[Music]
good afternoon everybody welcome to our
work session it's monday june 13th um
it's 1 pm cassandra gandala mayor pro
tem i am will be presiding over the
meeting
if you would would you please stand so
we can recite the pledge but i'd also
like to have a moment of silence for
those victims at evalde and one special
little one little girl being buried
today
counselor abeta will you help me with
the pledge
i pledge allegiance to the flag of the
united states of america and to the
republic for which it stands one nation
under god indivisible with liberty and
justice for all
thank you councillor beta
next is our pets of the week jennifer
martinez
good afternoon mayor pro 10 and council
i am jennifer martinez with the cds
communications office
and today i will start to tell you about
our cat of the week
this sweet girl has had all of her
babies adopted out now she would like to
find a place of her own to call home
lisa has been living with a foster
family and they have been great at
getting her used to having a home she's
still a little shy but if a forever
family is willing to give her a try she
only asks for a little extra
understanding to get used to a new place
and then we have chujo this 10 pounder
is very friendly and sweet but children
make him a little bit nervous he's
hoping for an adult only family now
while he is nervous around kids he does
want a potential adult family to know
that he will give them so much love he
loves to give kisses and loves to do
zoomies around the floor and if you're
not familiar zoomies are little bursts
of energy when they like to run and jump
and bounce real quick you can contact
the ascmv if you're interested in
adopting either of these two that number
to call is three eight two zero zero one
eight and if you have time this saturday
you can visit petsmart between 11am and
2pm for their adoption event that's 2200
east lowman avenue thank you mayor pro
jennifer so sorry with all the chaos up
here i'm having technical difficulties
up here but beautiful animals please
try and go and check them out there's a
huge population there at our animal
services center and we have a lot of
beautiful adoptable animals thank you
for your service a lot of love to give
we do yes
jobs of the week dr bayatas welcome hi
mayor putin hi members of the council
for today's jobs of the week we are
going to have a veterinary assistant
this is by the city of las cruces the
salary range goes from 12 1276 to 1914
an hour and this position will be
closing on the 24th of june of 2022.
there's also a position available with
as a caregiver with home instead senior
care and this position is paying between
11 50 an hour to 12 dollars an hour and
this position will be closing on the 8th
of july of 2022 there's also positions
available for head cook and site
supervisor and this is with adelante
development center incorporated this
position will be paying 14 an hour
depending on the experience and it will
be closing on the 17th of july of 2022
we also have 10 positions available with
direct care workers and this is an open
door llc paying between 12 to 15 dollars
an hour depending on the experience
closing on the 7th of july of 2022
additionally there's a position as a
journeyman electrician this is with
southwest electric incorporated paying
between 16 to 25 depending on the
experience and closing on the 2nd of
july of 2022. additionally there's going
to be a hospitality employer connection
meeting and this is going to be on
tuesday june the 14th from 9 to 2 and
there's also going to be a medical um
employer connection this is going to be
on thursday june the 23rd from 9am to
2pm both events are going to be at the
workforce connections office and 226
south almeida boulevard as always for a
full list of jobs internships and
volunteer opportunities we invite you to
visit employeem.com and also
governmentjobs.com for slash career
sports las cruces and as always inviting
the public to go to the new mexico
workforce connections information this
is at the phone number is four six two
five zero and the location is 226 south
alameda boulevard here in our downtown
las cruces thank you mayor patem
thank you so much dr payadis um
christine do we have mayor on the line
yet
i'm on the line good thank you mayor um
and we need to
[Music]
vote on that christine please take the
role to allow
mayor to be on
by phone move to a proof
sorry you need a motion huh i'm sorry
second okay motion made by councillor
abetta second by councilor flores
christine please call the roll
this is on the motion to allow the mayor
to participate telephonically counselor
beta yes councillor graham yes counselor
ben como yes cancer quran yes cancer
flooded yes
mayor pro tem yes and the mayor
yeah
thank you christine
all right um
our first agenda item is the go bond
2022 update
um that's work session number
22-028 and we have mr ikani tamoteo
and if i could ask the council to
hold your questions to the end we have
some very big agenda items and i think
it it would go
much smoother if we just allow
presentation and then we can ask
questions as as
after that thank you
greetings mayor pro tem gandra and city
council kanita mo pia assistant city
manager and i am simply introducing the
arc team john and andy who are here they
led the community engagement
opportunities and so this is them
recapping what happened and we'll have q
and a staff we worked with them closely
we've reviewed this powerpoint and we'll
be wrapping up at the end so john please
welcome john
welcome
uh to you as well mayor pro tem and
counselors my name is john petranas i'm
the president of architectural research
consultants as
akane said andy aguilar is with me from
arc
and also a key member ted shelton from
asa architects
we welcome this opportunity to talk
about the the process of looking at the
general obligation bond in 2020
22.
i'm going to do
four kinds of tasks here i want to talk
very briefly about our assignment and
then the results of the public
participation process i'd like to then
discuss some potential geo obligation
bond projects for your consideration as
well as some considerations regarding
how to set priorities and possible
strategies for the upcoming bond issue
we were retained by the city to
facilitate the public input process of
the
upcoming bond issue
as well as preparing uh pre-conceptual
cost estimates uh for
the projects that were identified and
then assist uh the city in developing
how to grade rank and prioritize these
projects and
formulate a bond strategy
when complete we will
prepare a draft and
final report for your consideration
i think we had very
excellent and passionate public input
process during the last few months
we had a project website
public meetings
online survey and emails were the
primary ways in which we solicited
public input
we had over 1100 people participate in
the process
the website
was
available to provide general information
about the general obligation bonds about
the past bond issues
most importantly it provided a way to
find out where the public meetings were
and when they were
as we went through the process we
provided feedback about what we were
hearing
and
also a link to the online survey that
i'll describe
as as
in addition other kind of links about a
bond issues and election opportunities
there were nine face-to-face meetings
throughout the city
they were scheduled both at the noon and
the 5 30 to 6 pm time frame to give
ample opportunity for people who work to
attend
there were two virtual public meetings
as well hosted by this
city staff
all meetings were bilingual with
spanish interpretation services provided
we
presented some ideas to stimulate
discussion these were just
not exhaustive not meant to steer
anybody towards a specific solution but
they were derived from elevate las vegas
las vegas las cruces i'm sorry
andy told me i always make a mistake
there
and
as well as input through staff for some
of the
counselors input
i'll describe
some of this
some of these projects as we go through
these are some images from the public
meeting as i mentioned we had i thought
excellent participation
we began with a short introduction
about what general obligation bonds are
and so forth
introduced those ideas
for discussion then opened up the floor
to public discussion and about those
ideas or any ideas that
in terms of general obligation bond
uh projects
we also had breakout sessions where
we uh encouraged people to come up and
tell us in more detail about what their
ideas were on either
these topics or on anything they wanted
in terms of general obligation
