improved and data added over FY26, but this is something that is going to be accessible to the public. And we'll also, last night we were talking about, well, once an application starts, there's an EN, and then nothing happens. You don't hear anything until there's a packet that's being posted for the Planning Commission. So something that's a simple thing that we can do with our digital platform is post what applications have been received so the public knows what's under review and actually can see those plans. So what we have implemented is like a first review and technical comments sent out to the applicant. So the first review letter will be posted on the website so the public can really understand and track what applications are currently under review. So the ENN process itself, I understand, is an initiative of the council to retool, but at least that's something that we can do in the interim. And then, of course, the electronic review of all building permits. So that concludes my presentation, and I'm happy to answer any questions.

Chair: Thank you, Director Lamboy, and thank you for being here this morning after a late night. Appreciate it. No, we have questions. Councilor Garcia, you want to start? We'll just go down the line.

Councilor Garcia: Sure, why not? Thank you, Madam Chair, and thank you, Director Lamboy, and Director Montoya.

I guess I'll first start off. Thank you for the presentation. You guys are busy. Even from the years of sitting on the Planning Commission, when I first started, I think this is exactly where I sat on the Planning Commission in 2018. They brought me a book that was that thick to my house and just dropped it on my porch. I was like, I've got to go through this whole book. It's crazy plans, all of the cases that were in there, all the supporting documentation. You name it.

So I can see the progression, even just in this short period of time, of where we were and where we are, and I think where we are going and where we want to be. I know that's sometimes a different vision by different people. We've had quite a few land use directors in that time frame that I can recall. But I can see that there's been positive movement towards modernizing and making things easier for the public. Obviously, I think that's one of the biggest things that you hear from especially contractors. It's so tedious, back and forth, and missing. Some of them have it down pat. They come in, they get it done, and they already know.

But I'm curious to see, and I'll just jump right into a couple of questions so I don't keep us here too long. In regards to your salaries, wages, and benefits, it looks like you did increase by 10.3%. But then your contracts and contractuals and utilities decreased by 40%. I think you kind of alluded to that a little bit in your presentation. Given the fact that you have some frozen positions, I mean, a civil engineer, I'm assuming you have to go out to contract for a civil engineer to approve something, whatever it might be. And so construction inspectors, construction inspector supervisor. So we did increase in salaries and wages. We have those frozen positions, and we're decreasing our contractuals. So I always want to take a look at that in each department. I believe that once you're getting more fully staffed, you should be reducing your contracts to people. But I can see in this case, I think you're in a bit of a bind there by not being able to contract. I'll let you respond to that if you can, please. Thank you.

Chair: Chair Maroworth and Council Garcia, it is a challenge, and truly it's so much better for our department to be able to handle everything in-house, but that's not the reality. When it comes to that technical expertise, if we don't have a staff member that has that expertise, then we do need that support service. So, with the use of contracts, one of the things that I see is with our permits and building plans. Wilson drives up from Albuquerque to pick up our permits to provide reviews because we have paper plans. So how can we easily save money is through the use of OpenGov or some sort of platform like that, so they can be done electronically. Because right there, we're being charged for two hours. So, in addition to the operational efficiencies and the like, what can we do to bring down those costs is important. And then, certainly, we're regularly advertising for positions and regularly trying to get people in and trained and also provide a career ladder for them within the organization so they can stay here.

Thank you. I can see that as being not just costly, but the effectiveness of time. I think that also can delay things when you're not obviously in-house. You get it done right away. You have to wait for somebody to come and pick something up. Snail mail-wise, I mean, that's, yeah, it's kind of, I think that that can be a challenge. Going kind of towards that, the challenges of hiring in your department, you guys are at 68 total full-time, or are there some part-time employees?

Chair: Council Romero and Council Garcia, that is all full-time.

They're all full-time. And what would be your fully staffed department? So you have how many vacancies at this point?

Chair: We have approximately 10 vacancies. Looking back at Amanda for help with that. So we have 10 vacancies, and some of those are due to promotions.

Okay. And so filling those, I guess, more entry-level positions has been challenging, is that?

Chair: Chair Romero, Council Garcia, actually, the entry-level positions are easier to fill.

Okay. So finding somebody with, I guess, more of a skilled, skilled, not labor, but, you know, some skill in this, in this industry already who understands the business, so to speak. And I guess the challenging part of that is definitely the county, other jobs that are in our markets, and I think everybody is dealing with that. I just, I don't want to take too much time because I'm timing myself actually, so I can be on, on, on good time limit. But I know Council Faulkner has got me on eagle watch. You know, again, I think the Land Use Department is very intriguing to me, being that I did start here in government as a Planning Commissioner. How, so the Planning and Land Use Department, do we ever do a dive into how the Planning and Land Use Department works and what kind of return as a city do we get on that Planning and Land Use Department? Because obviously, the Planning and Land Use Department is a very integral part of development. Development brings back in money to our community, whether it's in the form of GRT services, jobs, so on and so forth. Is there, I mean, how do we get that, how do we figure out what the effect of how, how good we are, are, are providing our services, working efficiently, in return getting money back, revenue?

Chair: Thank you, Chair Romero. Council Garcia, there are lots of impacts on how well planning and land use works and how it attracts business. So I'm going to use an example of the Georgia O'Keeffe Museum, and there is going to be a huge return in the fact that that museum is expanding. It's going to bring more tourism even as of yet. And so the actions and the collaboration with the developer and the museum was really critical and how we can get them from the idea to a shovel in the ground is really important. And I, unfortunately, in my career, so I've worked in historic preservation as well as current planning for the city, and now in a leadership role, I hear things, "Well, I'm not sure if we want to come to Santa Fe because it's really hard." And I take that to heart. You know, hard to develop there, and I take that to heart. And so we must be attractive to developers to serve our city, but also other areas, including Los Alamos, including Boake, including Tuzuk, Las Vegas. We have a lot of connections. So we are a heart of the region, and how well we do in planning and land use does directly affect the bottom dollar.

I guess, and I'll be almost up with my time limit now, but I think it's really important. I would love to see how that is kind of tracked because even if, you know, tourism is obviously our largest income generator for the city through GRT, but lodgers taxes, whatever you might look at, however you want to look at it. But when you're, when you're building out, you know, you have businesses here building, buying materials, contributing to the workforce, spending their money here, what is the actual cost of, of, of doing a development? I mean, and how does that come back into our community? And so I think that's, I'll stop right there. I just would be intrigued to see how the return of our return of investment of a, of a Land Use Department that is operating at full potential and how it brings back the dollars to this city because that's what we're looking for. So I'll yield. Thank you, Madam Chair.

Thank you, Councilor. Councilor Casset.

Councilor Casset: Thank you, Madam Chair, and thank you, Director Lamboy, for being here again so quickly after you left like all of us and staying with us late last night. I'm excited to jump into this budget. I always joke that Land Use is my favorite child, and I just have always been so, I think it's so incredibly important that we look at the impact that Land Use has across the city and how important it is for a lot of our really big issues: housing and economic development and water. I find Land Use to be just incredibly crucial to all those pieces. We even were talking about it with emergency management the other day and how we're looking at wildfires and how does this impact our building codes? How does this impact where we are allowing people to build? Are we going to be a bit more restrictive if people are going to be in those wildfire zones, and what does this look like for us? So, happy to have you guys here, and I know sometimes that my passion can be a lot for you guys, so thank you for always making time to speak with me.

A couple, well, a number of questions, but I'll get through a couple right now. First and foremost, as you mentioned, we have General Plan and Land Development Code in here, which I am so excited about, and I always want to make other people excited about it. Still trying to figure out how to make people psyched about zoning. Not sure yet, but I'll get there. We have $600,000 for the General Plan update and $170,000 for the Land Development Code update in here. What have we budgeted previously? And is this rollover from that? Is this in addition to that? And then is this going to be our last tranche that we think we're going to need to, to quote Rich Brown, our last tranche of money that we'll need for these projects?

Chair: Thank you, Chair Romero, Councilor Casset. You're our favorite mama, so really, really enjoy working with you. So, with reference to the funding, so we do have some rollover funding. Thank goodness for the governing body and the one-time funding, we were able to secure $600,000. That's both for the Land Development Code as well as the General Plan. Quite honestly, I was afraid this would happen, and so I took advantage of that one-time funding so that we can fund those projects. So there is a General Plan Phase 1, which is the community outreach and identification of key issues, and the Phase 2 of the Land Development Code will be running concurrent with that. So that 30,000-foot level policy development can be affected in that, you know, on the ground Land Development Code regulations. So approximately $450,000 of that $600,000 was to be able to launch Phase 2 of the Land Development Code, and we are currently reviewing the scope of work and adjusting it based on that collaborative engagement we're going to have with the two projects and add in a little bit of money for that General Plan update to be able to actually affect better community engagement. So that $150,000. So of the, for the Land Development Code, it is much of it is covered by the fiscal year 2026 funds, but the General Plan, no. So the General Plan, once again, it's a two-pronged project in that we have that digital platform in addition to Santa Fe Forward, which is really foundational and important work. So, as our community looks into, you know, the next 25 years, so we had approximately $400,000 that rolled over from fiscal year 2023. It took us a while to get the project off the ground. So we were able to roll that over as well as approximately the same amount for fiscal year 2020, I'm sorry, 2020 for fiscal year was the rollover.

2025 is the current funding that we have, which is approximately $400,000, and then it's going to suffer a little bit in 2026. So we need to be creative. I'm going to be watching for the advertisements for the one-time funding. I'm hopeful that we'll get that for the coming fiscal year. Certainly, of course, everybody's asking you for money. We would love to see that restored and available to us for the general plan update.

So, phase three in fiscal year 2027, that would represent phase three of the land development code update. That is really just a look at the code standards and making sure they comply with the policies set forth in the general plan. We might be able to have some efficiency there because we're doing that dual public engagement. So, it might not be as heavy a lift in 2027 for that phase three. Then, of course, the wrap-up and implementation planning of the general plan. Once again, fiscal 2026 is when we're going to be doing the engagement. So, the creation of the general plan document, review by the public of that document, and then also part of it is to make it actionable and to keep us honest and to have a checklist because I love those, is to have an implementation plan as well.

Okay. A deliverable. I would also argue that making sure that we really invest in this first phase of the general plan is important. I think what we experienced this last night when we were going over a land use case and this conversation on what are we actually deciding and the understanding that the general plan, this is where the policy development happens. This is really our opportunity to create those priorities. When we are getting to the reasons we don't get development approvals, but sometimes we do depending on PUD, apparently we learned last night, at that point we are really having to take Chapter 14 and apply it. At that moment in time, a lot of these policy decisions aren't on the table for us to debate in that way. So, I think investing in that general plan, in that policy component, is really important.

Also, how do we make sure again as we're looking at future planning, as you mentioned, our general plan is 26 years old? That's not good. We've run into issues here. We've had a lot of problems there. So, what is it going to look like? How are we going to put in these triggers that are going to make sure that we're not getting to this place where we're trying to go back and catch up, seeing what's relevant, seeing what's not? So, I agree, getting those dollars restored, if we're able to, that would be high on my priority list as well because I really see this as an investment in what the future of our city and what the future of our land use processes is going to look like.

I would also say that we talk a lot about public engagement with land use, and this is the time to do it. It is not necessarily during the process. Now, that's a balance. But I know there's been a lot of research around how an extended process will increase the cost of development, which of course for us increases the cost of housing. I always refer to this lovely Ezra Klein podcast about why are blue cities so expensive, and it really had to do with this process. They've wrapped themselves in a bunch of red tape, really wanting to give the community a lot of input, which is wonderful. We want that to happen. But we do want that to happen at the right time.

Then we do need to balance the needs and the necessity of transparency for the community, of understanding what's happening with the development, but also with making sure that we're staying on target and understanding what more process is actually going to do to some of our long-term goals, which is prevent them, which is get in their way, which is make our city even more expensive or not allow us to have better development and better planning because we're busy trying to maneuver into these little holes when we've already set our priorities. So, that's my soapbox for the general plan. I'll get off it now. Am I at 10 minutes already? Okay.

Well, let's do a quick one. So, let's look at the third-party plan review program. As you mentioned, that's a big contract for us. How is that working for the public? Because that was a big piece of this is we were getting a lot of input that it was taking too long to do our plan reviews, taking too long to do our permitting. Have we seen a positive reaction from the public who has been utilizing the service?

Chair Romero Worth: Councilor Casset.

So, we've had the opportunity to test it, and I don't think it's worked as well as we'd hoped. We've had some major projects come through using those services, third-party plan review. There have been requests, and I'm really grateful for the feedback from the land use working group and the building community because they have offered suggestions on expanding that program to different levels of permitting that maybe are not necessarily just big projects. So, the goal ultimately in my mind is that we would not have to have that in the future, right? So, by just being more efficient in-house.

And that's that's the OpenGov component, correct?

Yes, that is correct. We do have funding for it in the coming year and will continue to reflect on how we can make improvements to that in the interim until we get to that point with OpenGov that it's much more robust and responsive.

Okay, wonderful. I do want to hear more about OpenGov, but my time is up, so we'll get there later unless somebody else gets it first. Thank you.

We'll keep coming around. Councilor, well, I was going to go to you. I don't know if she's available. I think she's just listening at the moment. Councilor Faulkner.

So, I have, I'm available.

Okay, take it away, Councilor.

Okay, thanks. I'm sorry I'm not able to be in the room, but thank you, Ms. Lamboy, for all that you do. If I could move a bunch of money around, I would move a bunch of money over to that end of the building. It just seems like we ask an awful lot, and we just aren't putting the resources toward what we're asking for, which is a little frustrating for me. Not from the 40,000-foot level, but from walking in the door level. Do we have the ability to, you know, say my neighbor wants to put a porch on their house or something? It seems like a simple project next to building an apartment house. Do we have the ability to do some kind of an express thing for whether it's a porch? And probably even more importantly than that, what about how quickly does it happen that you can get a permit to, you got a leaky roof? What happens then?

Thank you. Councilor Lindell, Chair Romero Worth, it's complicated. So, in the case of District 1, much of District 1 is an historic district. So that adds a little bit of time, but I can report because in my work with the land use working group, we've done some analysis, and on re-roof permits, those are express permits, and we've been able to turn those around within three days. So, we're watching our numbers and taking a look at it and see how we can make improvements, but we have work to do. So, in terms of over the counter, we in our analysis have determined that these express permits can offer a little more flexibility instead of somebody coming up to the counter, although we've definitely made ourselves available to folks who do want to walk up to the counter and get some help. But if they employ this process, then we typically can get things out within one week for fences, window replacements, as well as for stucco jobs and such. So, within a week.

And how does someone know if they qualify for an express permit?

Chair Romero Worth, Councilor Lindell, that's a good question. I don't think we communicate that well enough. That's where the development guide would be super helpful. And the other thing that we want to do is, and I'm going to do it, it has nothing to do with the budget, but getting the word out. So, we're going to have a monitor in planning and land use, and it's "Did you know?" and these are the express permit types and all of that. Also, we'll be much more nimble with our digital platform. Lots of times I know communications team is super busy, we have to send in a comms request to make a change on the website, and getting that word out is sometimes not dynamic, and so we will be able to use the digital platform to get the word out. And then of course we've had our community outreach events built in the future, built in the past and the like, and really trying to use our newsletter and outreach to educate the community as well.

Well, I appreciate that. It just seems like the department deals with so many complicated things day in and day out. I would have no clue of how to streamline any of it. They all seem very, very complicated. I know that Councilor Romero Worth, Councilor Cassid, and myself, we've sat in and been working also on short-term rental. None of this stuff is quick or simple. If it was, we would have taken care of it a long time ago. So, I don't know how you juggle all of it. I think that you do have some absolutely amazing staff that lives over in that end of the building. Got people that have been there, I think, since Scott was a baby. Dan Esall is, he's probably forgotten more about it than most of us will ever know. So, we really do treasure them, and thank you for stepping up and doing this job. It's a really, really hard one, and it's very pressurized. Don't think that that goes unnoticed. I'll yield now, Chair.

Thank you. Thank you, Councilor Lindell. I think Dan is taking offense to how old you've made him.

Well, I said, well, I don't blame him. He can take offense.

All right. He's laughing now. I think you're good. Thank you, Councilor. Councilor Faulkner.

Okay. If Jamie is your mom, I would like to think of myself as your auntie. Land use is one of my favorite departments. And I think that we talk a lot about land use, but we don't fund land use in the same way we talk about land use. And having been on the planning commission for, I think it was seven years, I know how hard you guys work. I know the amount of time you take. I know the staff that I've worked with has always been amazing. I do have some concerns about when you're transitioning from the third-party contracts to bring everything in-house digitally. Are you going to keep some third-party contracts for the transition period of time? I mean, I get that you like getting rid of phase two of the general plan and the code. That makes sense because we're only on phase one, but then we have third-party review. We have engineering, we have planning, and you guys are not at capacity for staff. So, my concern is if you cut off all the third-party contracts while you're trying to get more efficient through using software, that there's going to be a gap, and I'm just wondering how you're going to fill that gap. I appreciate that all the departments are giving their staff raises, but I could also say cautionarily that if you can pay people any amount of money, and if they're overworked and dissatisfied because they're overwhelmed, they won't come, they won't stay.

And you're also not going to get new people in because they can look at the dynamic and go, "Well, you're paying us great, but we're doing 10 jobs for one person." Director Lamboy, this isn't directed at you. This is just a general fear that I have about all the cuts that we're doing in our departments in order to fulfill this increase in pay. So, what are your thoughts on that? And then what are your thoughts on how you're going to fill the gap in this transitional period of time? Thank you.

Chair Romero Worth, Antie Falner. Just kidding. Councilor Faulkner. The intent is really to not let go of that. We really would like to retain that funding because we do have a transition period that we'll need to pay attention to, and it will demand a lot of our staff. And so that's why, not only are we looking at using those resources wisely, like not requiring people to drive to get our permits, but also seeing what we can do to improve our efficiency on our side. And those efficiency improvements are for our staff as well as for the public. Ultimately, it's intended to be mutually beneficial. But yes, we don't, like I said, everybody's asking for money, and I know the dollar signs are in your heads, but we really do not want to lose that funding because it will be critical.

That's a very good point. Thank you. This is why I'm a proud anti. They know what they're talking about. Whatever I can do to help, I really don't think we should cut the third-party contracts, not all of them. I see how hard you guys work. I see how frankly overwhelmed the department is. If it were up to me, your department would be right under the city manager because you, police, and fire, I think are the most important. I had no clue when I became a planning commissioner how much the land use department plays a role in the health of the city. It's massive.

I'll give one example briefly. The street that I live on, and Council Garcia has to deal with this because he gives me rides, the street's only 20 feet wide. That was a land use decision. A planning commission said that was okay. When everyone is home, some people park on the street. Fire and police cannot get on our street. We've had fire have to stop at the turn to get onto my street and run with a gurney up to a house to help someone. And so land use is super critical. I can't say this enough. If there is anything we can do to not cut third-party contracts during the transition period, that is something we have to do, or we maybe could do a bar after the budget cycle is over. But we need to do something to keep those third-party contracts in place to protect your staff from being overworked and then also to help the community make sure we're being efficient while we're making this transition. Thank you so much, Director.

Thank you, Counselor. You have an ambitious work plan. You always have land use. There's a lot that needs to be done there. Since I've been a counselor, every year there's an incredible task list, and I think it's because it's an area that was neglected for a long time. Again, this goes back to deferred maintenance that I've been saying that's been building for decades. And I think there are things like the general plan update that haven't happened. There are things like the code update that has needed to happen. Our processes haven't kept up with current times, and so it's all coming home to roost, and what you have to do requires a lot of ambitious work.

So, that said, I guess I'm kind of curious, are there any grant opportunities to fund any of this work? Or is it really, does it really have to be kind of fee-based and government-funded like in other areas? I know we have granting and outside opportunities. I'm not aware of any in this area, maybe in historic stuff.

Correct, Chair Romero Worth. So we do regularly, we're a certified local government in our historic, and so for instance, last year we were able to fund through the State Historic Preservation Office a study with the Historic Santa Fe Foundation on the endangered properties program, a pilot project to try to keep people in their houses in the historic districts by providing maintenance and upkeep for those who are not able, long-time families with elderly potentially folks, or folks that don't have financial resources to keep their historic resources in good shape. So, we do have that grant funding, but the rest of it really truly is fee-based. And maybe that is an area that we can improve and look at other opportunities, but generally in the jurisdictions that I've worked in, there's not been much grant funding.

Yeah, and I guess so I'm glad you mentioned other jurisdictions and that experience because I think that's, I mean, what you're seeing here, did you experience that in any other jurisdiction, the climb that we're having to make here and because of all the things you're trying to do, big things you're trying to do all at once?

Yes, Chair Worth, that's correct. There's a climb in land use across the country and especially when it comes to implementing those big projects as well.

Okay. So maybe we're not that unique in terms of having kept up with things as we should have.

Jerome Marrow Worth, that's correct. Although paper plans are not common.

Yeah. So, okay, that maybe a few areas. All right. I'm curious about the development review guide. I think that's wonderful. Wondering if it might help policymakers, decision-makers, the governing body, the planning commission, with their understanding of processes. I feel like I don't have a background in land use. So coming here when I was first elected, I learned on the job. It's, wow, it's, talk about a steep climb. It's a lot. And we're still, you know, trying to, I mean, last night, understanding PUD, what that means to a project, that was news to many of us. I'm just curious, will that, can that be used to help us understand, you know, not just like if you're applying for a project and what do you need to do, what kinds of permits do you need to do to get the project, but on the other side, what do we need to know, you know, in terms of our regulatory authority and where we get involved and what the process is and what we've delegated to the planning commission, that kind of thing. Will that help us understand better this big picture?

Worth, yes, that is the intent. It's for people of all walks of life. So it could be for the governing body's use as well as for a homeowner's association and a developer. So, there is a lot, you know, there is a lot, and so that's where it's going to be incumbent upon us to also break down things in our communications with the public and educational opportunities with the public to talk about this is the big picture and this is how we accomplish it.

On your deliverables in FY2026, that slide, you have four. Are they listed in a priority order or are they just listed? I guess I'm curious. So you have one, Phase One adoption and Phase Two initiation of the land development code, community engagement process, an assessment report for Santa Fe Forward, digital platform, GIS-based real-time access to information, and then fourth, electronic review of all building permits. And I guess my question really is, while the digital platform, I maybe don't understand the value of the digital platform, and wondering if the electronic review of building permits shouldn't be higher on the list if this is a priority list, or maybe you can help me understand the value of the platform, digital platform, and why we wouldn't be putting resources that are going to that towards electronic review of building permits.

Yes, thank you, Chair Romero Worth. This is really my stream of consciousness just pulling together this PowerPoint. I have to admit, electronic review is, if I were to organize it, it would be one of the first priorities. The reason I thought, oh, we're going to be adopting Phase One of the land development code right at the beginning of the fiscal year. So that is a deliverable. So really that's, I think, how I organized it. We're going to be starting our community engagement process July, June 14th. But you are correct. We really need to look at it with a critical eye. The digital platform, I feel, is really important because also it's going to be of value to other departments. For instance, the PD, they get a lot of public records requests for crash reports, accident reports, and that's something that we can put eventually on that platform as well. So, we're really trying to provide value to not just planning and land use, but also to other departments.

Okay. And then I, you know, you're one of the few departments that has given us a list of frozen positions and lost contract funding. And I know I think we heard early on about frozen positions and this trade-off. I think the city manager has spoken to about how we need to, you know, not be afraid to move around money that has been frozen and we haven't been able to hire. So, I'm assuming, and I, we don't have Director Oster here, but we do have our budget people and the city manager who might be able to answer this, but the frozen positions, and we maybe back to the, to the, to the philosophy about how this budget was funded. Some of it was with the frozen positions, and they weren't, this was not done lightly. These are positions that I'm assuming you haven't been able to fill for many years, which is why they thought it's safe to be able to use the money that is allocated to these, these positions. And then your contract funding, I think, you know, kind of same kind of deal. We have done, you know, some, some, we've been taking money from contracts because some of these contracts haven't been filled either, or maybe they're not as needed anymore, which is, I think, several counselors have, have been pushing on that kind of trade-off. So maybe if we could just, I think it's a good time to just maybe renew the philosophy here and and what's happening. It's, it's not that we don't see critical need. And just, I don't know, Director, I'm sorry, City Manager Scott, you're, you're leaning forward, so I, I'm giving the microphone to you.

Thank you, Madam Chair, counselors. What I would say about the subject of frozen positions and the whole function here that I, with everyone else, I think it's critically important. I'm excited about what they've got going. And personally, I really don't want Heather to be sitting around looking for money. I'd rather that she's out there doing the leadership that she's so capable of doing in the planning arena. My feeling on all of the frozen positions is that to the extent that A, we need it, and B, we can find people to fill it, they should keep looking. That between Rod Golden, myself, we don't actually call them frozen. I forget what our word was, deep chill, meaning that it's possible to thaw them when we need them and we can find them. And that's what I want all the departments to do. We heard the other day that we have 260 plus vacancies right now, which is far more than the vacancy credit that we put into this budget. So budget management involves moving money around. I mean, it's ironic that we spend so much time putting money into each individual line item to make sure everything is perfectly funded when you know good and well that once you get into the budget year, you're moving here and you're moving there.

It's management, that's why they call it that. And we're going to fund, and we're going to find the funding, and we're going to allow this function to move forward in all these critically important areas. And one way or the other, we'll get there.

All right, I think that's very helpful, especially as we think about this. And the way this presentation has been laid out is that, I mean, deep chill, that's amusing. But it's not like, okay, this is, it's not stagnant. I think is a really important point. And that you will continue to look, I think, Director, if I'm correct from what I've just heard, to fill these positions. And if you find the right candidates, it sounds like the City Manager and others are willing to work with you to help you get the resources you need to do the work that we have been wanting this department to continue to do and to raise the level of our service to the public. And I think that's really important, especially given the emails that we've gotten from the Land Use Working Group. And certainly, many of us did meet with them, and I know you've been meeting with them. Thank you for doing that. And the frustration that we have heard from the development community in terms of how their interactions with the department have been challenging in terms of doing their work, and what that means to them and their clients, and ultimately to the city and the things we want to see happen.

So, yeah, and I guess Andy, you came down, and I don't know, just in terms of my time is up, but yeah, but the contract funding, I am kind of curious about. If that's what you came down to, to give us a better sense of, I'll just give you an open mic to fill in.

Christina Martinez: Madam Chair, my name is Christina Martinez. I'm a Senior Budget Analyst. What we did was analyze the past three years of contracts for this department, and we came out with an average of 35.2% being spent only, which is why we did the 54.8% cut to those, and we did leave the 10% margin just for a little bit of cushion.

Okay. And I think that's helpful just in terms of the, you know, the way that slide looks. It's pretty dramatic. It's like, oh, we don't care about land use. We're, you know, people are screaming at us, and we're like, yep, nope, we're not, we don't care about that. So, I think that that's important information for that. Director, you're raising your hand, and maybe you want to correct my characterization. I don't know.

Director: Thank you, Councilor Romero, Chair. The situation is that we did have a lot of funding hanging around for a while with the Land Development Code update, as well as the General Plan update, while we got those projects going. So there were rollovers previously in those previous budget years where that funding was not used. So it might be just a bit skewed in that regard because of these two special.

Okay. Well, I think this is helpful context for the slides, and I appreciate that you put the information forward, because I, you know, this is definitely the trade-offs, the push and the pull, and you do have, there's a lot going on in land use. I don't know. I have to maybe disagree with some of my councilors about, I mean, I think land use is important, but honestly, I think all the departments across the city are important. And, you know, we're trying to do a lot of things in all of them to the best that we can. And so I'm not sure I'd stack them in a, I'd probably be more like you in a stream of consciousness of, you know, listing them, because I think they all do very important work for different reasons, and it's, I don't know, I have trouble with that. So anyway, that said, I will go back down the line. I think there are a few more questions. We are going to break at noon, or if we get done with this budget before, we'll break after it. Councilor Lee Garcia, do you have more questions?

Councilor Lee Garcia: Just a couple more. Thank you, Madam Chair. I think I heard you say something about hard to develop, and I think that sometimes can translate into people who do not want to come into the city to build, or because at the end of the day, it is economic development, and we just talked about that. And when you get to the point of actually issuing a permit and somebody starts construction, that's when the income starts coming back into the city. It's hard to put a, you know, I was asking earlier, how do we identify what that contribution back into our local economy is? And I guess you can probably talk to economists or those that follow the GRT and when it bumps and how many permits are being put out there. And so, I guess that would just be a request at some point. And I don't know if it would come from your department, or does it come from who in the city would provide that type of analysis in regards to how efficient our land use department is working and cranking out those permits for people to start building? I know that initially when a contractor starts to build, you know, they don't necessarily pay a gross receipts tax on their construction materials because they're reselling whatever job that they're doing. We only see it when their project is complete and they've invoiced the customer, and that customer pays the GRT, as long as it wasn't a cash deal, which we see often, probably for small projects. And so, you know, I guess not really any other questions. I do thank you and your team for how hard you are working. You guys have a huge lift with the modernization, with the General Plan update. I mean, all of this stuff is just like, whoa. How do you prioritize which ones are important, and how do you keep the ball rolling in terms of processing applications every single day? And so I think that's the challenge in your department. I do value your department tremendously. And I also acknowledge the fact that it is difficult to divvy up the pie, so to speak, and who's more important, and why aren't we funding this and funding that? I think it's challenging. I think it is up to the directors to find how to do that in collaboration with us and senior administration. So, just mostly comments. And I think that's all I have, Madam Chair.

Chair: Yes. Thank you, Councilor. And Director, if you had something to add to those comments.

Director: Yes, Madam Chair. Councilor Garcia, we actually on Friday night got the assessment report for the General Plan update, and part of that is an economic analysis. So, I haven't had the chance to take a look at it and understand the economic analysis, but certainly we can fold in sort of that analysis as well. Johanna Nelson and I and our teams have been starting to meet, and so we can certainly bring this up as a point of study going forward.

Chair: Thank you. I'd be very interested in looking at that and how it, what it has to present. Thank you. Yeah, I think that's going to be a really interesting report for all of us. So, be happy to see that come forward. Councilor Cassutt.

Councilor Cassutt: Thanks so much, Madam Chair. On that line, actually, one thing I did want to mention is business licensing coming into land use. First of all, I do want to say that your staff member in business licensing pulls more than her weight. And really been very impressed. We actually had Jenna and Jason Senna come present at EDAC, Economic Development Advisory Committee, because obviously they have an interest in business licensing. And from there, there was a really lovely synergy that you know about of the Office of Economic Development helping to fund a navigator to assist with the business licensing process, because my understanding is that it's not very clear. And this seems to be another area where software is a problem from what I have heard from both staff and the public. Is that something that we've even started to scratch the surface of the challenges with the software with business licensing, and that it's not very user-friendly, that you kind of have to fit things into categories where it doesn't quite fit, and it sounds like it's quite a time suck in terms of both the public figuring it out, as well as your one staff person, Jenna, having to try to walk people through this and assist them with something that's not intuitive? Any work being done there?

Director: Yes. Chair Roworth, Councilor Cassutt, actually Maggie Moore has been sort of the force behind and making those software improvements. And once again, this is sort of the look back on how we can make Intergov work for us, because ultimately software needs to work for us. And, you know, what can we do to make those improvements? So operationally, as well as making it accessible to the public is really important. We did have a second employee. So, we inherited business licensing from the Economic Development Division a couple years back under Jason Kluke's term. And so we are really trying to find support for Jenna. She's a rock star. So, but yes, the software is something that we're looking at right now and trying to make improvements with what we have now and in the future.

Councilor Cassutt: So, Intergov, I did want to follow. So, right now Intergov is the software for business licensing then as well. And we started with Intergov, like a year ago, two years ago. I mean, this is recent, right? The change to Intergov.

Director: Yes, that's correct.