either by writing on a sticky note or by
attaching a green or
red dot indicating support or
non-support for a specific idea
we had
266 people attending in total you can
see on the map there they're from all
over the city
so i think we had very good response
some people
attended multiple meetings
this slide shows
public input by topic and
sort of been in the order of support
either by written on category boards or
support by indicating the green dot as i
just mentioned
and as you can see certain projects and
these slides as i go through certain
things will rise to the top
in this particular case the east mesa
public ration complex continuing
development was
right up there as well as affordable
housing
park development rehabilitation and so
forth and
on the ideas that you see
afterwards
we also as i mentioned encouraged
written content on the category boards
this provided an opportunity to provide
in more detail about what people would
like to see
and you can see recreation facilities
are
got the most response but right up there
is pickleball we had quite a bit of
pickleball supporters
quite a bit of affordable housing
supporters and supporters of public
safety at these meetings
specifically
fire station proponents
as i mentioned we had passionate people
who who came to every meeting and spoke
directly to the whole group
so these are the topics that these folks
tended to speak on
pickleball probably and i think we have
a lot of pickleball people in the
audience here they were very supportive
of their
project as well as housing and librarian
fire station again sort of rise to the
top
we issued a bilingual survey this survey
was available online
as well as in six public places
throughout the city
in paper copies so people could also
fill it out in that way
we asked the level of support for the
kinds of projects that we heard at the
public meetings
we got
713 unique responses
in this survey
and i should mention that there is an
additional survey that's being conducted
right now
results
will be
here by june 13th this was emailed to a
sample size of residents and staff will
present the results to you on the june
17th
work session
if we look at the results of this
online survey
by topic and these are sort of ordered
by total
support in terms of either strongly
support or
or just support
you can see the things that again that
rise to the top
in this case it was public safety
improvements followed by existing parks
multi-purpose community facility
recreation complex and so forth if you
look at the green and the totals there
most of these projects had substantial
support
but you can also see on the
yellow bars that some of these had less
support either neutral or non-support so
but i would sort of say that there's a
good support for most
things that were discussed
we also asked a specific question about
park facilities and about what people
would like to see in in parks and as you
can see pickleball is right up there at
the top followed by dog park and bike
part but again
there was support for most park
amenities improvements in the
city uh email was another mechanism that
people could provide their support
for the most part this reinforced either
people what people were speaking at
public meetings or what they wrote down
in different ways
but if you looked at them by major topic
you can see that public safety
specifically a new fire station was the
most email topics mentioned followed by
housing affordable housing i should say
and library
so
there are a lot of possible
projects out there for your
consideration in a general obligation
bond so
we spent a little bit of time trying to
figure out what projects to bring to you
and so the most obvious first step of
course were those who
had the most public support and tended
to rise to the top
we made sure that they were capital
projects and that it it involves some
sort of either planning designing or
constructing a physical app uh asset
uh some of the things that were
discussed at public meetings were not
capital projects
and we're also
looking for projects that had enough
planning and design development
to be able to determine a scope and
therefore a cost
for your consideration
uh there are
four prior specific projects that i'll
speak to in in just a minute uh listed
there in the first four bullets
and there's also two projects that had
considerable support but also
in our opinion needed further
development before we could
assign any kind of cost to them
an important step was trying to develop
some cost estimates
ted shelton with asa architects was the
prime person working with our team to
develop these costs they include two
types of costs that you probably you
folks are no doubt familiar with the
construction cost of actually doing it
this was
done as best
possible by looking at recent cost basis
and then escalating that to the
anticipated future midpoint of
development
generally assuming 2024
but as you know there's other
project costs that have to be added to
that including
site acquisition as appropriate site
development design administration public
art contingencies
new mexico grocery season tax and so
forth and that brings it to a total
project cost and those are the kinds of
costs that i'll sort of present to you
in a moment
so the first station i'd like to
present is a a new fire station
this is assumed to be similar to the
fire station number three which was part
of the
funding as part of the last geo bond
issue in 2018
it's anticipated to be about 12 200
gross square feet located in council
district 5
and the total cost we estimate to be
about 11 and a half million dollars
another project is the continuing
development of the east mesa recreation
complex
on the screen is the phase one
development this is being funded again
through the last bond issue and is under
construction
it funds two multi-use fields eight
pickleball courts
two baseball softball fields
a park and maintenance yard
there is an overall master plan however
to this park and this is really just
starts the project development
to complete the
master plan
as envisioned
requires
the kinds of projects shown on
your displays
two more multiple use multi-use fields
baseball softball field additional eight
pickleball courts
concession stands
volleyball and basketball court the
amphitheaters walking trails
completing a loop road
parking lot paving lighting for the
fields
and other general improvements
to do all of this if it was done at one
time and uh
in the 2024
time frame would be 36 million dollars
we estimate
affordable housing had considerable
public support during the
our public participation process
the most
frequent
way of supporting affordable housing
suggested was making a contribution to
the las cruces affordable housing land
bank and trust fund to address the
critical state and lack of affordable
housing in las cruces and obviously
any amount of money could be
suggested and put into this fund the
most frequently suggested number was
four to six million
dollars these funds would could be used
to acquire land or provide gap financing
for nonprofits and private developers to
construct a whole variety of affordable
housing kinds of options
one of the advantages that was brought
up in the public participation process
of using this mechanism is that it would
strengthen the local economy but also
leverage other sources of funding such
as federal state and private funds
so that six million dollars is really
have a lot greater impact
park improvements as as you saw was
quite a public
request
we worked with staff to identify some
possible projects to improve
parks
within the city
one of the
projects which is in both these projects
are consistent with a parks and
recreation master plan
was to upgrade and replace park
amenities throughout the system
to the tune of almost 30 million dollars
and you can sort see all of these things
could be done and implemented and
replaced throughout the system
another
project that potential project that was
brought up and again consistent with the
overall plan was to upgrade and replace
irrigation systems in the park system
on the
parks that are sort of shown on the
screen
this would cost in the neighborhood of
three million dollars if all parks were
done
and as i mentioned there were two
projects that were
had support but
kind of lack sufficient scope for us to
really understand
enough to provide a cost for it
this the first one is a multi-purpose
community recreation facility it was
suggested that this could be located on
the east mesa would need about 10 acres
at least