Councilor Cassutt: And then it's not, and so now we're moving to OpenGov. And I'm assuming that there is a cost associated with that shift. And you went over, I mean, in detail why this is important. And I do, I do agree that making sure that we are on the, we're utilizing a software that is beneficial. I'd rather us do that than dig our heels in to a software that we chose that is not working as well. But I do know that we're doing some other, you know, we're looking at Avenue for short-term rentals, where, you know, there's a lot of software choices that need to be made. I am curious about the lessons learned around, you know, what, you know, when we, when we were getting Intergov, it was really pushed as this is really, this is going to be great, it's going to revolutionize the department, and it's fallen flat, unfortunately. I actually don't even want to ask the question of how much it cost. But as we're looking at this, you know, this is, I think something that's really important, and maybe something that we even need to think about as we're looking at policies for how we choose softwares, what, what does this process need to look like? But what, what lessons have you, have you all learned that you are now applying as we're looking at some more of these softwares from this process of Intergov now to OpenGov?

Director: Chair, Councilor Cassutt, I've worked with lots of different software platforms in different jurisdictions, Excella, Amanda, they all seem to have acronyms. YouTrackIt, as well as lots of other different ones. And it's hard to make a decision on what's going to work. City of Aurora started with implementing Excella and then went back to Amanda because it was not working for them. So, it's not out of the question. We are all very aware of the importance of being good stewards of tax dollars. We don't want to just take that lightly. And so, OpenGov does represent cost savings in that it's being used in different departments already.

And so we have a return in that regard. Also, annual maintenance is much, much less, in the hundreds of thousands. I don't have the specific number for you, but in talking with Director Candelaria of IT, Intergov is a $2 million funding requirement each year. So that is something to be, as stewards of our tax dollars, we're very mindful about the importance of having a program that not only works but also is cost-effective.

Well, thank you, and again, thank you for being willing to make the change. I know it is hard. We say, "Sorry, this wasn't quite it." We had this conversation last night about being able to say, "Oops." We're doing the best that we can. There are going to be things that come up, and I know it's not something you all take lightly. So, I do appreciate that and am glad to hear that there is some cost savings there as well.

Counselor, is it possible to hear from your assistant, Mr. Graham, about this? It seems like he might have some thoughts he wanted to add. And I don't want to, I don't know what the protocol is, but thank you.

In addition to this, things that we have learned, there has been the business licensing, as stated, was just brought on maybe a year ago, a year and a half ago, but we've been up and running on Intergov since 2019. So that was a late add, and what we've been trying to do is implement the business licensing process into Energov, and we're finding a lot of problems with that. We thought that was going to be the end-all, be-all, make it all electronic and speed everything up. But as we make changes, we're learning different things are happening that, like you were talking about, Counselor, the classifications that you have to put people in, that kind of thing is an issue. And OpenGov also includes the business licensing within the permitting process as well. So, it should be a lot easier process to run with that.

If I may just have a minute or two more. In addition to Councilor Garcia's comments on the bind that it puts us in with reducing our contracts, as well as raising those positions that we have, that is definitely a bind. If we were fully staffed, we'd still be a bit more efficient with more people. We could use more staffing, but the positions that are frozen are highly technical positions that are very needed within our department. So, I know City Manager Scott has mentioned that we were able to look for those positions. Are we able to post those positions and advertise for those without funding? That's important. If we can keep searching for those positions because they are unicorns. They're hard to find. They're highly technical and they're very needed. And it will, once we fill these positions, there is an offset with the contracted funds that would be needed as well.

Yeah, it sounds like you shouldn't think of them as frozen. I'm not sure what the difference is between frozen and deep freeze, but apparently, it's a gradation.

Counselor: Oh, deep chill. Sorry.

Counselor Cassutt: Thank you, Mr. Graham. Thank you, Director, for letting me go lateral. Last question that I have has to do with enforcement. We've had a lot of conversation around enforcement, around, "Do we have our own code and code enforcement department?" Right now, code enforcement primarily hangs out within your department, although I believe that there might be some Public Works code enforcement. I'm trying to figure that out still. When I'm looking at the budget, I right now see that the proposed enforcement division, and I don't know if this is a new proposed division because it's the first year that I'm seeing, oh, no, 2025 had a line item. But the proposed budget is $11,120, which of course doesn't even fund a position. So, I'm assuming, hoping that those dollars or the salaries are elsewhere. But also curious what $11,000 is getting us within code enforcement, and what these conversations have been looking like on your end. I know this is a rough one. It's another really understaffed division that is very important, that has a lot of, that is being pulled in a lot of different directions. So, I'd like to hear a bit more about that budget as well as how things are looking in that arena.

Thank you, Chair Romero Worth. Counselor Cassutt, the code enforcement is sort of spread across different divisions. The $11,000 does not get much, basically materials. But the salaries are covered. We have two full-time code enforcement officers, and then we have some others that are dedicated to short-term rentals but do sort of backfill if needed. So, as you can probably assume from that, we are reactive, not progressive. So, we respond to complaints in a timely manner, but in a position where we can only respond to complaints. Fortunately, we were bailed out on a short-term software in that the lodgers tax is going to be funding that software outside of the one-time funding that the governing body approved for that. So, that tool represents a partnership, really. And that's sort of endemic or symptomatic of what we have to do to keep our code enforcement team going.

Well, thank you. I appreciate that. I know that that's going to be a continued conversation going, and so I will be interested to hear how, you know, continuing how things shift and what is needed. And it looks like we're going to have some larger discussions about that. That's the end for me, but thank you. My one last comment does sound like we're going to need to, you know, your comment on the contracts. I again really want to make sure we keep a very close eye on that because it did take a while. I remember funding these projects and then getting cranky that they hadn't started. So, I appreciate that you got the ball rolling. I really, truly do. And I want to make sure that you are not penalized for the fact that it did take a minute to get that going. And so, I would just say to the City Manager to be really keeping a close eye in this arena. And I mean, that goes for all the contracts because I know that it was this balancing act of trying to be as efficient as possible, putting our dollars, you know, trying to spread them as much as possible. I know it's going to be a fun balancing act, but I do recognize and personally live through what was experienced within Land Use. So, thank you.

Thank you, Council. Councilor Lindell, did you have anything else?

No, I don't. Thank you very much.

Thank you, Councilor Faulkner.

Okay. Yes, Mayor. Thank you. I thought it would be useful just to introduce again, as I've been trying through many of these budget hearings to do, to take us from the moment of a single budget to more of a trajectory of priorities. And I think everybody would agree that when it comes to Land Use and the team there and the governing body's priorities, housing is and continues to be the number one priority. I know that when I walked into the Mayor's office in 2018, between 2008 and 2018, the city had permitted fewer than 200 new housing units per year. And so we started out in my administration and with many of the people who are still with us from before and have been added since. That's been a single-minded priority to do what we can do to increase the supply and address the price of housing in Santa Fe. And I don't know that it directly relates to the budget that's in front of us, but it's useful to look at a number of the initiatives that have been taken, including the $3 million a year commitment to put that money into the Affordable Housing Trust Fund. We all agreed to use some of the one-time unanticipated GRT dollars, take care of that before we even got into this budget discussion. So that money has been allocated. We championed on the part of everybody on the city's team the increase, the approach to have a 3% excise tax on homes over a million dollars. Unfortunately, that's still stuck in the courts. But I feel that our position on that is strong, and I think should it come out in our direction, I think we'll see an $8 to $10 million a year influx into the Affordable Housing Trust Fund, and of course, that gets matched 3x for every dollar that goes into it. So there again, funding outside this budget will be directly applied to what I think continues to be our number one priority.

I asked our capable team in Land Use for some data, and I just thought I would introduce into the record for the public to know, since 2018, the actual number of housing permits issued, single-family accessory dwelling units, manufactured homes, multi-family, and affordable units, is in excess of 6,000 units over a seven-year period. That taps out at about somewhere north of 850 units per year, which is significantly higher than the fewer than 200 a year that we experienced in the 10 years prior. This is in spite of COVID. This is in spite of all of the other challenges that we've been dealing with at the macro level, increased interest rates, all the things we don't control. At the same time, for this year, just purely in the multi-family arena, permits either have been issued or work in progress for almost 700 more multi-family units right now. And one thing that we, I may have missed it, I apologize for coming in late this morning, the work that the Land Use team has done to have that interactive series of maps on housing units in the pipeline is a real opportunity for everybody to be aware of what the projects are, where they are located, and what their status is. We also know that we've got two very large opportunities for housing and particularly for affordable housing with the bringing on of the Midtown, the pace of Midtown picking up, the RFPs going out. I understand that yesterday the RFP closed for the consulting work to be done on minimizing or limiting or eliminating disruption to adjacent neighborhoods so that we don't displace people, which is a form of actually increasing our housing if we don't lose it that stays affordable. That RFP closed yesterday, and Mr. Hernandez let me know there were some very good applicants for that piece of work, which has been a priority. And also TR content to Phase 3 and affordable housing on Midtown continue to be items we're pressing forward on, which over the next few years could bring online in the neighborhood of 2,500 plus new units of housing. So the Land Use Department's critical variability and importance goes deeply into addressing the housing needs of our community. The fact that over seven years we've been essentially quadrupling the permits issued from the prior 10 years tells me we're on the right path. But we still have more work to be done to expedite and facilitate those permits so that the cost and availability of housing in Santa Fe gets addressed as a continued priority for all of us. Thanks for letting me just put some data into the conversation.

Thank you, Mayor. Any other questions from the committee? Do we have a motion?

Motion to approve.

We have a motion and a second to preliminarily approve this budget. Can we get a roll call, please?

Currently, Madam Chair. Councilor Cassutt?

Yes.

Councilor Lindell?

Yes.

Councilor Faulkner? Councilor Lee Garcia?

Yes.

Chair Romero: Worth. Yes. Motion passes. Thank you. Thank you all for being here. Really appreciate it. A very interesting morning talking about land use. Okay. We are going to break for lunch. We will be back at 1:00, and we have a couple of budgets to do. One of them is the film office. Let me just get to that slide.

Madam Chair, we have tourism, the film office, and arts and culture, right? And we're going to do affordable housing and economic development on Monday. Correct. Affordable housing and economic development will be on Monday. Right. Okay. So, just so folks know that while they are in this department, we are going to do those budgets next week. All right. With that, we will take a break for lunch. Thanks, everyone. Yeah, we do. Okay, let's organize ourselves. Can we go live? Well, actually, is City Manager Scott joining us this afternoon? Should we wait for him?

Madam Chair, I think they're just coming in.

All right. Okay. Can we go live?

Madam Chair, we are live.

Perfect. Thank you. All right. So, it's a little bit after 1:00, 1:05, and we are going to continue on. We are going to hear the Santa Fe Film Office and the Arts and Culture and the Tourism budget. So it looks like we're doing tourism next. Is that correct?

Yes. Yes, Madam Chair.

Okay. So take it away.

So, Madam Chair, members of the Finance Committee, I would like to ask Randy Randall, the Santa Fe Tourism Director, to present on behalf of his division. Randy's reputation precedes him. He brings over 11 years of service to the City of Santa Fe and in total over 45 years of service in the hospitality industry. He actually, not many people know this, he began, well, I don't know if not many people know this, but he began his professional career as an ensign in the U.S. Navy. Thank you for your service. My dad went to the Naval Academy. So that's, wow. We'll talk. Went through OCS.

Well, in the past year, the Tourism Department maintained our number two most desired city destination in the U.S. in both Condé Nast Traveler and Travel and Leisure Readers' Choice Polls. In 2024, they secured more than $23 million in earned media and also successfully hosted 228 meetings and events at our community convention center, resulting in the use of the facility for 295 days of the year. So Randy, take it away.

Thank you, Madam Chair, members of the committee. It's my pleasure to be here at another, yet another budget session. I have a couple of members, key members from the team here with me: Jordan Gunther, our Director of Marketing; David Carr, Director of Sales; and Melanie Moore, Director of Operations. Interesting to note that Jordan's the rookie of the group with only five years experience. David's been with us 11 and Melanie 14, and about eight in this role, I think. 16, 11, I said that. Yeah. Anyway, we've got about 42 members in total on our tourism team, divided between Visit Santa Fe, which is the marketing sales organization that also runs all of our visitor centers, and the other half on our operations team for the convention, community convention center, which operates the building next door. And let me just remind you that all funding for Tourism Santa Fe is from lodgers tax. There's no general fund funding used in our tourism effort.

So if we can do the first slide, maybe the next slide. The primary objectives for us for this next year is continuing our advertising investment of $4 million through, it's actually $4.2 million of our budget is spent in the direct advertising of the city through Vladimir Jones. They're in their second year of a second four-year term contract. So they've been with us now six years. The media objectives is to really focus primarily on our core markets, which are Colorado Springs, D, not in this order, Colorado Springs, Denver, Dallas, Austin, Houston, and Phoenix. And Texas, from a state standpoint, is our largest provider because of the several large municipalities in Texas. So we will do some general marketing to the state of Texas as opposed to specifically into these core markets. Then we also want to continue to grow into some opportunity markets of Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Chicago. San Francisco probably the least of those three if we had to put them in order, just because we've seen more success particularly out of Los Angeles, and we focus the efforts in our marketing to bring people to our website, SantaFe.org, and to any partner websites that we market with of the online travel agency companies.

We leverage the zip codes in these particular markets. Most of our advertising, 80% of it, is digital online interceptive type advertising so that if somebody's searching for a vacation in the Southwest and they say, "Where can, what's good to go to in the Southwest?" we try to interrupt that, intercept that, and put up a banner ad to suggest Santa Fe would be good to consider. Because so much of our advertising is digital, it's unlikely any of you will actually see our advertising. So, I've been asked in the past, "If you spend $4 million, why don't we get to see any of it?" Our advertising effort is very targeted and very focused on the visitor who can come and stay in Santa Fe. It's in contrast to the state advertising, which is very much out of home type awareness advertising. You see them in the airports. I just saw them in the San Francisco airport yesterday. There was no call to action on it. Nothing made me want to come to Santa Fe or New Mexico other than seeing a pretty picture. So they feel there's a need for awareness. We think we're way beyond that. Santa Fe is very well known, and we need to be more focused, a little lower in the funnel in our marketing efforts.

I'm not going to read all of these strategies specifically to you, but we are evolving our advertising as well as our website to include more AI. We don't necessarily want to be on the cutting edge of AI, but we want to be there as it's developing. So, this next year we'll have a chat on our website that will allow someone to communicate with our website the same way you do with ChatGPT so that it would search the web and bring back answers, and we will be able to feed it with a lot of material as well to make it very productive.

Next slide, please. A second objective is to continue our strong public relations emphasis through the Liu Hammond Group. They're in the third year of a four-year contract with us, and this is the third contract we've had with them. So, we've had them as our primary partner in public relations for 11 years now. As was mentioned, during 2024 we generated $23.1 million of earned media value. The return on investment in this section is incredible. I think our total, including personnel, our total spend on public relations is under $300,000, and yet we get this kind of exposure. It will not increase incrementally. If we were to spend $400,000 on the same effort, we'd end up with about the same results. So, we think we have this really at the sweet spot. And through this effort, we continue to encourage media press trips into Santa Fe as well as having our public relations manager do deskside visits in some key, some of our key core cities.

Next slide, please. A third level of our marketing is to deal with the group sales effort. And so we want to continue to meet the meeting planner at strategic meeting planner events. So we'll be attending 17 meeting planner trade shows. And then we do attend four to six travel and adventure consumer shows again in either the core or the opportunity markets where they occur, and that's a one-on-one meeting with consumers. The consumers pay to come into these shows. So, they're interested in travel. They're interested in giveaways. They have a wonderful time. And it's kind of amazing because in our core markets, which would be Dallas, Denver, and Phoenix, where we would attend these shows, we get a lot of, "Oh, we love Santa Fe. We haven't been there in a while. We want to come back." In the markets like Chicago or San Francisco or LA, we get the more of a response of, "I've always wanted to come to Santa Fe," and then we can talk to them about planning a trip. So, we do know that there's a lot of opportunity in those markets.

And this, this part of our Santa Fe hotel travel market, this, the tour, the convention business has been slower to recover from the pandemic. This year we're seeing more of a full recovery. But while the individual travel came back almost immediately, this level of travel has been slow to return both from a desperate desire to spend the money to bring the groups, the associations, and they haven't been as strong, and I think they got used to the virtual meetings, and it's taken them a while to realize that they need to come back to at least, at least having hybrid meetings. Most of the meetings now offer a hybrid opportunity for people to attend from afar as well as attend in person. But we are seeing them come back, which is good, and that hybrid meeting actually opens up our opportunity to take larger meetings that used to require perhaps meeting space for 1,400 people. Now they can get away with 800 people. And so suddenly we've, we've got a little bit of a larger market that we can talk to.

Next slide, please. We want to continue to make improvements to the community convention center. It's, goodness, 18, it's probably 16, 18 years old now. And it doesn't look that way. And that's because we have really been aggressive in making the facility, keeping the facility current, keeping the facility kept up, and ensuring that, that, that we don't let it age as it does age. We don't want it to show any wear and tear. In this next budget, we'll be continuing some replacement door security. We've about got it done this year. A boiler replacement and lighting upgrades. And on the second level, we've got, you may be familiar, we've got an outdoor terrace that is about 50% usable. Our plan is to take the other 50% that had some big planters put in it when it was built, have all those planters removed and have a lot more covered space up there. So, we'll be able to actually handle much larger groups, about 250 people up there in a covered space so that if there's, if we got sunshine in the day or inclement weather, the use would be able to continue. And we think it'll be a lot more usable. We'll also put in a stairway going from the courtyard to the second floor, which currently doesn't exist. You have to come, you have to find your way up there. We're going to make it easy for the people to transition from the courtyard up to the upper level.

Next slide, please. And then the fifth primary objective is to continue to increased focus on lodgers tax collections. You heard during land use that we've got some new software coming in that is being sponsored by lodgers tax. My mission is going to make sure that that software gets used properly since lodgers tax is paying for it. And I am convinced that with that software, we will collect more additional lodgers tax, particularly from short-term rentals, than the cost of that software. So it'll be a positive investment. I mention in here that we've got our, the audits are reinstated. We have a responsibility to audit people who collect and submit lodgers tax, and they, we've been a little bit remiss on those. So those were reinstated this year. And the problem with short-term rentals and lodgers tax collections, first it's really the only major tax that we do collect as a city.

And secondly, the collections are done in finance. The management of short-term rentals are done in land use. I get to spend the benefits along with arts and culture of those funds. So there's been no real ownership. Tourism has the time, and we're going to take ownership and try to improve those collection efforts.

Next slide, please. Measurements of success will be our largest tax collections. We want to continue at the level we're at now, which is about $18.1 million per year. Pre-pandemic, to remind you, we had never exceeded $12 million. So, they're up substantially. Most of that is through increased average rate. It's not through increased occupancy. So there's still room to grow that if we can hold that average rate or not suffer a lot of loss of average rate as the hotels try to increase occupancy. Our website visitation and again, that measure of earned media that we obtained through our public relations efforts. I didn't put on there, but again, maintaining the facility next door and making sure that it is kept in pristine condition is another measurement, in my opinion, of our success.

Next slide, please. The biggest risk to our visitation, it's pretty obvious, the unsettled economy right now. We're not sure if that's going to deter people from coming. The other side of that could be that in fact, people say, "I'm not going to travel internationally this year because of the way things are going. I just want to do something unique right here in the lower 48. Let's go to Santa Fe." And so it could be good, but we don't know yet exactly how that's going to happen. The last time we had a recession, which I put down as number three, the year in 2008, our lodgers tax collections for that year dropped by over 30%. So, and how the tariffs factor into it, I mean, they're kind of a part of this whole economic turbulence that we're in. So I don't need to say more. We have had a robust year for fiscal '25. And if I had to place my bets, I would suggest that we will maintain our level for this next year.

Next slide. I thank you. We thank you. Questions from the committee on my right.

Councilor Lindell: Sure. Mr. Randall, I remember the day that you interviewed. I remember who interviewed me. Actually, Councilor Lindell and Councilor, will you use your mic? I'm sorry, it's not close. Councilor Ives and Ryan Snyder. And I always like the story that Councilor Ives was very involved with Sister Cities and UNESCO, and he wanted to know what you were going to do to bring Europeans to Santa Fe, and you said it takes a very tall ladder to pick that fruit, and I never forgot it, and I know it to be true. So from your presentation, I think that the way this department goes about it so strategically and targeting the markets that we know are good for us, it makes all the sense in the world. It's hard to ask questions or make suggestions for me to this department. I mean, I've been hanging around here a while, and it's year after year after year. We're in the top five of this, we're in the top two of this. And I mean, it's astounding how focused people are on coming to Santa Fe. Now, is that because of the tourism department? I don't know. But I think that you guys pave the path and make it so when people come here, they have, they get the experience that they think they're going to.

Now, as far as the convention center goes, I couldn't begin to guess how many events I've attended in that center. And really and truly, not one time has it been problematic or was there some big snafu with the facility itself? Not once. And Melanie, take a bow over that. That's an amazing, amazing thing. I mean, you walk in there and that place is lickety-split clean. Staff is attentive. They're attentive to the guests that walk in the door. Done a terrific job. I had the opportunity to go to Denver to one of the shows with staff, and David Carr could sell me my own shoes. I mean, I own those. I don't need to buy those again. That guy's good. And you know, even the presentation and the visuals, the marketing that we do, it's terrific. All I can say to this group is keep doing what you've been doing. I know that your job is to put heads in beds, and I think you're doing a terrific job. The economy is something we can't control, and I think you're right to be a little bit gun-shy about how that's going to look in the future. But you know, you create, you create the budget with lodgers tax, and it just keeps getting better and better, really. So my hat's off to the entire crew. I love walking into that convention center. It's really a very, very special space. Thank you.

Thank you, Councilor.

Councilor Falner: Couple questions. First, Andy, you're amazing. You've done such a great job for the city. I've known you for a really long time. I also remember when you got, did your interview. I wasn't there, but I do remember when you came on to the city. Are the numbers higher in tourism because of inflation or the numbers like actually higher?

Madam Chair, Councilor, the revenues are definitely higher. I mean, it's our increase, again, it came mainly through an increase in average rate, which on the rebound from the pandemic, the first year, 2022, the average rate was up by 30%. So that's so far beyond inflation that it was a pent-up demand and a real concern that was actually led by the management of the Rosewood. They decided, they and the Four Seasons, and they didn't get together on rate planning. That's not legal. But they both decided that to recover from the pandemic, they just had to get a higher rate, and they launched a much higher rate, and it worked. Other hotels saw this. They came right along, and the demand was strong enough to allow that kind of rate increase. And then we've been able to hold it or increase it just a little bit since then.

Councilor Kells: Thank you so much, Madam Chair. Thank you, Randy, for being here. And you know, as Councilor Lindell and Councilor Falner have stated, you guys really do incredible work. We know tourism is the bread and butter of Santa Fe. It is always a really interesting question or conversation that I'll have with people of like, just focus on tours so much, like it pays for your parks. I mean, it really, it really does. So we, we need to keep that focus on there, and I think that has been a really important balance of the utilization of lodgers tax. I am very appreciative that actually the short-term rental, I didn't realize that that lodgers tax was funding that, and I was actually going to ask about it today. So, thank you. That's really wonderful. And I know that we've discussed things like different events and different festivals and lodgers tax coming in to help with those, even though they really are serving, you know, we're hoping to grow them to get people here, but they really do also provide a wonderful opportunity for locals.

That said, I am curious about the balance with we bring in these new events, and then there is a cost on the city with parks, with police, with fire. And how we assist those budgets, and is, I'm not sure if that's something that has already been explored of how tourism assists this balance, because I do want us to continue growing it, and yet after looking at those budgets, you know, we are seeing how much those events cost, which I think is always a really good reminder for us of what that looks like at the city. Can you, can you speak to that at all of how either, you know, we're calculating the amount of money that we're getting from these? I know that we've done some pretty cool work with geo-fencing and being able to track that people come to the plaza and then they go to all these different places, or looking at, you know, excess lodgers tax when it comes in above budgeted revenues of how that can potentially assist some of these other departments supporting the things that bring people here to Santa Fe.

Madam Chair, Councilor, fortunately, when people come to Santa Fe, they spend money not only on lodging but in a lot of other ways. Lodging represents about 20% of their, of their spend. So gross receipts tax is collected on all of those other items, those other expenditures. That should be more than sufficient to cover any added costs from events. I am not a supporter of using lodgers tax to fund event costs that should be covered either by the city through its gross receipts tax collections. You can see how much those are up. Part of the reason that those are up is because of this increased tourism. So, I, so yeah, I think the gross receipts is more than sufficient to cover any added costs that the events cause.

And are we doing, I mean, I know that we've talked about this in the past of doing some of these economic impacts on, and I know that we've seen numbers, I know we've seen numbers from Zozobra of Zozobra happened and we made this much money. Are we doing that on some of our newer events like Dia de los Muertos or I'm curious what Pride does for us? Because that, that's a big one that, you know, we get a lot of people in there, right?

Madam Chair, Councilor, we've done them this past year on, let's see, what do we do? Indian Market. We, we, we this past year when we reinstituted the, the economic impact statements, it was really to help measure the recovery of those events and make sure that they were healthy and successful. So Indian Market, Spanish Market, we did Spanish Market, it's had two, second year now with its new management. Important to measure that one. We did the Literary Festival, which was a new event. We did, if we paid for theirs, they do it anyway, but since I was doing them at no cost for other events, it didn't seem fair to let them pay for their own. And the fifth one we did was Wine and Chili. This next year we will try to do a few other ones. We need the cooperation of the event to do a successful economic impact. We haven't been successful, and it's helpful when the event sells tickets. We haven't been successful with doing a real economic impact on Fiestas, for example. Pride, I think, would be very difficult to do a good one on, but we could try to do that. I personally don't think it does a lot to bring visitation into the city, but I think it's a great event for the city. And there are a lot of events that on their own don't necessarily drive traffic, but they enhance a visit once they're here. Someone might not plan to come for a particular event, but because they're here and they hear that there's a jazz festival going on, they go, "Wow, I can attend that now because I love jazz." And so, our big events attract business. Our smaller events make a visit more, more exciting and a more memorable experience, and this is what keeps people coming back and back. I didn't mention, but the last time we did a survey on repeat business, 70 to 75% of the visitors to Santa Fe every year have been here before.

Oh, wow.

Some people visit three, four, five times a year, but, and those are not second homeowners. But so only about 20, 20 to 25% of our traffic coming in every year is new business.

That is interesting. Well, glad to hear people are enjoying their time here. So I'm also curious, you know, we, we've mentioned the economy, and obviously this one is, is a big one for us because of the fact that we are so dependent on what's happening in the rest of the country and the rest of the world, the rest of the region.

As we're talking, now I'm not a professional in this. You guys are, and you speak with professionals, but I'm thinking about some of the challenges that people are going to have with travel and how we potentially take advantage of those. So, if flights get really expensive, do we then target our markets more at people that are within driving distance of us? I know for spring break, we drove to Phoenix, and we chose Phoenix because we could drive there as opposed to San Diego where we'd have to fly. Or the whole, if people can't go international, Santa Fe is not like the rest of the country. We are international within the states. So, how is that kind of maneuvering going to happen as we maybe have to change tactics or not even have to change but see an opportunity to really enhance based on what's going on in the rest of the world?

**Councilor Cassid:** Madam Chair, Councilor Cassid, you can tell our core markets are all drive markets anyway. Our opportunity markets, with the exception of Houston, Houston is a little far for drive, although some do. Our opportunity markets are more the fly market. So, we'd have to look to see whether we would want to heavy up there or if we actually would heavy up in our core markets and just live off of those. 80% of our visitation to Santa Fe comes from the core market, really from the states of Colorado, Texas, Arizona, Oklahoma. That's 80% of our visitation. So, I think there's the opportunity that if people in those states choose not to travel further, that yes, we will be a substitute trip for them because the concern would be if the economy shrinks to a point where the expendable income by a lot of the middle class gets diminished, then they will not have an alternate visit. They will just not travel. That's the danger. That's the danger point. That's what happened in 2028.

**Councilor:** And I was about to say, are you sure? Because we haven't been there yet. Do you know something I don't? Wait a second. When's the next pandemic? No, I'm just kidding. I'm a budget ahead. But I forgot what I was going to say with this. I'm sure my time is on. Oh, so the last question then, I think I had another line of questioning along this, but I just saw in here that there was one more flight that we're hoping to add to the Santa Fe airport. Where do we fly now, and what's the target?

**Councilor Cassid:** Right now, the traffic goes. United goes to Denver and to Houston once a week on and off. Now, it's not on a regular schedule, which makes it a little more difficult. But it's on Saturdays, and that still allows, because of the fact that it used to be when you booked a roundtrip ticket, it was less cost than if you booked the separate legs, and that's not really true anymore. So, we're finding people will use that Houston flight to come or go, and then the opposite side of their trip they'll take out of Albuquerque. So, we're still okay with that. And then we've, American flies to Dallas and Phoenix daily. I think there are four flights to Dallas and one to Phoenix. There are three flights to Denver. We're still very excited about the opportunity. JSX is coming in. They're going to be our new carrier. They're going to fly into Dallas Love for their first trip. But we think, and we're in discussions with them about flying into Southern California, which is the market that we really want to get into, both for the support of all the film activity that we have in Santa Fe, but also so that if you're going to the West Coast or that Southern California market, your only option from Santa Fe isn't with a stop in Phoenix. A lot of people want that direct flight. So, we think JSX will be the airline that will add that flight first, and then the commercial airlines watch JSX very carefully, and JSX we think will prove the market to be a good opportunity, and then we expect one of the airlines might come in. The problem is for American to fly direct to say LAX, they have to fly over their hub of Phoenix, which they don't like to do. That's the hold back on that flight coming back.

**Councilor:** Makes sense. Well, thank you. Again, I really, really do appreciate it. Appreciate all the work that you're doing. I do hope that we get a direct to California because I go there a lot. So, it'd be really nice to fly out of Santa Fe instead of having to drive to Albuquerque. So, keep working on it. Thank you.

**Councilor Garcia:** Thank you, Councilor Garcia. Thank you, Madam Chair. Thank you, Director Randall, for the presentation. Back again, I like to, it's really hard to put a thumb on how, finger down on how much income generating your department is creating for the city. Back to the land use department, how do we identify that? I know it comes back to us through Placer's tax, through GRT, but there are ways to kind of gather that data. I'm sure you follow that quite often when you have a Spanish market, Indian market, whatever income generating festival or thing that's going on. How you're tracking that obviously, and I'm sure that data is presented somewhere. I don't know if you can elaborate on that.

**Director Randall:** Madam Chair, Councilor Garcia, I think the GRT is the best measure of the impact of visitation in Santa Fe. And the last time I saw a calculation, it was between 30 and 35% of the city's economy is supported through tourism. That may even cut it a little bit short. Events are one reason people come here because the authenticity of what Santa Fe is is the primary reason that people come here. But if you think about all the expenditure that the residents make during events, for example, those events wouldn't happen if it wasn't for visitation, but they're available to the residents, and anywhere between 20 and 40% of the attendance at any of these events is by residents. So that part of the event and tourism type activities is also supported financially by residents. So that would even move it up beyond the 30 to 35% into probably up above 40 to 50%, we could suggest, of Santa Fe's economy. And clearly, because of all of the excitement that goes on in Santa Fe, is one of the main reasons that most residents like living here. So I think we add more than just financial benefit to the economy.

**Councilor Garcia:** Thank you. And I'm glad you said that, and I'm glad you also alluded earlier to some of the events are generating a lot of income back into our community. Others may not do so much, but they do contribute to the ambiance. They contribute to how beautiful this city really is, its historical value, its culture, and I think that's many times people come here and they're just in awe with how rich it is here. And I think that's something not for us to lose sight of. I think that we, as we support these smaller events, whether it's Fiesta or Pride, what's the other one for Halloween? Yes, and again, I think when we are having these events, and not only how we include our local community in that, I think it's, coming from a Southside representative of the Dia de los Muertos, we have a huge immigrant community that partakes in that. And so I think those are all very important events to continue to support. So not really too many. I think maybe I'll have a question around our focus on where we're advertising, and I think you mentioned our big ones are Dallas, Denver, Phoenix. Is that correct?

**Director Randall:** Yes, Dallas, Denver, Phoenix, Austin, Houston, and Colorado Springs. So, Colorado Springs is, I think, the seventh most important city market for us, and people forget about Colorado Springs, but it's a very growing community, and it's an hour closer from Denver. So, yeah.