and couldn't include things like a
branch library senior citizens or
centers or other kinds of public
facilities on the site
the council could choose to
further this project by providing
resources for planning design and land
acquisition
and what that would enable is on the it
would sort of stage this project
for consideration at the not next spawn
cycle or future bond cycles so it would
essentially provide the scope that would
be
necessary to complete it
in a similar manner the library system
and expansion and renovation had
considerable support
the
library system is now
updating their master plan which will
provide
the
capital plan direction for the next five
to 10 years but in previous and two
previous
master plans a branch library was
suggested as a project
the site could be included as part of
the previously mentioned multi-purpose
community recreation facility
and again the council could
choose to provide resources for design
and land acquisition so this project
would be ready for your consideration in
next
future bond cycles
so if you've been keeping track
and adding this all up it's almost 88
million dollars in in potential projects
and so how do you set priorities all of
these projects are important
uh all of them are supported by public
input process and all and will improve
the quality of life in in
las cruces
we have suggested five criteria
that you might consider
in terms of identifying priorities
one would be those projects that
continue what was started from the
previous bond issue might have a higher
priority than others in a similar manner
their ability to address multiple public
input requests or if they're supported
by a master plan or study
their ability to activate or leverage
other sources of funding so that you
could get more bang for your buck
the ability to fund the entire project
within this geo bond cycle so it's
it's an achievable project in other
words
arc staff internally
looked at
how would you apply these criteria and
this table is a very simple matrix that
looks at
if it meets a criteria it has a score
and it's a green so it's a potentially
a three score and if it doesn't meet the
criteria maybe a one score and in
between a yellow score
and it provides just a very simple way
of sort of looking at the projects and
try to judge their impact if you
and we understand that you may want to
add different criteria or change these
criteria or score them differently but
just as an example
uh using this method
arc would suggest that east mesa
recreation complex sort of rose to the
top
for two primary reasons one is that it
finishes
a project that was started in the flask
last bond issue i should say continues a
project that was
started in last bond issue and it also
has the ability to impact multiple kinds
of public requests not only park
development and so forth but also very
specific facilities such as additional
pickleball courts
and as you can see
it provides a way of ranking
projects if
if and that may suggest some things to
you as counselors in terms of how
some of these projects may be addressed
but the big picture of course is that
there's
more requests than
available money
using
the 23 million dollars that we were told
that the council sort of suggested as
the
budget for this and that at the budget
that does not raise any taxes
there are two broad strategies which the
council can use to
address and
develop a strategy for implementing
one is that you focus your resources to
accomplish fewer things but give them
more money
the other one is that you spread the
money around as much as you can to
impact individually projects
so this last chart just gives an
illustration of that
the first one
focuses all the all the money in this
case for the east mesa recreation
complex 23 million dollars
the second strategy
it says
focus on it
in this way you would
say well let's also do the fire station
and that could be done completely
within this geo bond cycle but obviously
we then could not put as much money
towards the east mesa recreation center
further spreading the money around we
could
do the contribution to the housing trust
fund of six million dollars as you see
and again we'll have to take that money
out to make it balanced
and the fourth one spreads the money
around primarily but providing planning
money for those other projects we talked
about in a contribution to the parks and
recreation redevelopment
so
that is concludes
my presentation i think connie wanted to
thank you john
okay and um mayor potem gander on city
council ikani damo piao assistant city
manager for the record
these are the next steps before we get
to q a
the next steps is today we are here at
june 13th first work session we have
another work session planned for june
27th
additionally
we plan to come to city council
july 18th
to start the
start finalizing the direction for go
bonds finalize ballot questions
if we need two more city council
meetings we have august 1st and then the
second is actually august 15th
as two placeholders before
our city clerk needs to submit this to
the county
so with that
mayoral attempt council
we have again arc we have
ted from
our doing a cost analysis and then we
have staff from public works parks and
rec
and
we have our fire and various other
departments behind me as well
thank you connie um i have counselor
abeeta and counselor binkle
thank you and thank you for the
presentation i do have a couple
questions based on
all the public output input that was
received did we take any demographics on
on
on those participants at all
really the only demographic that we
asked for it was at the public meetings
and that was the address of
where the people are yeah
thank you
from
my i guess phase of life and the people
that i've come into contact with a lot
have not been able to participate yet in
this
process i have been encouraging the
online survey for that too
5 30 to 6 still people are picking up
their kids from school
getting them ready for dinner things
like that and so there's a lot i would
say in that family phase of life
that i know have not participated and
i'd highly suggest us
if there's any way that we can
even reach out and participate maybe
with the schools who have a great list
served to send the survey out if we can
do something like that and just try to
capture a few more of those voices it
would be a a really good opportunity i
think
and i'm always one for finishing up
projects
so things like our east mesa that we
already have a design and plan for i
think is
something very beneficial to look at and
i know that we have a heavy need for the
fire station
and thank you mayor
thank you councillor abeda councillor
binkamal thank you thank you so much for
the presentation and for all the work
that you've put into this since january
um and thank you for your question on
demographics i had a similar question
just in terms of your
organization's lens on equity and i'm
curious how you factor in matters of
equity in terms of
where
even just location like where are we
putting an investment is it majorly in
districts five and six right so not only
that is it impacting uh low to moderate
income populations those kinds of things
is that something that you look at in
your analysis
um
in general um
you know one of the things that we
looked at
initially was how many people a project
would benefit
and when we came down to looking at the
sort of the short list it was like
everybody
so um you know that criteria criteria
sort of fell off at least from my uh you
know initial look
um
we could certainly uh add criteria as
you've mentioned
i'm not really quite sure at this point
how we would
assess a impact on a particular
demographic
but we could make a guess at it
yeah i mean i think definitely
particularly maybe that's something for
the city manager's office but certainly
before this comes to a final vote i
would like to see sort of the equity
analysis of
investing in
um
and what communities get invested in um
and i just i just feel like that's an
important conversation for us to have
um and this question of demo graphics
you know i just i do think it's critical
that we
understand who gets to participate who
has access to these conversations um the
folks that aren't participating it
doesn't mean they don't care it just
means they don't have access and so how
are we making sure that even though
their voice was not represented in the
surveys or in the public input meetings
that their interests and their needs are
being still considered
um
that's what i'll say about that i'm
curious if you can
um i think it was page 29.