**Councilor Garcia:** I guess what I would, what I, the direction I'd take on that is, as you are expanding into looking into other areas, and I'm sure your marketing team is probably on this, but are we utilizing data like through geo-fencing, as Councilor Cassid said? I know one of the big reports I see when Zozobra is happening is they're collecting all this data. I know a lot of it is, you can gather at minimal cost or no cost, but there's some that you purchase and things of that nature. I guess you would see where that investment would go, and that targets where we need to be maybe putting a little more advertising. I don't know if that's something you all have looked into.

**Director Randall:** Yes, Madam Chair, Councilor Garcia, we subscribe to two data sources. One's called Datafy, and a second is called Placer AI. And between the two of those, we get a lot of, we can use them to geo-fence. The amazing part is you don't even have to geo-fence in advance. I can after the fact geo-fence something, and it will give me a good indication. It's not exact, but a good indication of what the attendance was at any particular event or what the traffic was through that. You mentioned on the support of the smaller events. It's interesting that through our OTAB grants, the Occupancy Tax Advisory Board has a fund of $150,000 of grant money that they can issue for marketing for events, and they go to the smaller events, or they go to startup events, or they go to a larger event who's expanding what they're doing. But none of that, none of those dollars can go to an existing event that's just doing the same thing year after year. There's also a limit of three years worth of funding that we'll do for any event so that we make sure that those dollars get spread around, and our biggest desire is to use them for new startup type events like Dia de los Muertos. We were, I think funding was provided $30,000 to them last year, and the literary festival is in this year, will be in its third year of funding. So that the whole idea is to help a new event get through that unstable period of the first couple of years, and then by the fourth year, we feel they should either be standalone or they should find funding elsewhere. But we need to move our funding then to another new event.

**Councilor Garcia:** Thank you, Director Randall. Okay, good information for me. I thank you for the report, for being here, and no further questions.

**Councilor:** Thank you, Councilor. I just have a couple questions. So on page 40, "secured more than $23 million in earned media coverage for calendar year 2024, the first year in total over the $20 million mark since 2018." I'm not a tourism professional. Tell, and I know a little bit about what it means to be earned, to earn media coverage. Can you talk a little bit about what exactly that is and how you measure it?

**Director Randall:** Thank you, Madam Chair. Earned media is really the value of third-party commentary, editorial, or articles that is said about a destination. And we work, we have a director, a public relations manager on Jordan's team, and she works directly with our agency to talk to various publications about writing stories about Santa Fe. There are collection services that actually document when those stories come out, and they put the value on it. So, it's a little artificial because if it's a full-page story about Santa Fe, then a full-page value of the rack rate of advertising in whatever publication or digital source that is, is calculated as the earned media value of that page. Very rarely do we anymore pay full price for those. So, it probably is inflated by 20% if we were to buy it, but it still would be a $20 million expenditure for that kind of exposure.

Now, there are many times we get exposure that's credited to that, that if we had to use our own dollars, we might not necessarily buy because the return on that exposure isn't great enough to invest our dollars. But because we're investing time in it, it all works to our benefit. Okay, thank you.

I know how to geofence a shopping cart, but I don't know how to geofence a visitor. How does that work?

Madame Chair, you actually, if you will, draw a line around Fort Marcy Park or the Railyard, and we have, and that fence that you put around it, it then tracks everything that crosses through that space or into that space. And it uses cell phones to monitor that traffic. Then there's an equation that takes what traffic comes into it by the cell phones that are registered with that data source. They then can extrapolate that to a total number. And that's where I'm saying there's a little bit of magic and guessing in it.

We have some areas that we keep geofenced all the time: Railyard Plaza, Fort Marcy Park, and Cerrillos Road, for example. So this data will allow us, for example, we can see where the visitor on Cerrillos Road, what they do in Santa Fe, and we can see if that's any different than what the visitor that stays downtown does. We can see when visitors come in from our outlying hotels, and we can see what our traffic in the whole city is.

We, for example, this last year, we had just over three million visitors to Santa Fe. 2.2 million of those were overnight visitors in the city. The other 800,000 to a million were day trippers. But those day trippers could also be people staying in Buffalo Thunder or staying at Four Seasons or the hotels that are outside of the geofence that's put on the actual boundary of the city. So we can compare a lot of statistics. We get county data and we get city data, and we can compare those two.

Okay, interesting. Airlines apparently are cutting back because people aren't traveling. Is that concerning you?

Madam Chair, I'm worried. I know we're trying to add flights, but I have a feeling we're going to be first on the chopping block if this continues.

Madam Chair, the loads coming into Santa Fe have all been above 90%. So with those loads, I'm hopeful that, and the equipment that they use for flights to Santa Fe aren't necessarily the equipment that they need either. So I think those two factors will work in our favor. I hope we'll be able to keep our flights.

Okay, those are interesting metrics to be looking at. I was just looking at our small size. Yeah. Okay, I think the literary festival has come up several times. I think that's just an amazing new event in Santa Fe. Any sense of its economic impact specifically?

Madam Chair, it will actually be measured this year. So we don't have that data, but as soon as we do get that, I'd be very happy to share it with you.

Yeah, I think that's coming up. I think it's largely sold out, but really a very innovative, new, exciting event. And it appears that after the results of last year, its second year, and looking at this year, it is financially successful. It will be able to continue. It's being able to expand, and they've been able to hire a director, which is part of the success of organizations, is to build a good, sustainable team to operate it on an annual basis. And so it's, I hope, going to be here to stay.

Yeah, I just have to, when I was a long time ago, I was president of Literacy Volunteers of Santa Fe, a nonprofit here in Santa Fe, and we tried a fundraising plan to do an evening with an author, one author. You don't know how hard we worked to do that, and it wasn't largely successful. And so I am just blown away by the capacity of the people involved to bring many authors and to have Santa Fe turn out the way it does. So just really kudos to them. That's an exciting event. I think that's all I have. Other questions from the committee? Okay. Do we have a motion?

Move to, I'm sorry. We can move to approve, but we're going to take the mayor. Is there a second? All right. And over to you, Mayor.

Thank you. I was struck when Councilor Garcia was asking a few questions about something that's troubled me for a while. And it is, and maybe it's inevitable, Randy, but I'd be interested in your thoughts about a different kind of marketing. It's always troubled me that there's an implicit and explicit emotional division in the city. The idea that somehow tourists get first-class service and residents are an afterthought, and somehow it's not all in the service of the same Santa Fe purpose.

I know that you and I have had this conversation repeatedly. One of the reasons that we're able to do so many things for the residents of our city as a government is because of the outstanding reputation we hold among people who don't live here, who want to come and participate in an event or just be a visitor. And yet somehow the division persists, almost like in cities where there's a major university and you hear about the town and gown division. We've got our own sort of internal friction over who gets first dibs on city services.

I wonder if we're thinking about marketing and messaging, which your team is extraordinarily good at. Is there any marketing or messaging to be done to try to talk to our own team, local residents, about how we're all in this together? And the tourists who come here, they do get exceptionally great responses and receptions from all of our residents. I've always been blown away by talking to visitors to Santa Fe who say, "Oh, I walked into a shop and I spent an hour. I didn't buy anything, but I got a free education on Indian jewelry or whatever." I mean, the warmth and the responsiveness, or people walking down the street staring at a map they can't decipher, and our team, our team being our residents, invariably say, "Can I help you? You look like you might be lost." And there's a warmth and a generosity of spirit in the day-to-day existence. And yet there persists in the abstract almost a them versus us division. And I wonder, maybe that's just inevitable.

I know there are cities where there's actually a formal celebration that's staged every year when the last tourist leaves town, and we get our city back. And some people think Fiestas used to be that. But is there any messaging or even marketing to ourselves that would be worth doing to point out that it's not them versus us? It's us benefiting enormously from the warmth, the hospitality, what Councilor Garcia was talking about, the history, the culture, the uniqueness, all the things that you pitch to the outside world is true for all of us here. And yet we somehow feel divided, to borrow from Abraham Lincoln, a house divided against itself.

Thank you, Mayor. You know, we've never really felt the need to do that. I sometimes worry that if we tell people that this really isn't a problem, it may be a problem they hadn't thought of, and we're talking about a problem that maybe we shouldn't. Albuquerque One, if you think about it, is really based on the fact that Albuquerque had a lot of internal problems and didn't look very good from inside or outside. And they tried to do the Albuquerque One to pull themselves together. And I think it's been a pretty successful campaign, whether we need that kind of, clearly we don't want to rebrand, but I think it's something that we could look at doing. We've never spent dollars internally. In fact, with OTAB, we tell people they can't, and that they have to figure out other ways to attract the local once they're here or the visitor once they're here. And by the way, most of our events don't market to people in their hometown. They really market to people either through our website or to people once they're here to come to their show. I mean, the Lens tells me that a lot of their shows fill up at the last minute as people discovering what they can do. But I think it's something we could certainly look at, and we probably could find room in our budget to do that.

Yeah, I also, I'm not sure it's a spending thing. It may simply be a, I know you do a lot of outreach through the hospitality industry, through members of associations. I just think it's something to add to our talking points.

But I think it could be radio. I think we could, if we had the right message, being again careful that we're not trying to highlight a problem that somebody may not be aware of, that we don't want to magnify anything. And so we don't want to keep telling ourselves that we have a, we're divided, because then people decide they need to get on one side or the other, as opposed to if we're not divided, there's no side to get on. And that's the way I prefer to look at it. But it is true, and I think we just want to make sure that all of our residents realize that they're so welcome to come at all of these events. Literary Festival does a wonderful job. They give locals a better price than people out of town, and I have convinced them, I think, that locals should be Santa Fe County and City, not Albuquerque anymore and the rest of the state. They can pay a little bit higher. And so, to the extent we can encourage events to offer locals a better pricing and a better access to tickets or better access to whatever, I think we can do it that way as well. But we could look to see if there's a little campaign that we could do through Q-Save and, and yeah, I just, it's something that when we have petitions from the floor, comes up from time to time, and I write those notes down to myself, and it makes me shake my head a little bit in kind of a sad way, like this should not be, shouldn't, we need to be better toward each other and toward the economics, the economic realities that bring people here, the cultural realities. And as I said, in town and gown cities, they almost just accept that it's a fact of life. But we're smaller and more integrated than that. And I would just think we all need to talk to all of our own folks about this is, this is good for Santa Fe, and particularly when it goes away, you notice it.

Yes, and Mayor, you know, there's no way, and we need to remind ourselves that there's no way we'd have the selection from 400, 400 or more restaurants in Santa Fe with a population of 92,000 people. It just wouldn't exist. And those are easy numbers to bring forward and talk about.

Yeah, not the highest priority, but I was just triggered by something that Councilor Garcia mentioned. And I think it's worth looking at not just the great success that you've enjoyed, but and created, but also how do we make sure everybody else appreciates it. Thank you.

Thank you, Madam Chair. Thank you. We are going to move on. If we could get a roll call, please.

Certainly. I think we have a motion and a second already. I have a motion from Councilor Lindell and a second from Councilor Cass.

Okay. Councilor Cassid? Councilor Lindell? Yes. Councilor Falner? Yes. Councilor Lee Garcia? Yes. Chair Maroworth? Yes. Motion passes.

Thank you. All right. We're going to move on. Thank you for being here. Thank you for all the work. Really appreciate it. We're going to move on to the film office, I believe.

Madame Chair and members of the Finance Committee, I would like to ask Jennifer Labar Tapia, the Santa Fe Film Commissioner, to present on behalf of her division.

As you know, Jennifer is our Santa Fe Film Commissioner and has served the Santa Fe Film Office, which is a joint city and county office, for nearly nine years. In total though, Jennifer brings over 22 and a half years of public service to the city and county of Santa Fe. She's well-regarded across the Southwest and is an effective leader who has sherpa'd many people working at all levels in the film industry. We are so excited to welcome her to the Community Development Department.

This year, the Santa Fe Film Office maintained its industry domination. Jennifer is going to tell you all about it. She has some great data to share with you. They also hired a film coordinator and launched a new interactive online locations directory, which is really exciting. And one thing I'm really proud of the Santa Fe Film Office for is they prioritize trainings. They prioritize partnering with local institutions like the Santa Fe Community College, Stagecoach Foundation, and even the NYU Tisch Film School and IAIA to create training opportunities for New Mexicans at all levels of the film industry. So, Jennifer, take it away.

Am I on now? Okay. Can you hear me now? All right. So, thank you all for having me today. So, as the director had pointed out, the Santa Fe Film Office is a joint city-county office. It's one of the nice things that the city and the county can work on collaboratively. It was established in 2016 through an MOA that is still active today. Basically, what that means is the Santa Fe Film Office is responsible for recruiting film and television into our region. We're responsible for community outreach. We're responsible for training. And both the city and the county, through this MOA, equally contribute to the budget of this office. And when you look at the handful of line items there for my budget, which is just a few, basically what you're looking at is the full budget. But know that the county is putting in half of that. Next slide.

So, as the director had alluded to, Santa Fe is still at the top of best places to live and work as a filmmaker, excuse me, in all of North America. That's Canada, United States, and Mexico. And this is a ranking that's done every year by MovieMaker magazine. It's one of the trades. And they look at a handful of—it's a huge rubric that needs to be filled out every year, including site visits. We bring the editor out to see Santa Fe for themselves, and they look at all of our resources. They look at our crew. They look at how strong our incentives are. And Santa Fe now took the top ranking in the small city category for the third year in a row. So we've had it now in 2025, of course, in 2024, and then 2023. And Albuquerque actually hit the top ranking for the large city category. So their large city category, they're in with Toronto and Atlanta and a lot of those big markets. And so to have both Albuquerque and Santa Fe hitting that number one mark, it just shows how with this film corridor, they call it, that we partner really—we partner well together, and we combine our resources to make us a top filming destination. Next slide, please.

So, with what a film office does, just to give you some clarity why there's a film office and how it's different from the state film office: there's the state film office that oversees all of our incentives. The state of New Mexico was one of the first states to have a comprehensive incentive program. The state film office is responsible for keeping those incentives healthy, keeping them strong, keeping our elected officials at the state level educated on why we need incentives and what they do. And then they also are responsible for promoting the state as a desired filming destination. So when you have these regional film offices, like you have Santa Fe, Albuquerque, and Las Cruces, we are dedicated film offices. We have enough film production to sustain a full-time film office. Smaller municipalities, Española, Las Vegas, Alamogordo, those areas typically—those film liaisons is what they are called—is basically somebody who sits in the economic development department or maybe somebody that sits in their tourism department, and they are the designated film liaison for that area. But we are considered part of the big three: Santa Fe, Albuquerque, and Las Cruces.

So not only do we promote our individual regions as a desired filming location, but we work really closely with our local vendors, businesses that want to be involved in the film industry, those that are dedicated to working in the film industry. We keep those relationships strong. We also help foster bringing in any new vendors that might want to come into our region. We also work really closely with our crew. Permitting is done through our office, so all the day-to-day permitting. We're more the boots-on-the-ground type office. So, when there's permitting going on, we help with the day-to-day, whether it be city or county. This office had designed our own permitting system because we are unique, being city and county. So when a production comes in and they need to pull a film permit, it's all done online, and no matter where they are, city or county, as long as they're in the region, they fill out this permit. Everything gets uploaded. They put everything in that we need to see. And on the back end, on our end, we can decipher who needs to see it, whether it be the city fire marshal or the county fire marshal. Does it need to be sheriff's or does it need to be city PD? So, we can control that on the back end. Everybody sees it, whether it be city, county, or both, and then we can get those permits approved, and we can get those done usually pretty quickly.

A lot of times with film production, it was a little bit of a learning curve with some of the staff, both city and county, where they wanted 30 days out to pull a film permit. A lot of times productions don't even know 30 days out that they're even going to be wanting to be on the plaza, for example. And so staff has been exceptional with that learning curve and educating them that we're not trying to be entitled. We're not trying to say, "Hey, we're film, this needs to happen." It's just the nature of the business. And so city and county staff have been very accommodating with our tight turnarounds and getting permits approved.

We also are responsible for production scouts, introducing locations to maybe areas that the film production isn't familiar with. And we are working on a location directory. It hasn't quite launched yet, but we're in the process of it. We have a photographer on contract that's helping with photographing the city and the county and all of our resources that we have. And we already are working with a contractor called Reel Scout. Reel Scout is a proven directory that a lot of other film offices use. And so we already have that secured, working with Reel Scout and tailoring it to the Santa Fe region and getting those pictures uploaded and everything live. Our goal is to have that done within the next few months, and it's something we've been working on for almost a year. So it's been a big project.

And then also just the community outreach, education, and partnerships. We work really closely with the high schools. Just so you're aware, at Santa Fe High and at Capital High School, we do have, and at NMSA, we do have a dual credit film classes that—so you take these classes now at the high school level, you'll have a dual credit that will take you to the Santa Fe Community College, and it will take you to the film program there. So we partner with the community college, we partner with the high schools to see the kids getting interested in film and then taking that career up to the community college and getting their degree in film. And we also work closely with IAIA, and we're working at the higher institution level with Tisch, the NYU film school, which we'll get into that in just a minute as well.

And we also are with our community outreach about how you can get involved into the film industry. That's a big part of this office as well. A lot of times people say, "Well, how do I even get into the industry?" And I was just out in Gallup yesterday, speaking on a panel in McKinley County and to Gallup about film, and they had multiple high schools there from around the region. And one of the kids came up and said, "Well," you know, I said, "Well, what's your interest in film?" He's like, "Well, I really don't have one. This was just a field trip, and it got me out of school for the day." And so, I said, "Well, what are your interests?" And he said, "Well, I want to get into construction." And so, it's like, "Okay, well, set construction is very much a desired career in film production." And individuals at any age don't realize all the trades that this industry touches. So, it touches electricians and construction workers and plumbers even and artists, you know, with doing all the set decoration. If you love to shop, you could be a set decorator and get out there and shop for everything. And wardrobe and makeup and hair and, you know, all these different trades that come into making a film production come to life. So, sometimes people just don't think about that. And also this industry, it's not just reaching out to the youth, but it's reaching out to our veterans, maybe individuals that are just freshly out of the military and they're looking for a new career. Also, retirees are a huge draw because these individuals had a profession in their professional life. Maybe they were accountants in their professional life, but why not go on to be a production accountant, which we are in a huge need for? And so taking that profession that you had for the past 20 plus years, you can now bring that into production. So it's not just for the youth, it's for all ages that would like to get into this industry. Next slide, please.

So with the new budget, what we're hoping to do is continue to expand the office. Since 2019, I have been on my own. So having a film coordinator now that we have just hired about a month ago has been life-changing for me, so to speak. In fact, he's out on a production scout right now so I could be here with you all. And so having expanding the office to help with all these initiatives is a huge game-changer for us. We also are working with our northern communities. I look at Santa Fe as the gateway to the north for the film industry. So we do work really closely with San Miguel County and Las Vegas. We work closely with Rio Arriba County up at Ghost Ranch and Española and even working with Taos. We're having some pretty active conversations with Taos right now because they don't have an official film office, and they really need one. So just educating them on why they need a film office, what that looks like, how can we partner, work together. Same with Los Alamos. They just lost their film liaison about a year ago to retirement, and she was amazing. But how can we assist with Los Alamos and getting those destinations? Because with working with these northern communities, Santa Fe is still going to have a benefit with these individuals filming out in Vegas or filming up at Ghost Ranch. They're going to stay here. They're going to eat here. They'll probably be based here. They take what they call a second unit out to these other locations because it is expensive for to do big location moves.

So we're still going to have that benefit by promoting our northern communities as well. We also work with the eight northern PBLO. So that's one of the goals of this office as well: how can we have an even stronger relationship with the eight northern PBLO? Because, as you know, those governments change either once a year or every other year. With those changes, it depends on if they want to have filming in their jurisdiction or if they don't want to have filming in those jurisdictions. It's important to know the relationships that they have with filming and how they feel about it. So, with expanding the office, maybe we bring a part-time liaison that is native and can have those relationships with the native PBLO and talk about filming and educating those governments as well.

So, one of the things we're looking at, the locations directory, we talked about community outreach. One of the programs I'd like to launch this year is a film-friendly business program. What that means is basically for any of the businesses that are currently here—our florists, our dry cleaners, our hardware stores, our thrift stores—all these vendors or businesses that are here that can benefit from a film production being here, how can we make you a film-friendly business? What that would mean is those business owners, we would put on a half-day or a full-day workshop, maybe on a Saturday, bring in some individuals from the film industry, and explain how this industry works. Like I talked about, how things are on a quick turnaround and how you need to be on call 24/7 and all these things that are special to the film industry. Having and educating our businesses and even our residents that maybe want to get into the industry, and then they would be deemed a film-friendly industry. They'd have a cool decal maybe on their window or their door saying that they're a Santa Fe film-friendly business. But just educating our existing businesses and our residents on how they can really get involved more with the film industry. So that will take an initiative that I'd like to work with economic development and then also with my office and both city and county. That would be a city-county initiative.

We do need to increase our marketing and brand exposure. That's one of our goals as well. We do a pretty good job advertising in the trades, but that's like Variety and Hollywood Reporter and Deadline. But maybe even doing some advertising in some of the other airports about filming in the Santa Fe region and how can we expand our marketing. So, it's something we're looking at for this next year.

Then the partnerships that I alluded to earlier, the NYU Tisch partnership has been an amazing opportunity for us. Because what that was is this last summer, it's been something we've been working on for a couple years, and it came to fruition last summer. What that is, is NYU Film School is one of the most prestigious film schools in the world. When their board said, "We need to get out of New York. We need to expand our brand and we need to expand what we can provide, and let's look at the Southwest," Santa Fe was on the short list. So we were working with the dean of Tisch and also the dean of the Director's Graduate Program and had them out here a few times, did some field trips, introduced them to IAIA and the community college, and we created an amazing opportunity for indigenous students to go through this director's program. So, it was a whole semester class that you would have taken at Tisch for a director's program, and it was done in three weeks, and it was done by a very generous donor through the Tisch program. It was about $90,000 for them to do this because it brought out their top professors. They needed to stay here. It was free to the fellows that were selected, and the only criteria is that they were indigenous. We had 10 from New Mexico, one from Oklahoma, and one from Arizona. It was such a success this last summer that the same donor agreed to do it again this next summer. If things continue the way we hope it will, there's even discussions that maybe there might even be a brick-and-mortar NYU Tisch campus over at the community college or over at IAIA. So there's great possibilities that can come from this. But just having them here and having those relationships has been amazing for us as a film community and then also for those that get to go through this program. And of course, the community college and IAIA are always huge supporters of our office and vice versa to them.

The International Film Festival, which just continues to grow every year, I think they're in their 16th year this year. It's one of our homegrown film festivals that we love to support. One of the things we will be doing that's going to be our inaugural year through this office is we're going to, they've expanded the days of the film festival. So what we could do is called a fam tour. So we're going to have a fam tour for the filmmakers and we're going to have a fam tour for the fans. So they're going to be two different fam tours. Our office is going to sponsor it and do this tour. What we will be doing is we will be taking the filmmakers that are here that aren't familiar with our resources, take them out to some of our western sets, take them to some of our stages, introduce them to all the resources that we have here. So hopefully they'll bring their next project to Santa Fe. Then we want to do something for the fans, which would be maybe they're not filmmakers, but it will give them an opportunity to get out to some soundstages and to go out to Western Steps because all of those are private property. You can't just go onto these properties. So, it'll be something fun for our locals and for anyone else that's visiting that's just a film fan.

Then, the Stagecoach Foundation, that's George R.R. Martin's foundation that's here in Santa Fe. We work closely on training programs and screenwriter workshops and how to get into the industry with background talent and actors and those kinds of things. Then the Sundance Labs, who are actually here right now. The Sundance Labs does have an indigenous lab that they do every year. This is their 11th year here in Santa Fe. So we have them here now as well.

Our travel budget, it stays pretty much the same, and really what we do for traveling is it is a lot of meetings out in Southern California because that's, of course, where all a lot of the studios are and the heads of production and the ones that make these decisions, and it's just to have those face-to-face meetings as opposed to a Zoom. So, going out and having those meetings with our studios is instrumental in keeping relevant and keeping them reminded of why they need to come to Santa Fe. And then also, I sit on a lot of panels throughout the state. So, a lot of in-state travel as well, promoting the film industry here and how to get into it.

Then film tourism. We can get into that. That's next slide, please. Oh, actually, I'm sorry, got ahead of myself. We've got the impacts of film. And I'll just go through this quickly. So, the impacts of film. So, since, and these are numbers since 2016. So, that's since this office was created is when we took these numbers, but approximately $4.6 billion has come into the New Mexico economy because of film. And that's about $1.6 billion that's come into just the Santa Fe economy. So, that's about $200 million a year. Next slide. Yeah, you could do the whole thing. That would be great. Thank you.

So the industry supports thousands of jobs statewide directly and indirectly, which we touched on a little bit with our hardware stores, thrift stores. For example, "Dark Winds" is going on right now, season 4 up at Camel Rock Studios. It's a period series. It's early 1970s, so you need those olive green or those avocado green appliances. Where better to get them than from some of our thrift stores? You need the gold and orange striped pants. They might be in one of our thrift stores as well. So, it's all the different vendors that support this industry, and they're all here in Santa Fe.

Then, the film and television production, and it's a major driver of hospitality industries, accounting for thousands of hotel rooms, all the restaurants that benefit from film being here. So I work really closely with Randy Shop with Tourism. We do have a handful of cooking shows that come through here, travel shows that come through, and so we'll work really closely with tourism, make sure they get the best bang for their buck, so to speak, in terms of who to introduce them to to do some of these travel shows that come through. And then also, it's a major lessor of commercial properties. So this is important for mill space. It's important for production offices. It's important for special effects to house the special effects. A lot of times productions, they're just in and out. They might be here for a few weeks. They might be here for a few months. So they're just looking for some of our commercial properties that are available to rent, and they come in, set up shop. And again, that's a whole other avenue, too. They're doing furniture rental. They're needing to get all their paper supplies and, you know, for printers and those kinds of things. So all that benefits by even just setting up a production office.

And then we have the construction materials, and we joke a little bit about yoga instructors and dog sitters. Those are individuals too. I have people that come up to me and say, "Oh, my friend, she's a yoga instructor, and she's been doing 5:30, you know, yoga in a star wagon with one of the talent, you know, for the past four months." And that's somebody who's having private yoga with maybe talent that has to have their morning yoga. I can't relate to that, but there are many that do enjoy their morning yoga. And so having those private instructors, a lot of talent and crew like to bring their pups on set, and so they need a dog sitter. So it's just, the point of this is just the possibilities are endless of how you could be involved in this industry. And then also just the media exposure that it does promote by having the brand recognition by productions being here in Santa Fe.

And now I can get into film tourism. So film tourism is something we've struggled with a little bit over the years because film tourism with Santa Fe is a lot of our locations are done on a controlled set. They're done on a stage. They're done on a western set. And I still get calls from "Longmire," if you're all familiar with the show "Longmire." And I still get calls, you know, "Where was the sheriff's office?" It's like, "Well, the exterior is sitting on the plaza out in Las Vegas, but the interior was on a stage over at Garson Studios, which is no longer there, and couldn't go see it anyway." So when we look at the film tourism for Santa Fe, it's a little bit of a struggle because we just don't have those principal locations that you can identify, like the "Breaking Bad" where you can identify the car wash and you can identify the Crossroads Motel and you can identify those and you can go see them and take your picture in front of them. We don't really have that here. So, but what we do promote is our surrounding communities that do have those principal locations.

So, if you want to go to Walt's cabin, it's up in the Valles Caldera. If they want to go to Walt's exterior sheriff's office, go over to the Plaza in Las Vegas. They're staying here, but they'll be day trips maybe somewhere else. Same with Oppenheimer, even though a very small amount was actually filmed in Los Alamos. A lot of it was in Santa Fe, and a lot of it was up at Ghost Ranch when they built Los Alamos pre-World War II. It was all done up actually up at Ghost Ranch, and that set still does exist, and it is open for tours if nothing else is filming up there. So, we can tell people where they can go see some of these iconic locations, but we'll still have the benefit here.

I bring up "Holiday in Santa Fe" as well, and I know we don't do ham tosses on the Plaza. I know that. I knew that that was going to be an issue with some of our local residents when I went out on set that day and saw the foiled ham sitting on the Plaza. But it's one of those things. It's a Lifetime Christmas movie. Everyone has to just remember it's a Lifetime Christmas movie. It was a cute movie. But whenever Lifetime shows this at Christmas time and in July, because they always do their Christmas in the summertime also, if you follow the Lifetime social media and they see "Holiday in Santa Fe," it was photographed beautifully. They had beautiful drone shots of the golden hour flying over the Cathedral and the Plaza, and so many people were like, "Oh my gosh, Santa Fe is beautiful. I need to get out there." We had a huge influx from what I could read just from social media about how many people now got that brand exposure of Santa Fe because of "Holiday in Santa Fe."

And one of the things we did do for the community is when we did get permission from Lifetime to show this to the community before it actually aired, and we arranged it with the Violet Crown. It was free for the public to go over. Actually, it was a dollar. I'm sorry. We had to charge a dollar, but it was a dollar for the public to go. We ran it all day long, and I just want to show you a quick little blip from Mario Lopez. So, if you can play that video. This was played before each of the showings of "Holiday in Santa Fe." Basically, what he's saying is that it was just a 15-second blurb, but basically what he was saying is that he really enjoyed being out in Santa Fe. He enjoyed the food. He enjoyed the people. He really wants to come back and bring another project.

But this is kind of to the point we were talking about with our residents and how they feel about some of these industries. One of the comments I get a lot is, "Is everybody so nice here?" And that's not just the vendors that we're working with. It's when we're going out to restaurants, when I'm showing them around, and people don't even know who we are, so they're not "on," so to speak. They're just being their authentic selves. And I hear that all the time from productions that they love being in Santa Fe. There's something about the air here, and everybody is just so nice and so kind, and that's always something really nice to hear.

And then with Mario Lopez here for two months, he's also the host of Access Hollywood, and so that was also a brand exposure that we got because he'd always open it up saying, "I'm on set in Santa Fe, New Mexico." And he loves his social media. So for his millions of followers, he's constantly doing a live Instagram post or something from Santa Fe. So that's all exposure that we get from having productions here and wanting to brag about being here.

Just a few weeks ago on Jimmy Kimmel, the main actress of "Ransom Canyon," which is right now on Netflix and has been hitting the number one and two spot back and forth. But she was talking about, Jimmy Kimmel said, "Oh, I understand you were in Albuquerque for 'Ransom Canyon.'" She goes, "Yeah, we were doing a lot in Albuquerque, but I was living in Santa Fe." And that's kind of a lot what happens too with talent, and they want to be in Santa Fe. They might be based in Albuquerque, not to diss on Albuquerque, but they like being in Santa Fe, and they did do a lot of filming up in Santa Fe as well. But that's just again where you just get the nice comments from those that have worked in our region, and when they go about saying it, it is huge for us. And we are, it's very much a word-of-mouth industry, this industry. And so if they have a bad experience here, they will tell their counterparts at other studios. They could be at a dinner party and say, "Hey, I know you got another project. Don't go to Santa Fe, they were terrible," if they had a bad experience. But luckily, knock on something, we haven't had that, or that feedback hasn't come back to me. We do get a lot of repeat customers. It's a producer that was here with an HBO series. They had a great experience, and now they're working on maybe an Amazon, and they've come back because they had such a great experience. And that's what we'd love to hear.

Next slide. Next slide is really just saying that's it. Okay. The presentation was sent to you, so if you do want to see the Mario Lopez shout-out, you can watch that. Okay. Thank you.

I think this is your first appearance in front of the Finance Committee on the city side, even though you've been working for the city and county for a long time. So, very thorough, very interesting, to kind of go into what your office does, and certainly film is a big economic development driver in this area, and so very interesting to get this briefing and a snapshot of the kinds of work you're doing. So, thank you. Thank you for being here.

Thank you, Madam Councilor Lindell.

Thank you, Chair. Thank you for being here. Lest we forget that film "Ideal Home" that Mayor Javier Gonzalez was in. I always like watching that. Wow, that was some presentation. Thank you very much. One of the things that you said was on the agenda for 2026 is a location directory. That's really interesting. How is that being put together because there's only two of you?