you said a number regarding um
park's
um
total cost on parks and it was 3 million
or something and then i was like oh you
went by that really fast that seemed
like very low so can you go back to that
slide and talk about that
i think it was 29 i might have i noted
it too late
this one
one more yes this one
um
oh irrigation systems i see that's why
okay
i'm curious to hear from parks and rec
if this is
um
like what kind of a need i hadn't heard
this before regarding irrigation systems
if you can speak about this yes and i
would ask if there's a staff member from
parks that can speak
good afternoon mayor pro tem members of
council sonia delgado director of parks
and migration
the question was regarding the
irrigation systems could you repeat that
please i'm just curious sonia i hadn't
uh i hadn't heard this issue be brought
up before can you just speak about the
need
for this and
like how long have you been
needing these kinds of repairs
these our irrigation systems are
completely outdated
they have been piecemealed for quite
some time
and
we need to have a complete replacement
on them and so we listed the facilities
that are in the most need
and we're hoping that we can figure out
how to make this happen
okay thank you sonya i really appreciate
that let me see if i have any part more
perks question before you go back up the
stairs um
i don't think i do sonya thank you
the fires when you say public safety
that's a really broad term do you mean
specifically a fire station or were
there other public safety needs
when we started it was a broad term
but as the public
told us about specific things it really
focused down on the fire station okay
um chief maybe there's a question for
you i sort i saw the
the proposed cost for the new fire
station
to be around 11 million i'm curious if
you can t that's double
the station in district four is it is it
bigger
what can you talk about
the
double being of costs from the recent
fire station we just did with goband
no oh i'm sorry i just assume that those
questions are going to go to them but
you can answer that as well my apologies
mayor pro tem councillor bitcomo yes i
would uh
defer to our consultants as they did the
cost projections moving forward after
the next couple of years
uh do you want to hear the detail about
the cost projections is that yeah i'm
just curious because we just had a very
successful gopro project i'm going to
bring ted up he's probably okay
anticipated that that'd be great and i
say that because we just had a very
successful go bond project and
fire station three and i think that was
about 6.5 million right and so i'm just
curious about nearly the doubling of the
cost of this new one
my name is ted shelton with asa
architects and uh
and i'm a
local architect with you know some
knowledge of the cost
uh sort of conditions uh in our area
um
the ex the fire station that was
recently built you might be thinking of
construction cost versus project cost
but
it was about four and a half million is
that right
construction cost
is that right
jason
mayor pro-tem um
yes i'm going to let
fire chief jason's been left with tony
trufino talked to the actual
construction cost but total project cost
was around six and a half million yeah
but
you know we're in a volatile uh
increasing construction cost environment
that's pretty unpredictable fuel costs
are adding to the cost of everything
uh and that project was bid in 2020
so that's a very good number to start
with but what we did was we
projected that cost to current times
which is this is two years later
and then we also adjusted it into the
future
to the time that we think this project
would be bid if it were funded we also
added about a 14 percent
sort of volatility
increase because of what has happened
with costs in the last several months
if you've looked at the cost of lumber
or almost any building materials there's
sort of an inexplicable increase that
has happened so
all of that all of that gets compounded
uh when we add
uh the development cost to the raw
construction costs so
uh it's it's surprising that it's that
much higher than one that was just built
two years ago
but it's not quite double
but but it is considerably higher and we
just don't think it would be responsible
for us to go in assuming that we could
build a fire station
in a year and a half or two years for
the same amount of money that we did two
years ago that's a helpful analysis
thank you i appreciate it
um just a couple last questions um
can you show i'm just really curious
about can you show us the question on
the support not support survey specific
to affordable housing i'm just curious
um
perhaps not surprised but i do i know
that there was a high public input
regarding affordable housing and the
survey showed
was sort of on the
bottom of the support list still a lot
of support yeah
on the survey the question was the kind
of the last one on the
this this page and it basically says
affordable housing initiatives uh
strongly support support neutral or do
not support okay thank you i admittedly
have not done the survey yes but i will
um
and then just my last question is really
around
um can you do the spread that final
um
sheet you had around focus spread the
options
that one
no more towards the end
where you have the oh the survey uh
no no no the how we should potentially
spend the money got it okay i'm sorry
one more oh yeah there we go
nope that one oh no it's this one i
think yes
any of these proposed projects are we
would any of these projects be able to
easily find other funds
funding sources like potentially the
federal
infrastructure bill those kinds of
things
yes i i believe so and uh in this chart
we tried to indicate uh that i think the
affordable
housing initiative is probably the best
uh that we
could figure because there is both state
monies available for affordable housing
as well as you know the housing trust
fund
essentially is a
incentive for private developers to
provide
affordable housing so those you know you
leverage funds through the through that
source
i think there's some opportunity for all
of these projects however to get some
additional financing either
through the state for instance the state
supports library investments
we know that you have put additional
money into the
some projects including a
east mesa recreation complex just from
general funds so there's some
opportunity for leveraging i think all
of these capital projects in some banner
or other
okay thank you and i just want to note
that our affordable housing trust does
not have a dedicating funding source to
it so it's sort of like the will of the
council
okay thank you those are all my
questions
thank you councillor benkomo any other
counselors
i have a couple of questions can you um
[Music]
and maybe this is for tony or um sonia
the eastmaster recreational facility as
it stands now tell me
what are we building for
remind me of the various ball fields
softball fields soccer fields those
kinds of things and and why wouldn't we
have additional soccer fields
good afternoon
may pro
city council this is tony trevino with
public works for the record um if you
recall part of the first geo bond phase
we had a master plan
we took a step back to do a master plan
for the entire park part of that master
plan included what was noted on the
first gioban ballot which was
um pickleball courts eight it had eight
pickleball courts a baseball complex
multi-use fields two multi-use fields a
10 acre park
and and that was all done within that
first phase however what was added part
of the master plan was a full build out
of the complex which added another
soccer multi-use field the addition of
the complex and the baseball softball
field and several amenities around the
traditional park so the items that were
listed as part of the original geo bond
question were done within that first
phase they were the priority
as part of that master plan
i'm sorry tony remind me again the
number of soccer fields i'm sorry i'm
trying to look here and there and i'm
getting confused all that was it was
said uh um
multi-use fields is what was called out
in the ballot so multi-use field so it
was plural okay so that was the only
thing that had an exact number was the
pickleball courts of eight yes yes okay
and so the so in the
other column that we're looking at on
slide 24 the funding needed for future
additional that two multi-use fields
could conceivably be used as soccer
fields
um i don't know
flag football and other kinds of sports
like that may protein gander that's
exactly why they're called multi-use
built and not soccer field or football
field or
um
lacrosse shelters and actually
so they're multi-faceted
multi-faceted okay
tony so um have there been conversations
in addition to what we have currently
about updating the high noon soccer
fields although i know their school
right there the school's responsibility
and i want to say that very clearly
that that's the school's right fields
and responsibilities to maintain and for
some reason we get
um
a lot of flack about those fields
and there and i in fact i just saw um
something
specifically about the high noon
um soccer fields and sort of their care
and maintenance and that sort of i
thought and comparing it to the
the geo bond
that we're about to complete
um
can you talk to me about
what would be the likelihood of working
with the schools to improve
those soccer fields with this particular
geo bond cycle this next cycle
is that something that that you would
unconsider can we do that
and
may approach him gandera
i have my opinions however i'm going to
pass the baton on to director of parks
and recreation i'd love to hear your
opinion tony
to me based on kind of what the issue is
capital infrastructure to go there we