Madam Chair, Councilor Lindell. So, a locations directory is one of those, it just gives a great screenshot of all the different looks that Santa Fe has to offer. Right now, the state, and I've had to lean on the state film office for their industry directory. It's good, but it doesn't give as much of the locations that I would really like to highlight for our region. So, we did bring on a photographer who's in the industry last year, and he has been, he started this last fall. So, we're getting all the seasons represented because I didn't want him just to show what everything looks like in the wintertime because we all know how it looks so different from winter to summer. So, it is something that's been a year that it's going to take to really get all these images uploaded. But what we've, of course, there's all of our resources. There's our western sets, and then there's our stages that will be in there. But then also our streets, you know, we really look at, why don't we have more car commercials here? Why don't we have some of these other commercials that we think could really benefit being in Santa Fe? And so having some of those iconic, you know, when you're going down State Road 41 down to Stanley, that's just one of those great open roads that's that long road. It'd be a great car commercial or a great something. And so to get to capture what kinds of roads we have, the landscapes we have. So we're hitting the alpines to the high desert and everything in between because we do double as a lot of different locations. We double pretty much as everything but a big city, which is fine. We don't want to double as a big city. You can go get some tight shots down in Albuquerque and double as a big city. But we can double as Middle East, as Montana, Wyoming, Texas. We double as a lot of different regions throughout the world actually. And so to capture all that in this locations directory has been the task of this photographer who does come from the industry. So he understands what it is that we're looking for for an industry directory.

And then also it's going to have another feature of this through Real Scout. You can also, as a resident of the area, you can upload your own photos of maybe your ranch. If you've got a ranch, you've got a pasture, you have an old barn sitting on your property, you've got something that could be the middle of nowhere. A lot of times we need a gas station or a cafe in the middle of nowhere, and you want, we can use your land to make that happen. So, it will be also an opportunity for residents to upload what they want to share. And then people can find them through that as well. Find out about that. It's going to be a big marketing push that we'll do through this office. So, once we launch it, we'll make sure that we do market it, and we'll get in touch with our reporters. Of course, we'll have it on social media, and we will let everybody know that this is an opportunity for you to register whatever it is you want to register, even vintage cars, anything that you think could be interesting for a film production, you'll be able to upload that onto the locations directory.

That's perfect. I think that's a wonderful, wonderful project and also getting people involved. That's all I have, Chair. Thank you very much.

Thank you, Councilor Faulkner. So, I have a question. Las Cruces got a sizable funding from the state for their film. So, what did that have an impact on us at all?

Madam Chair, Councilor Faulkner, with Las Cruces, because they are so far away from us, they're not considered the kind of the powerhouse corridor with Albuquerque and Santa Fe. And so I know the state does, they do a good job with trying to share this industry with the whole state and whatever is going to make sense for different regions of the state. So we just had this conversation in Gallup yesterday with some of their elected officials as well, you know, about what's going to work, and you know, you've got to figure out what's going to work for your region. And so they do have strong support from some of their senators that are very involved with film down in the Las Cruces area. They work really closely with Texas being right close in proximity, and so they look at how can they help that part of the state with film production. So we're holding our own in kind of northern New Mexico and with Albuquerque. So I think it's just the state's way to say, "We see you, Las Cruces," and they're trying really hard to bring up their film industry down there because they do have their struggles because it is, they don't have the crew base like we do. They don't have the resources like we do. So, it's how they can help contribute to that part of the state.

And has the state supported the Santa Fe Film Office?

Madam Chair, Councilor Faulkner, yes, they have.

Okay. Thank you, Councilor Cassutt.

Thank you, Madam Chair. Thank you so much, Jennifer, for being here. I feel really fortunate because I have seen you a few times through Quality of Life, but also Economic Development. And I, if you can maybe send the committee the sizzle reel, that was always fun to watch, and it kind of gave a snapshot of all these different projects that have been done in the area. So very glad to have you at the city. It's exciting to now be working with you in closer proximity. One question.

You mentioned that we can't double as a big city, but aren't we doing the New York City backlot at the community college? Correct? Yes.

Madame Chair, Councilor Cassett, yes. We are working on a backlot city project right now with the community college. We've already broken ground on it. What that means is we don't have a new, it's going to be a New York City backlot. So, not with the tall, it's like a brownstone type New York City backlot. And so we've already secured funding from the county through some of their ARPA funds, and they've committed a million dollars toward it. And then the city also, when we went through our one-time funding, has put a quarter million dollars toward it as well. So we're getting, we're chipping away at it. It's about a $4 million price tag. So we're already going to get, it's going to get us through phase one and hopefully phase two.

And it's an exciting project because not only are we going to have the only New York City backlot set available in the state—Netflix does have one on the Netflix stages, but that's only really for Netflix projects and not everybody gets to use that. So with us, and how we're unique also, is we're open to everybody. No matter if you're Nickelodeon, if you're a cooking show, if you're Disney, whoever you are, you can use any of our stages, any of our resources. It's not subject to just one studio. And so this will be the same with this New York City backlot that we'll be building.

And as we're building it, it's the trades over at the community college, their construction team will be building it with union carpenters. So we've also worked with IATSE 480, which is our local crew union. So they'll be training the trades over at the community college on how to do set construction and build it all to code and everything that it needs to be. And then also this backlot will be used for student films. So any of our students in the film program will be able to use this backlot as one of their resources when they're doing their student films. And then also it will be available for any studio to come in and rent. So it will be generating revenue as well.

Wonderful. Great. Glad to hear. And I always love the educational partnerships that I know you promote and your office really helps to cultivate. So thank you for that. We have been talking about the uncertain economy, and I honestly have no idea what that impact looks like in the film industry and how that either potentially hurts or benefits film in Santa Fe and New Mexico at large. So, do you have any thoughts on that and what are we potentially doing to harden ourselves against that?

Sure. So, Madame Chair, Councilor Cassett, with the economy, it's affecting everything just as much as film, and this industry does have its peaks and valleys, and right now we are in a little bit of a contraction. So it happened really when the strikes happened a couple years ago. We had a screen actor strike and we also had a SAG-AFTRA strike. So we had two big strikes going on a year ago last summer, almost two years ago. And when that happened, a lot of the studios, they still needed to produce their content, but you couldn't do it in the United States with these negotiations going on. So they went out of the country, and countries like Hungary and the UK has always been pretty much involved in film, and so is Canada, but New Zealand and all these different countries just literally rolled out the red carpet. And then they learned pretty quickly what it took to have a successful production in these countries. They needed crew, they needed resources, and they did a really good job building that up.

So we got through all those union negotiations, production came back, not as strong as we had hoped, but it did come back. And then there was another threat of IATSE having a strike this past summer. Didn't happen, which was great. But studios were a little gun-shy to greenlight anything until those negotiations happened. They happened, but then they still realized it's cheaper to film outside of the country right now. And it's just, they learned that during the first round of strikes, and it still is true today that it's just cheaper to be filming outside of the country with labor costs and healthcare and all of that. But when I meet with these studio heads, they very much say, "Trust me, our heads of department, they want to be closer to home. This isn't the ideal for us as a studio. We want to keep the business in the United States. We want to do this." But they have really tight budgets as well. And studios are merging, and so they're going through their cuts, and people think that just because it's Hollywood coming in, they have all kinds of money. They really don't. And that's part of what we're going to be educating our businesses about too, is that just because you see a production coming in doesn't mean, please don't gouge them on a day of using your business for like $10,000 a day if normally you'd bring in maybe $2,000 a day, because then you get that reputation of price gouging.

Anyway, I don't want to derail, but it's just one of those things that we always have to look at and be mindful of that everybody's on super tight budgets, and so the studios are going to go where it makes most sense for the studios. The one thing about New Mexico is that we have proven incentives. We were one of the first states to have this incentive program in 2002. It's been proven. We do keep our promises. And when governments show that there's a little uncertainty in their incentives, it just happened in Louisiana where their legislators were ready to cut their incentive program, and the industry came out in force at the capital and saved it. But now there's that, everyone knows there's a little bit of uncertainty in Louisiana that those incentives might not be around. Whereas we're opposite of that. We're proven to be strong. We're successful. We have support from the governor and from all of our legislators with our film incentive program, and that's where I can use all of your help as well when we go through our session every year and film incentives, if it comes up, let's talk with our lobbyist, and we can all talk one-on-one, and I can talk to you more about what the film incentives mean to us and why it works and maybe the pros and cons of them, because that's where it's important to keep those incentives strong. So between the county commissioners and our city councilors to help keep that strong at a local level is huge.

Well, wonderful. Well, thank you again so much for your work. Really glad to have you with the city, and thank you for being here today.

Thank you, Madam Chair. Councilor Lee Garcia. Thank you, Madam Chair. Interesting topic. Around 2006, I think, there was a film called "No Country for Old Men" that was here in the area, and brought a bunch of his picture cars to me to work on because they needed some stuff done on them. And I ended up becoming very well acquainted with the picture car coordinator. His name was Bill Lee. And, you know, there was not a lot of people in the area that would attempt to work on their cars or had the means to do tire work or other mechanics that they were looking for. And so the film industry brings a lot of business, economic business to the community. Stuff that they don't do or didn't do in that time. Maybe they have, they do have now. But I remember being involved with the scene where the tire gets blown out because they shoot the tire. Well, they couldn't just keep on replacing tires. So they, they welded a little PVC pipe to the back of the wheel and they put a little discharge on there. So when they shot, it went down. So it was kind of cool to be involved with all of that stuff, you know.

Fast forward, we've done a lot of things for "Longmire." I, there, there, the movie "Paul" was something that was kind of cool. Not too many people know about that movie, but there were three motorhomes involved with that that they were driving around in. One that they cut in half for filming. The other two they were driving around. Well, they cut the wrong one in half because one of the, one of the vehicles was a Ford chassis and the other one was a Chevy chassis. And so Bill comes to me and he says, "Hey, what can we do about this? Because the, they look different, the wheels." I said, "Okay, well, let's take a look. I think we can get some Dually simulators that we can put on there." So, I'm giving away the secret whoever's watching that movie that they're, you know, they had two Fords and one Chevy. Well, they, they messed up and cut the, the wrong one in half.

And so anyway, I just, just to say that because it is very interesting. And it is economic development to, to our community. I don't know if many people know who Clyde the Buffalo is. Do you know who Clyde the Buffalo is? He's our most famous movie star. Just, just down at the Mortenson Ranch. And so, you know, he's a customer of mine and we, we, we shoot the, you know what, all the time and just talking about stuff. And, and, and it's a big, big, it's a big business. It's such a huge business that brings a lot of money back into our communities.

I do like where you alluded to, there's a lot of scouts out there looking for places. And one time I was, was contacted to utilize one of our places out in Las Vegas. They were going to take the whole facility, convert it into a diner, a Big Boy diner. And then it was "Bios." It never got off the, off, I don't think "Bios" was ever filmed, but it was a Tom Hanks movie. And so, you know, following all of these, these different things, and that's what makes it really unique around here. And I think that's what makes it so attractive. The tax incentives, incentives that they get, which was done way back in the 2000s. But I, I think that the opportunity for a lot of our youth to be involved with this, to get into this industry, to even just start working on sets, whether they're filming or building sets or they start and not. So, I think it is a great opportunity for us as a city of Santa Fe, and thank you. I mean, I, I do see that this is your first budget. And, and so I think, what would be our, our, you know, there is, I think Councilor Lindell alluded to, there's, there's only two in you, two, two of you in, in the office. What does growing the office look like?

So, Madame Chair, Councilor Garcia, it would, it would look like bringing on a third, hopefully full-time employee that would be more of an admin assistant that could assist with the volume of calls that come through and helping with, we call them lookbooks. When we, when we get a script and we will put together different looks that could fit the script, they can assist with those kinds of things, things that take a lot of time to put together. And so having someone to help with that, and then also looking at maybe some contractual positions, and that would be for the example of working with the eight northern pueblos and having somebody that's maybe part-time that their sole responsibility is keeping that relationship with the eight northern pueblos, educating them on film, working closely with this office. We would monitor all that, but look at how we can really engage our native pueblos in northern New Mexico into film, and that could be something we could spearhead because that doesn't exist right now. And so having something like that, also helping out with our northern communities.

There are talks that maybe some of these communities that don't have designated film offices could pitch into the MOA that we currently have, and we can assist with educating them on film permitting and with their locations as well. So there are different possibilities that we're looking at. They're all needed, so it's just a matter of executing them and having the dollars to do it. Okay, thank you.

I think that is important. I think you mentioned there's a lot of travel expense. You said you go to California and stuff like that. Would that be your other operating expenses? I'm just assuming. Yes.

Madam Chair, Councilor Garcia: Yes, so it's trips. Mainly, there's one big trip a year. It's called the Association of Film Commissioners International. It's for all the film commissioners. Myself, along with other film commissioners around the world, we all get together in LA once a year. It's not a huge expense. It's maybe 1,200 bucks to go, so it's not huge, but it's those kinds of things that we stay relevant in those kinds of organizations. It's the networking, especially the LA conference, because a lot of the heads of productions do go to those. They're right there in their backyard, so it's our chance to get that face-to-face time. And then it's pretty inexpensive to do these trips just to California anyway, so it's not a huge part of the budget, but it's a little bit with the travel.

Okay, I don't have too many more questions. I think it is just intriguing. I think many people will eventually come here. I turned on Ransom Canyon for the first time, and I saw the facade of the Las Vegas Plaza, and I'm like, "Wow, that's cool." And my wife was like, "Do you think they filmed it inside there?" I said, "No, they probably had a set stage somewhere else for interior, but it was something that was cool to see." And then you're continuing to watch, "Oh, that's over here." And so, again, having been fortunate to work with a few people in the industry, automotively speaking, that was pretty neat, and they'll continue to come to us. Obviously, the contribution back to the local economy is there because they all have stake bed trucks, and they're looking for welders. They're looking for people who are, like you said, electricians, whether they're either paid directly from the movies or they're contracted out. So that's coming back to the community, and I think that's pretty big for our community.

With that, no further questions, Madam Chair.

Thank you, Councilor. Unfortunately, we're going to have to leave it here. We've got one more budget to do, and there's another meeting coming in at 4:00 that Councilor Cassett and I have to continue on our little marathon here. So we're going to have to leave it, but I really appreciate you being here. I really appreciate the work that you're doing and the contributions that you're making to the city, to the county, to the region, to the state. It's, as I've said, a very important industry, and very interesting to hear some information about it. So thank you. Appreciate it.

Can I get a motion to approve?

Second.

I have a motion and a second. I got a tie. Who wants it?

I'll take the second.

Okay, and we don't have anybody on Zoom. Oh, we still have to do a roll call. All right, so just to confirm on the motion, it was Councilor Cassett, and then with the second, Councilor Faulkner. No, Lindell and Falconer.

I made the motion. Lindell seconded.

Okay, I don't know. Just pick somebody. Honestly, I don't really care.

Okay, I have Councilor Faulkner with the motion and Councilor Lindell with the second. Councilor Cassid?

Yes.

Councilor Lindell? Councilor Faulkner?

Yes.

Councilor Lee Garcia?

Yes.

Mayor Worth?

Yes.

Motion passes.

Okay, we do, as I said, have one more budget. I guess we could push this to tomorrow. I feel badly. Chelsea, are you available tomorrow? Okay, wait, I'm getting. Oh, actually, we can't do that because we've already noticed it. All right, so sorry. Getting some. All right, so we're going to move forward. We are just going to grind through it. I'll be swift with my inter.

Madam Chair and members of the Finance Committee, hold on just a second. There's one option. We have not yet noticed the meeting for Monday, so we could do an agenda to the amendment and reschedule till Monday.

We're just going to power through. All right, thank you.

Right. Madam Chair and Finance Committee, I would like to ask Chelsea Johnson, Arts and Culture Director, to present on behalf of her division. Chelsea has been in her role for nearly two years, and for nearly 30 years, she's honed her craft as an accomplished and published author of fiction, non-fiction, and screenplays. She's also a journalist and has published work in the New York Times, L Out, and NPR's Selected Shorts, among others. And if that wasn't enough, Chelsea is an accomplished professor and has dedicated over 15 years of her career to teaching at the higher education level. I'm going to pass it to Chelsea.

Thank you. Is this on? Okay, I will keep it concise for you. All right, Arts and Culture Department. So, all right, you can see here, we tried to include a lot of photos that are specifically from events of the last year. So, our mission statement: We provide leadership by and for the city to support arts and cultural affairs. You can read all of these bullet points. I don't think I need to repeat them for you. I guess what I would just like to emphasize is that our role within community development is to really focus on arts and culture for Santa Fe. Santa Fe's whole identity, as well as our economy, is largely around arts and culture. It's what unites us as a community. It defines who we are, both our heritage, as well as our future and our present. And it's what we share with the world and what drives so much of our tourism as well. So, in the Arts and Culture Department, we really try to sustain, support, and bring together our artists and our arts organizations so that we can ensure that Santa Fe has a strong artistic and cultural future, as well as our storied past. So, all right, next slide, please.

Okay, some of our major accomplishments. This is just a snapshot. As you've heard probably many times, this is the 28th year of our UNESCO Creative City status. We're very proud of that, and we are really using this year to relaunch that designation and its prestige as a community-building initiative and as a way to move forward with a strong tourism brand as well around heritage arts, crafts, and folk art. Not just the past, which again is famous, but also the innovation and the present and future artists that are working in these traditions. The community gallery is popping. We hosted many art exhibitions. We hosted tons of local artists. We had thousands of visitors, and we're really using that space as a community gathering and event space, as well as an exhibition space. We completed a long-needed inventory of Midtown film and music equipment. We are in the process of distributing film to schools, as well as city agencies. And we already got all of the music gear out to the high schools and public schools, which was great. And we continue to fund many, many nonprofit arts organizations and sponsor ever more events, which you see reflected in the budget. We have raised our sponsorship line considerably to reflect how much work we're doing in that realm. All right, next slide, please.

So you'll see in our budget that we continue to increase our cultural investment funding program for arts nonprofits. Those are in our advertising line, which I know seems a little counterintuitive, but those are marketing and promotion grants that we distribute to everyone from tiny theater companies to the Santa Fe Opera to the Georgia O'Keeffe. We plan to also build in more connections and resource sharing among organizations this year to strengthen that arts economy, especially in the pressures that many of them are feeling in the current political climate. We've also got a much higher sponsorship line, as I mentioned, supporting ever more creative and culturally relevant arts programming across the city. Significantly, we are hiring a sixth staff member, which we're very excited about, to streamline our operations and enhance what we're able to do, and that is what you see reflected in that apparent budget decrease. So I'll just touch on that briefly. Now, when we were crafting the budget, we were operating on a flat budget model. So in order to fund a sixth position, we were drawing funds from the grants and services line and the other consulting line. We did not know whether we would have approval for that position or what the exact number would be at the time we submitted the budget, so we were conservative. We underestimated a little bit, and that's where that gap appears. We wanted to ensure that our top priority of having a sixth staff member was approved. So, and we will draw on our lodgers tax on extra revenue to cover those gaps in our budget. And then finally, we want to rejuvenate and expand our art in public places, more murals, more public art, airport art, etc., with strong community engagement and impact. So, finally, I'll just say this is a set of Polaroids from our Free Our Flowers exhibition, which was funded by our Artist the Solution program. This is just a tiny glimpse of a whole wall of snapshots of people who came to that opening, and it's such a wonderful picture of what we do and what arts and culture is in Santa Fe and just the range of people we serve. Our art is the solution, a phrase that we love to turn to. I think it is the solution to many of the problems that we face and some of the cultural pressures we're under. Our theme this year is cultural futures. And I'll just end on that note that we really do care about not just our present culture and our past culture, but the future of what Santa Fe is. And our department is working tirelessly to advance, sustain, support, and envision what that can be. Thank you.

Thank you. Thank you for being here, and thank you for the work. Councilor Lee Garcia, do you want to start off?

Thank you, Director Johnson, for the quick presentation. Obviously, it's already been a long day, but your department is valuable, and I think it still merits the attention to listen and to definitely, at least, partake in the process of what you are doing, your mission, and your vision. I think you just finished off by saying not just our past culture, our present culture, but what's our future culture? And what does Santa Fe look like 100 years from now with all of the different diversity that has come through this region for many, many years? I think it's all very, very important. Not forget from where you came from, who you are, and where you're going to be in the future. And I think that that is very important. I do commend you on the work that you're doing in regards to beautifying our city through art. I know a few years back when I started on the council, there was a lot of, and there still is, I believe, maybe you can speak a little bit to our initiatives in placing art in public places.

especially when there's new development that's coming in. I think that's still something that we're charged with doing, and if you can elaborate on that a little.

**Councilor Garcia:** Yes, thank you, Councilor Garcia and Madam Chair. So, one area that immediately comes to mind is at Aspect Studios in the Midtown Housing Development, and Philip Jez has reached out to us about placing public art there. We may be moving some of the pieces that are already at Midtown into that area, or we may do a commission for some art to be integrated into that housing development. But either way, we are on board and ensuring that that is a significant piece of that. The Sidler Road roundabout project that I believe was set aside a couple of years ago is something that's also on our list for next year: innovative ways to find a way of beautifying that. Creative placemaking in general is something that matters very much to us. Deputy Director Charlotte Russell is also a certified planner, so it's also bringing that expertise to the work that we're doing in Midtown and elsewhere. The airport is another place where our art and public places is going to be growing this year. We have six sculpture pads that we are tasked with finding art to put on. So, we're really looking forward to doing that as well.

**Councilor Garcia:** Okay. Thank you. Again, when I first came on the council, there were quite a few pieces that were put up at the public library. I think there were some over at the MRC. They were really neat things to see the local artists contributing to what we have in Santa Fe and thinking outside the box again. So, not too many more questions. I think that your presentation was short but very informative, and I think I'll yield the floor for now, Madam Chair.

**Chair:** Thank you, Councilor. Councilor Cassid.

**Councilor Cassid:** Thank you, Madam Chair, and thank you for being here with us. It's been a long day, so I definitely appreciate you waiting around. So, my favorite thing to always ask about is the district funding, which we seem to have failed to get ourselves together to expend out, but at least we do have a plan. And so hopefully we could start, you know, July 1. Is the district funding still in the budget this year?

**Councilor Garcia:** Yes, we will find ways to make sure the district funding happens.

**Councilor Cassid:** Okay. Yes. As you know, I get really excited about that just to bring some things to the district, but I am really eager to explore looking at pavement art and that kind of intersection between the safety and placemaking and beautification of the neighborhood. So, we will get that together, and hopefully in this fiscal year, we could actually do some of that planning and then be ready to spend out in July. And then you had mentioned that this was also a partnership you're working on with the MO looking for some other grants, which I know is not unique. There are other grants that you're continuing to look at. Can you give us any more insights on what some of those may be?

**Councilor Garcia:** Yes, thank you. Thank you, Councilor, Madam Chair. The grant that you're referring to is the Bloomberg Asphalt Art Initiative that several city agencies had been interested in going for earlier this year and did not end up applying for, but it is something that we will pursue in next year's funding cycle and also looking at other options like that. We can also draw, I think, on our capital improvement project funds and find other ways, your district council funds, to find a... This, I think, also dovetails with Councilor Garcia's question about neighborhood and public beautification. This is a great way for councilors to use their district funds. And we have, we're talking too about doing utility box painting, more mural work. There's a mural grant proposal that one group wants to apply for for a year-long project that we're working with them on. So, lots of possibilities for that.

**Councilor Cassid:** Wonderful. Good. Glad to hear. So, UNESCO, that's very exciting, and we know we're wanting to do a lot with that. I'm not as familiar with the relationship between UNESCO funding, the federal government. Are we going to see some uncertainty there, potentially some funds being pulled, and what does that look like for the programming and the work that you had planned?

**Councilor Garcia:** Yeah. Councilor Casset, Madam Chair, UNESCO, the United States, I believe, is still currently a member of UNESCO. It's quite likely that we will withdraw on a federal level, as often happens. We withdraw, we rejoin, we withdraw, we rejoin, depending on the political winds. No funding currently comes to us from the government for that. We're solely funding that within the department with community partners. We're doing a lot of creative collaboration with other crafts and heritage arts organizations.

**Councilor Cassid:** Wonderful. Workers in town to make things happen. Okay. Well, good. Glad to hear that. That's nice.

**Councilor Garcia:** And we will be seeking sponsorship also for future programming.

**Councilor Cassid:** Great. The community gallery, what are the plans for that this year?

**Councilor Garcia:** We have a really exciting list of exhibitions. We've reserved some spaces for the Artist the Solution programming. Let me see. Coming up in July, we have Erica Lord, who is a really emerging, up-and-coming indigenous artist doing an exhibition called "Codes We Carry: Beads as DNA." That's going to be really exciting. She won a huge, very competitive national Creative Capital grant last year to do this work, and we were excited to continue to support that. We have another up-and-coming indigenous artist, Dell Kerman, whose work will be there in August. We are sending out a call shortly for an LGBTQ show of Santa Fe and Northern New Mexico artists to go in in September. We'll do a long UNESCO show through October and November highlighting local heritage artists. And for next year, there will be a few open calls. There's a Halloween-themed show around death and art, which I think is going to be really great. A skateboard and snowboard art show. I can't remember all of the details, but I'd be happy to share the rest with you as well.

**Councilor Cassid:** Yeah, I think getting the schedule would be wonderful so that we know and can join as we are able. So, I don't think I have any other questions. Thank you again so much for being here. Really appreciate it, and thank you for your work.

**Chair:** Councilor Falner.

**Councilor Falner:** You guys for being here? I may have missed this when I had to step out. Do you work with the, I'm assuming you work with the schools?

**Councilor Garcia:** No. Yeah, not we... Madam Chair, Councilor Falmore, we do not work directly with the schools, but we fund the Artworks program that works with the schools with Partners in Education that sends our teachers into schools. And of course, we collaborated with them closely on distributing pianos, musical equipment, and audio gear.

**Councilor Falner:** That's good because a lot of the programs that fall under arts are getting removed from the schools, and so I've always, I find the arts can be very therapeutic, especially with people who have PTSD, and a lot of our teenagers face things, and so I was just wondering about that. Thank you. That's it.

**Councilor Garcia:** Thank you for your question, and I think it does highlight an issue, which is that arts and culture is often one of the first areas that people seek to cut when they're trying to save money or to wield authoritarian power. Arts and culture is either seen as expendable or very dangerous, right? Or as a threat to power. And so we are very sensitive to the way the current political climate and the current economic climate are going to affect the organizations that we work with. Even as we are funded by the lodgers tax, and so far we have a strong reserve account and continued steady funding thanks in part to our association with tourism, but we're very aware of the way it's affecting groups and creators.

**Councilor Falner:** Yeah, we certainly saw that during the pandemic. That was very painful. You weren't here, but I'm sure you were somewhere in the art world, so you felt it in some way.

**Chair:** Councilor Lindel.

**Councilor Lindel:** Thank you, Chair. I'll make it quick. So, when we do art in public places, do we have, can we have a contract with the artist? Correct. We have a time frame on that.

**Councilor Garcia:** Yes, Councilor.

**Councilor Lindel:** That's good. Yeah, it's caused us a lot of problems in the past, and I think that having that, having clarity on that makes our life easier in the future. There's some pieces in town that I love driving by and seeing them, and there's some that I'm like, "Oh man, when is that going away?" That's life. I mean, that's how it goes. Someone else loves it. I don't. But I just, I never want to be in the situation that we found ourselves in numerous times in the last number of years, that we have clarity with artists and clarity of ownership and clarity on the future of pieces. So, thank you for getting that taken care of because it caused a lot of people a lot of heartache.

**Councilor Garcia:** Yes. Yes. Councilor Lindell, Madam Chair, we are particularly looking at mural programs and kind of mural timeline planning and expectations based on what the city of Albuquerque has done. They have a really well-developed documentation and process and policies and procedures around murals, which we are following. And we are also putting a lot of extra effort now into going around and doing some deferred maintenance on our public art so that the pieces that are out there are well cared for and look good.

**Councilor Lindel:** Thank you very much. That's all I have to...

**Chair:** Thank you, Councilor. Do I have anything? So, what are we doing differently with UNESCO than we've been doing? It's in your goals. I know we've kind of done this with UNESCO.

**Councilor Garcia:** Yes. Madam Chair, thank you. The designation has been, we've had the designation for 20 years, as you know, and I think that it's... Yes, that's exactly what I think it's been in the past. It's a really prestigious honor. It's a special designation, and we're the only creative city in New Mexico. But there are only nine creative cities in the U.S. There are also three UNESCO heritage sites in New Mexico: Chaco Canyon, Carlsbad Caverns, and Taos Pueblo. So we really think it's worth highlighting and elevating. It's a very useful umbrella and a globally recognizable brand that can help really elevate us at a local level. So we are, we're engaging in some really specific programming. And we had the big kickoff party that featured so many artists and performers and local foodways in February. As you know, we're looking ahead to the fall where we're working with several other creative cities to design a week-long program here in town along with several institutional partners. And even just in the coming month, in May and June, we're doing a series of "Get to Know Your Creative City" free community gatherings and workshops, many of them at Make Santa Fe and the Southside Library. So, we're local artisans in tin work or clay or textiles, whatever it might be. We'll do free demonstrations or workshops, and we want people to come together and share in that work and tell their own stories. And this kind of again, uniting people through the sort of storytelling of culture and heritage around art. So, we have many things planned for this year, but we're also looking ahead to how to build on it for the future. So, it's not just something that flares up and then vanishes periodically, including Director Levar Tapio was talking about that film-friendly business, you know, kind of designation in store windows, and we were looking at a UNESCO, you know, creative city kind of heritage arts trail and map, including that kind of signage that could be in local galleries, shops, institutions, et cetera.

Just to create a very citywide network around that. Great.

And the art in public places, I think I've talked about this before, but the utility boxes, I do remember that was something we did for a while and then I think that fell off probably because of COVID. And how do you pick? Utility boxes are one thing, but murals are totally something else. And also we've seen some, how do you, what's the longevity of a mural and how do you work on, I don't know, either preserving it forever or kind of setting the expectation that it's something that's going to evolve and change over time? Can you talk a little bit about those two things? I think those are things that have concerned me, I guess. Yeah.

Thank you, Madam Chair. We are looking again, we've been in really interesting conversations with DCA, the City of Albuquerque, and other statewide arts agencies to compare practices and set the best path forward based on what other cities have experienced, on what Santa Fe has experienced. And a lot depends on whether it's a private wall or a public wall, right? But part of it is definitely setting a very clear timeline for five years, for example. The city or the artist agrees to maintain this, after which point you lay out a series of potential scenarios. But we think as long as there are very clear, fair, transparent policies, expectations, and procedures from the start, that we will avoid some of the issues and conflicts that can come up over murals and create something that's just really enjoyed and cared for for the natural lifespan of the piece.

And in terms of picking places, yeah, for picking sites, that's again something that we're going to do a deeper dive on, I think, shortly to establish what will work best. When it comes to private walls, there's a lot more flexibility. As far as public space, we want to be really mindful that there are many groups and many artists who are interested in doing this work. So, we will be doing open calls, making sure it's well publicized and that there's a fair selection process and jury process for it. Yeah. And that we're putting them in places that people want them. I think that's the other rub that I've seen over time that is tricky. So, okay.

Interesting. You might, just coming to mind, you might also, I don't know if you've had any conversations with Carol Branch in the work that she's doing. They did do a big mural, which I think was helpful in terms of some of the graffiti that they were seeing in the area where it was painted, and seems like you guys could have some synergies and that would be mutually beneficial. So, definitely. Thank you.

All right. Thank you for being here. Thank you for your patience as we move through the agenda. Really appreciate it. Do we have a motion on this to approve?

Motion from Councilor Faulkner. Second from Councilor Cassutt. If we could get a roll call, please.

Certainly, Madam Chair. Councilor Cassutt.

Yes.

Councilor Lindell. Councilor Faulkner.

Yes.

Councilor Lee Garcia.

Yes.

Chair Romero Wirth.

Yes.

Motion passes.

Okay. Thank you. Thank you for being here. Tomorrow we start at 10:00, correct? And we, I think, are hearing two budgets, general. So, maybe we'll only take the morning if wishing made it so. Yeah.

Hopefully. Yeah, that's the goal, Madam Chair. We have MRA and general government tomorrow morning beginning at 10:00 a.m. And I'd love it if we can get through those and take the afternoon off. That would be a great goal, everybody. So, all right. Thanks. Appreciate it.