don't own the property to go and build
um these kind of improvements on a
property we don't own that is going to
be the conflict right there okay so okay
bye
executive
i can add more you can add more make me
sound smart
mary pro tem members of council sonia
delgado director of parks recreation uh
just for your information we do have
some state legislative funding that was
given to us to do some improvements at
the high noon one through five
we currently we just sent over an
agreement thanks with our legal team
working with the las cruces public
school legal team to review
an agreement so that we could have
use of those fields on a long-term basis
so that in turn allows us to spend
funding on that from the state or if we
did go bond or
from another grant
because currently as you know we do not
own those fields so we needed something
in place to allow us to do that for a
long term basis so that is in the
process and we have already started to
encompass some of those funds to include
drinking fountains
additional drinking fountains and
other play equipment that we could use
out there
thank you sonia i really appreciate that
update i know we've been working on that
for a while and i appreciate i
appreciate that now given the need for
additional soccer fields is this
sufficient
would you say
i would say all our sports fields are
not sufficient for the demand that we
have on all our sports we have waiting
lists for every sport that we have in
this town
not only because we don't have enough
fields for them but we also don't have
enough fields to allow for new sports
and we get requests for those constantly
so we need a lot more sports fields of
all types in this area
thank you sonya so much i appreciate
your comments on that sure
[Music]
so the affordable housing component
just to piggyback on counselor bencomo's
um statements
i know that there's some folks that are
concerned about this housing trust fund
and it
it's sort of a piece of
you know a larger puzzle and i'm
wondering if folks have very specific
natalie and company have specific i mean
i know they do i just want her to have
an opportunity to speak to what might
that tr that trust fund be used because
we have about seven or eleven projects
in the queue and and i think it's
important that the public the general
public are aware that it's just not
gonna sit in in this fun
for you know months and months we have
an obligation to use it within the time
frame that we
have said we want to use it and so i
know it is is is there a specific
project that this money would be used
almost immediately
mayor pro 10 member of the council
is natalie here she is okay
good afternoon mayor pro tem gabriela
natalie green for the record um at this
time there is not a specific project uh
the proposed question would be very
broad again something around plan design
acquire land or construct
the affordable housing plan does outline
some priorities versus others i think
that we would have to go through a
a priority planning phase to
to determine whether we do we could do a
variety of things i think land
acquisition is an important component
for single family
we could also do some leverage funding
we do have a number of multi-family
projects across the city that
are
prepared to request funding should the
opportunity present
so i i envision a variety of things
that targets that full housing spectrum
and not one specific project
necessarily
not sure if that answers your question
no it does thank you i i just know that
i think it makes our the public a bit
concerned about it being put in this
fund
um and and and not being used right
almost immediately without i i mean i
know we we have many
um meetings specific to housing
affordable housing and i know the
various projects that are in the queue
and so
would there be an opportunity to drill
down a specific project that we could
actually name on the ballot
as the question
um
mayor pro tem gandhara from a strategic
standpoint i think the coalition to
support affordable housing i'm really
intends for it to be a broad question
so we don't have that not in my backyard
if we name a specific project are we
then going to have a
coalition of people that are
anti-affordable housing so
that begs the question we do have
off the top of my head at least three if
not four immediate projects that i could
picture using this financing on
and
i apologize that's my glucose meter
so
i could see yes again doing there's a
number of developments on the east mesa
there are coming subdivisions so doing
some single family acquisition if anyone
saw the latest housing report the
average sales price for a single family
home is 300 000
and so
i'd like to do some single-family land
acquisition in large
bulk
we have
the three sisters project that council
has made a pre-commitment of funding
will be coming to ask for that actual
funding of 2.4 million
there is a senior
housing complex on south pharmacy i've
seen the plans they're done they're
prepared to come to ask
for that financing in the next year
that's a four percent tax credit that
would leverage other funding that's 80
units of
senior housing
and so they're looking for about a three
million dollar commitment
as council may be aware we put out an
rfq for a development partner to go to
the tax credit round in january for our
expansion of the community hope campus
so our goal is to apply for that
low-income housing tax credit funding in
january so we can get some units to help
address the the housing crisis that
we're in for our own house population
the other project that comes to mind is
again our paseos verdes i know you guys
that haven't we haven't talked about it
in a while but it's still percolating in
the
background that is another project that
we're looking to get funded um through
the tax credit round in january
so those are my four
thank you um
[Music]
yes i haven't forgotten you mayor
and then lastly i'm i'm concerned about
the demographics and equity when i hear
sort of these new projects these capital
projects it's um
happening you know mostly in the east
side of town where there's land and
different
um you know the availability there
um i i want to believe that we have
other
needs in
in the other districts as well and i
know that we do
so what would be helpful
is when we look at
parks and um and improvements and and
such that when we talk about
demographics we're talking about like
how many children are there how many
adults are there how many seniors are
there how many people of color who would
really be
um you know engaged in those in in those
particular recreational facilities i
think that's an important issue and i
want to highlight that i don't want us
to lose sight of it
and so thank you natalie john
counselor amplores oh thank you madam
chair i'm sorry i'm sorry
mayor
[Music]
natalie when you said yeah were going to
go you were thinking of doing rfps rqs
were you wanting to
[Music]
in the past when we've worked with some
of our partners in oil housing we've
come up with 10 you know 15 match or
whatever
um
if we go that route
that would that would
basically expand if we were to do let's
just use the spread number three uh
[Music]
so can we use this money for for that
ten percent or do we have to use it for
the whole project i guess my question
um mr mayor
mayor pro tem gandera
i believe the money could be used to
leverage those low income housing tax
credit applications so you would not be
required to
fund the entire development
the albuquerque
the city of albuquerque has a they call
theirs the workforce housing trust fund
and they use theirs similar to how i
would imagine we would use ours to
leverage that additional funding
and so
for example our current project it's a
it's almost a six to one
leverage so for every dollar of city
investment we're leveraging six dollars
in private development
thank you so
[Music]
and this will much
go to what you're saying
there's land all over so we could
whether it's in the uh district five or
district six we can also look at
different infill that's also within
districts one through four and but but
more importantly i think it allows us to
leverage that money so what i'm trying
to say is that six million is like
getting 36 million so i really think we
need to strongly consider that for one
thing
uh second
is the um and and i
i was trying to listen but i couldn't
quite get just
i i know that when we were doing the
first geo bond there were some things
left out and one of them was whether
it's the pickleball courts or whatever
for the on the east mesa complex
was this money gonna be
well i guess that's up to the council we
could direct it to use for a pickleball
you know it's not there's no question
right now we can develop the question
that that money be used for the things
that we didn't quite finish
from the first geo bond and one of the
things that we had committed and you
were kind of on that path mountain chair
was the soccer field and i also think we
also
let the pickleball community know that
hey you know what when we have
some money we can we can finish that
other part so i think we need to
and then also don't forget the skate
park too so i think those are some
commitments that i think were made
unbeknownst going into the second geo
bond
but i i think that in my my druthers
would be that sprint three where we have
money for the
for the
fire department in district five because
you know that's there in order for us to
keep that iso rating at number one we
have to continue to have
uh top top uh fire services in all
districts
and and then that also gives money for
the housing
and then also for
the the east mesa
complex
and those are my comic books
thank you mayor
flores cancer pencomo i have a question
for ms green
thank you mayor for tim
so my question is this or maybe a string
of questions has a city looked into
doing any kind of land leases from the
state or
from blm
insofar as
because we have blm land through
scattered throughout the the
entire city
as well as
state land
so just wondering
whether you or your
group of
housing people and economic development
have looked into that
and
because
i think we're all concerned about
providing housing for everybody and
everybody includes those who follow
right in the middle of making good money
as far as i'm concerned but then good
money for me
you know isn't what it used to be
because there are people here who could
afford there are i've met people
throughout the
go bond
meetings
that are earning enough to buy a house
that cost 150 000
but we don't have houses that are 150
and i th my
experience with with the city being on
the housing policy review committee
is that it looks at providing housing
for people who um
you know
it's not really called obtainable or
attainable
housing it's called affordable housing
so i'm just wondering miss green have
you or your your group of people who
work with you
looked into the possibility or the
probability or the actual ability
of uh having
housing for people who are earning more
than what quote affordable housing
unquote hud standards provide
[Music]
mr mayor mayor pro tem candidate
councillor flores we have not looked
into the state land leases any funding
that is deposited into the trust fund
assuming it's not federal funding can go
up to 120 percent of area median income
so for a family of four that's about 65
dollars if it's federally funded through
our housing and urban development
funding that is capped at eighty percent
of area median income so for a family of
four it's about forty three forty five
thousand dollars don't hold me to it
i'll look it up shortly miss green my
question was specifically has your your
group of people because it's not a
department it's a department within
economic development but you're
apparently in charge of housing or
something like that so
i need to know we need to know whether
you have
have you looked into
leasing land from the state or looking
into blm land
for purposes of of providing
housing
for people who really fall in that awful
middle we're either getting retirees
from all over the united states who are
able to buy
up to a million dollar homes in some
areas in the east side because not all
of the east mesa is wealthy by the way
but um
then we have people who
who uh really can't afford anything
so it looks to me that you've been
focusing a lot on housing for people who
otherwise wouldn't be able to buy
housing no matter what um
except for uh
you know the work that you do so my
question is that so is i think the
answer is no you haven't done that thank
you correct thank you madam chair
thank you councilor flores councillor
binklemon thank you um i don't have a
question for you natalie thank you i was
just going to point out that
um this you know idea of having
affordable housing bonds isn't this like
new idea out of nowhere risky it's
it albuquerque has used this tool very
effectively in fact and
um very successfully i mean when it goes
to the voters the voters approve it and
i have right in front of me actually
um that in 2021 their affordable housing
go bond which was very much
this language around the actual question
was plan design acquire land and
construct affordable housing as provided
in the code
um
79 000 versus 32 000 people approved it
and so
um and actually there was a
great article that came out after the
november election last year that across
the country
ballot measures things like this that
have affordable housing attached to them
tend to be very successful so the data
is
um
on the side of that
project i did want to ask though if
given that this is um
really an election related matter if the
city clerk's office had been part of the
process or at what point is the city
clerk's
office part of the process
councillor como the
manager for the record
we
have been talking with
our city clerk christine
to ensure that we hit our deadlines and
so that's where the
the date later in august 23rd we that's
the deadline to get this into and so
with her assistance we made sure that we
were on time to
to finalize ballots with you in the city
council meeting so she helped us
solidify our timeline so that we we can
stay on track great i just want to make
sure that her office is in the room
given that this is at the end of the day
an election process and i did actually
have one more question for tony
tony there you go
um tony the last go bonds question
around the east mesa rec center
specifically said eight pickleball
courts is that what i heard you say
mayor gotem gandara comes back oh you're
exactly right that is the only sport
that had a specific number called that
and those have been funded technically
already those are under construction as
we speak they're undercut eight
pickleballs are under construction as we
speak okay thank you very much
thank you councillor benkomo i just have
a final question about library expansion
um
did it
did folks speak
to library expansion specific to the
branigan library or to
design and build a library on the east
mesa
mayor pro-tem members of council
i think there was multiple responses i
think there was a
general
support of library renovation and
expansion
um there was some specific talk about a
branch library and as i mentioned there
that has been a you know a past uh
potential uh project uh
in in past master plans
but uh i think the i guess the direct
answer is there is support for
library renovation and expansion in
general
can you take it back to the slide that
speaks to that
no no no the one that shows
the percentage of people that actually
had that as a
there will be a
variety of slides that do that so let me
i know we have you going from yeah
hopefully you start
it's fine you know here's one
uh in terms of public uh meetings
it shows the uh
library expansion in terms of people who
wrote things under category boards and
and expressed support
here's another one in terms of specific
request and in this case uh your your
memory is correct because this one does
mention branch library in specific
does where does it show in this one
this one does
it's the third oh my third library yeah
there we go and i think uh and as i
mentioned my first response is more
general to that one
both things are mentioned
when we get to the survey
library system renovation as you can see
there's quite a few
people supporting that project
and i think that would be the last oh
here's one uh in terms of email topics
as well
so john
have you been able did you did i see
that or you're not we're very clear in
terms of what that would look like
and a dollar amount
no because uh again
it takes quite a bit of a study to
identify specifically what a branch
library would be it would require
knowing where it's going to be located
uh what kind of services it would
provide and so forth so
that has
that was in fact i
my firm actually worked on the master
plan in 2000
and we we did provide a number then but
you know that was 20 years ago so sure
i'm not talking about expanding a
branch library i'm talking about the
renovation of the live current library
no we i i do not have any specific
information about that i appreciate that
i mean i i'm a
firm believer that we should expand that
renovate that library it's in dire need
i think the library is
home to you know
lots of people that see different kinds
of services the work that they're doing
in there is amazing
um from
teaching people
simply how to turn on a computer
understand you know the basics of
computer technology
to
you know an ipad to just the phenomenal
services that they're offering around
reading literacy music
those kinds of things so i'm i'm i
really think we need to consider that
and i'd like to see a dollar amount if
that's possible um in the next um
meeting i mean if it if it makes it that
far i'm not sure but i i'm i really am a
big supporter of of renovating that
library i think it's time um and i'd
like to seize uh you know a dollar
amount um
in the next the next meeting if we could
we will try very hard thank you john
thank you okay is there any public
comments specific to this
if so could you raise your hand
it's a lot of you huh okay so i'm going
to start on my left and i'm going to
give you
keep your hands up and let me see what
that looks like
i know i told miss sharon thomas i would
give you three minutes and there's quite
a few people here um i think i counted
12 or 15 people so i'm going to give you
two minutes so please come up um ifo and
jennifer will you please time folks and
i'll start with first row
two minutes
yes come on down hi
hello
good afternoon thank you
mr mayor mayor potem members of the
council and mr peeley
my name is joe galvan nash i'm a long
long time lifelong las crucin
i'm also with the league of women voters
of southern new mexico and today i'm
here of one person who's helped organize
with many other people a community group
if they could stand up we are the las
cruces coalition for attainable housing
and we're members from non-profits
agencies citizens who believe that the
city's november election
needs to focus on attainable and
affordable housing
first i want to thank you for the pass
support for the previous bonds as we've
seen we have
walking trails and dog parks and
recreation facilities underway but today
we really want to focus on
time to include bonds that are for a
basic need there's too many people
struggling in our community
for food utilities gas and housing it's
already a crisis in las cruces poverty
is about 28 percent
today there are more than thirteen
hundred children in las cruces that are
considered homeless by federal
guidelines and those thirteen hundred
children have brothers sisters mothers
dads and family members who are also
homeless
56 of elementary children live at or
below poverty level in las cruces
now we know what what's happening our
inflation rate is over eight percent
that's the highest in 40 years and what
contributes to inflation
price of gas food transportation and
rent
there's just not enough affordable
rental properties in las cruces
so we believe that a portion of the
november bond should be earmarked for
attainable housing we're recommending 6
million as a fair number to consider
we also believe that if we go through
this
as my time is up so one final comment
uh the health and the success of a city
relies on the basic needs for its
residents and you all know that in order
to help people and have a successful
city we need to be inclusive of putting
roofs over the head of people who need
our help thank you so much joe
okay anybody else on that first row
hello miss monique lopez good afternoon
we're protein candida mayor
members of the council
i am also here representing our
affordable affordable housing
coalition of las cruces i'm sorry excuse
me can i get your name for the record
monique lopez
um i am actually gonna i'm here also
representing the resilience leaders i
want to start with our vision our vision
is to ensure all county residents have
access to the 10 vital
surviving and thriving services
shown to create safe childhood resilient
families successful students and
job-ready adults who can participate in
new mexico workforce
we developed and distributed us
resilience leaders developed and
distributed a survey here in dona ana
county and the results show that 68 of
people report having a difficult time
attaining housing in our county
and out of those 68 78 of them fall
within the annual income of 10 000 to 24
000 a year and 88 percent fall within
the 25 000 to 39.9 thousand
i want to speak on by behalf of myself
going back 17 years ago i fell within
that range i was a young girl graduating
from college ready to move on with my
career but i just could not find a safe
place to live and raise my child
i landed up living in a trailer park
which there's nothing wrong with that
but this trailer park had high crime and
it wasn't the safest place for me or my
child to to live in so i went on a
mission to try to find myself a home
working hard as a professional in a
behavioral health agency and i just
could not do that it saddens me at 17
years
later we're still in this place
i was blessed to come across a couple
who was willing to finance my home and i
was able to get myself into affordable
unit because of them not because i i
qualified not because i was able
so what i wanted in closing i want to
say
um i was there i have now dedicated over
20 years of my professional career to
this community in the behavioral health
setting really
pouring my passion into providing those
surviving and thriving services for
individuals because without them without
survival we can't thrive and our
survivors are we need how a home we need
food we need those things in order to to
thrive and if i didn't have them i
wouldn't have been able to thrive and
give back to this community so i asked
the council to please vote for this gold
bond to give us the money to have our
our residents survive and thrive thank
you monique
hello
hi
please state your name
um my name is daniel sanchez i'm a
community organizer with anime cafe
i'm here
not as a community organizer i'm here as
a father in alaska soon i was born and
raised here
i have three kids
prior to the pandemic i uh
worked here here for the city
i was making uh
15 15 hour this is around the time where
we were having a conversation where
minimum wage should be
15 an hour
and i could tell you as a single father
it was hard
and there wasn't anyone to turn to there
wasn't any programs that i knew of
because
i made
enough oops
so
my life changed when i was given an
opportunity
and what i'm asking
is for
you city council
mayor may pro tem
um
city manager
to give people opportunity
this isn't even the opportunity this is
an opportunity for opportunity
so that's
all i have to say
and i
really hope you guys take what i say
into consideration
thank you so much
next
i know how this works
good afternoon my name is sharon thomas
i'm also part of this coalition i want
and many of you know i'm a retired
english professor so i'm always looking
at the language so i want to clear up a
little confusion about attainable and
affordable
so attainable occurs in your latest
comprehensive plan and it's described in
this way housing attainability refers to
the ability of residents to afford
mortgage or rent with enough money left
over for other living and discretionary
expenses so we're talking about both
subsidized housing and housing for that
big missing middle that councilor flores
talked about you know every every public
meeting i went to
somebody got up or more than one
somebody got up and said i could buy a
house if there was just something in my
price range
so those are things we can do
in 1982 40 percent of the county's newly
constructed houses were entry-level
homes by 2019 that share had fallen to
around seven percent so we just don't
have them and we have to find a way to
do something about that
the 2009 affordable housing plan did
establish the trust fund and the land
bank it also recommended a 5 million go
bond that's never been done
so far the city has provided some gap
funding for
40 units of affordable housing and a
little bit of land for a mix of
affordable market rate but that's it you
know and that's great but that's not
enough you know we can't get by in just
a couple projects like that
so according to your comprehensive plan
the prosperous community has a range of
housing types and prices to ensure that
all residents can afford living
arrangements this is only possible if we
actually make use of our land bank and
our trust fund
you the bond funds can be used as a
local match as we talked about maybe six
dollars for every one dollar acquire
land
so i just want to end by saying this is
in the state the new mexico constitution
and the new mexico affordable housing we
you have a plan there's a whole process
laid out and the council gets the last
approval of the projects
thank you miss thomas
welcome representative ferrari
thank you mayor pro tim guenthara
and
hello city councilwomen i've been
looking forward to saying that
as a state representative from house
district 37 i've been
for the past
six years on the health and human
services committee
and i just attended a state um i mean
national
state
chairs
meeting in denver and one of the
important
issues we talked about was
opening doors to housing security
so i thought it was really important to
be here today
because
[Music]
when we build affordable housing we
enhance the public health of our
community
and the physical and mental well-being
of adults and children are enhanced
through safe secure
and
stable shelter
and
it's important for children to be able
to be sure and have that stability in
their life as we know and i'm sure most
of you are working hard to prevent
adverse childhood experiences of our
children not only through education but
also housing and food and hunger
security is important for that but
adults who are homeless
or housing insecure
are less likely to have goal-oriented
thinking and are more likely to
experience psychological distress
substance use and intimate power
violence and symptoms of trauma and this
also affects our children
so children learn more when stable
housing allows for
school attendance
continuity
and children who are homeless or housing
insecure exhibit more anti-social
behavior less pro-social behavior more
sleep problems
and difficulty advancing in school and
children are more likely to meet
developmental
milestones when raised in stable and
healthy housing in which they are not
exposed to lead mold vermin and other
threats that sometimes you know
the housing that's available
and not supported by us as a community
um often presents
so i ask you to please um support this i
appreciate the leveraging we can do at
the
federal level but there's also things at
the state level that we can for services
that support the housing that you would
afford with this geo bond thank you
representative ferrari thank you
anybody else on the second row
third row
fourth row
good afternoon mayor pro tem ghana the
council
my name is aaron boyd i'm with messier
valley community of hope i am the
housing programs manager and i'm also a
social worker with them
thank you today for the presentation you
know it suggested between four to six
million towards affordable housing but
i'm here to really urge consideration
for a full funding of the six million
towards affordable housing in order to
really address the lack of affordable
units in our community
this not only affects those individuals
that are unsheltered but it affects
single-family
single-income families disabled
individuals on a fixed income like
social security as well as numerous
other individuals trying to sustain
housing in our community
we have landlords in our community right
now that are charging six hundred
dollars for an efficiency unit
so how can an individual that's on a
limited income like social security of
841 in social security benefits afford
to sustain without affordable housing
options that's not sustainable for
somebody to continue to live every day
those same landlords are also requiring
individuals to prove three times the
rent amount in income
that's not sustainable
now that green also addressed affordable
housing projects that could begin to
address the housing crisis on multiple
levels from single-family housing senior
housing and those were unsheltered
however she also addressed that the cost
for those projects could exceed that
between four and six million dollars so
again i ask you to please really
consider funding and allocating the six
million towards affordable housing
thank you thank you so much
anybody else on that row fourth row
fifth
good afternoon
i'm george pearson with velocis and i'd
like to speak on behalf of the trails
the multi-use trails are an important
component that we need to continue
funding
we have some connectivity that we still
need to complete
connecting from the end of the
trail at burn lake to go to
valley view drive would be an important
addition for connectivity to
improve
access
and there are other parts of the city
the east mesa has some trail needs
um so
i think it's important that we continue
with that process because it's not
something that can be done all in one
fell swoop
and also
i was trying to find the second survey
on the website just while i was sitting
here and going through the city's main
hot topics page
i found the link to the old
survey that's closed and i couldn't find
a link on the clc bond
website so if you could
update the main website and make clear
when the closing date is for the current
survey thank you
thank you george
anybody else in the sixth room seventh
row
eight
ninth
is that everybody on my left yes
okay
now to my right i've got a few hands
that
were raised
first second third
fourth
fifth row yes ma'am
good afternoon
councilwomen
you can put the mic down and then please
state your name for the record
my name is becky dominguez i'm the
president of the pickleball association
in las cruces
some of you might recognize my name
because i did send an email a couple of
weeks ago to all the council women but
i'm here to represent the community of
pickleball and you're probably tired and
the email that i sent you kind of gave
you some statistics which i won't repeat
again today
but
as a point of reference i was born and
raised in las cruces
so my loyalty and my love of this city
is intense
and i hate to compare it with other
cities
but as a point of comparison i'm going
to just discuss albuquerque because
we're always talking about albuquerque
does this albuquerque does that
so um a couple of years ago albuquerque
saw the explosion of pickleball in the
city they realized there was a need for
venues
so in 2016
the city of albuquerque built 18
pickleball courts
this year they're funding another 12 i
believe
and that's going to breathe their total
up there they have amazing tournaments
up there that brings in a tremendous
tremendous amount of revenue like most
tournaments do just like baseball here
and um
and softball
so um i included in this phase which i
will probably give copies to you later
but in phase one it gave a rundown of
what was needed to build those 18 courts
the total cost for those courts was 1
million two hundred and eighty three
thousand dollars for eighteen quarts
our pri of course today because of cost
fluctuating a similar um
a similar facility would actually cost
much more obviously
but our primary objective for our
community is that we just want to
increase the number of pickleball courts
or venues throughout the city and we
want these courts to be well constructed
so um if you look at these later and i
will give you copies you will kind of
have a breakdown and gives you an idea
of cost thank you that's all about that
thank you so much yeah thank you so much
for listening thank you
anybody else on that fifth row
sixth row
thank you council people and all the
people that worked so hard in putting
this information together i think they
did a wonder my name is kathy
rittenberry i'm a resident of las cruces
a proud resident
i think they did a great job of picking
times throughout the day
and the evening to make sure everybody
got an opportunity to voice their input
i think the city has asked us to be
responsible citizens and
speak up
for the things that we feel are
important
we showed up for the pickleball because
we started this two years ago and the
mission was about kids
bringing this game because it's the
fastest growing game in the united
states not new mexico the entire united
states we can participate in that and
that's what our club decided to do is
bring it to kids we just finished up
with a camp free
everybody throughout the city was
invited we delivered flyers to every
single elementary in las casas every
single junior high or middle school in
las cruces to show them that this camp
was available to them we had volunteers
there we had food refreshments for them
we are trying to give back
yes we started as old people
you know i worked until i was 70 years
old and now i'm at the point that i can
give back i chose las cruces because
it's a wonderful place to live and we
really do want to give back to the
community we have opportunities that we
can have tournaments
the
coach at the university is going to hold
the tournament because he realized that
the aaron gifford tournament that we had
this
fall or spring raised a lot of money
that we could give back to the homeless
home
housing veterans homeless veterans so
we're here asking for
your help so that we can give back to
the community not just one segment but
the entire community
i would say the only thing on that
distribution of money is the third one
does not represent the
amount of people that showed up to
express their opinion
that's the least amount of money that
goes to east mesa
so i would strongly recommend that you
look at that carefully to make sure that
the park kathy thank you thank you
okay anybody else in sixth row
seventh row
good afternoon um
my name is jerry rittenberry
and um
mayor pro tem
mayor city council it's just a
delight to speak to you about
the family
last week was another
just sensational week
for pickleball as kathy just said
we started the week with this camp for
third fourth and fifth and was broken
into six and then seventh and eight
children
and
they came with
family who brought them out
and it was just amazing to see two boys
that i saw i think they were in fourth
grade one
i said okay now we're going to start out
i'll just toss you the ball so you get a
peel part well the young man hid it back
with his hand a perfect shot
the other boy came from an abusive
background
he responded to one of the volunteers
when they started
i can i can't do anything i'm really not
worth anything
and he was so sad
but i want you to know within an hour
that boy was playing pickleball
with the biggest smile that i've seen in
some time and it was such a rewarding
experience
this thing is just really good for
family we concluded the the week with
the senior games at the university so
this this week we experienced four
generations of people playing pickleball
this is a a good bang for your buck in
investing and recreation
in the city i was looking around the
room and every single person in this
room can play
and we would be delighted to work with
you thank you for your support of
pickleball and the future here right now
we have five million players in the
country
that is expected to be 40 million
in 2030 in eight years
projecting that here that would say we
would serve three or four thousand
people thank you so much for your
comments and for your youth mentoring
that's something near and dear to me
something that's very important to in
our community is
becoming a mentor for our youth so i
appreciate you all yes
sixth seventh row
anybody else eight
there's one more
maybe two
if there's another one out there that
wants to speak why don't you make your
way down
good afternoon
mayor pro tem and city council members
my name is laura smart i'm speaking on
behalf of pickleball not only am i a
player i'm also a referee i travel all
over the united states refereeing and
playing
and las cruces is in desperate need of
more pickleball courts the eight
pickleball courts at the east mesa that
are in progress right now we're very
grateful for that but we really need an
additional eight we need a championship
court in order to hold
major tournaments the tournament that we
had in april generated thirty thousand
dollars which we donated to the
community of hope
i hope you recognize the significance of
this amazing sport
that any member of the family can play
any age and it's easy to pick up
we really hope you appreciate
the fact that we do need more pickleball
courts thank you
thank you miss martin
said everybody on my right
okay
uh mayor protegra mayor miyagashima city
council just economical assistance city
manager just a few closing
remarks that i wanted to share there was
a comment made
there was a comment made regarding the
[Music]
survey and i just want to make everybody
aware if you just google go bond
or go to our website
it is under hot topics but you could
also just
google gold bond las cruces
if you go to the gold bond page
and you scroll down there's this
bilingual survey up through the end of
the week if you click on that
it'll take you to the survey and then
also just showing
everybody as well another way to access
it on the front page if you go under hot
topics it's the first link here
a remark may pretend gonda and city
council that i wanted to share just to
let you know that staff had considered
the expansion of the library we'll work
with our consultants to come up with the
cost there were various projects that we
were
asking whether we should
whether we should move forward from
staff perspective because we were trying
to anticipate which ones to bring
forward which ones to
and so it was just throwing up the best
that we could and so the reason why that
one
didn't come on this one but we were
planning to bring it on if we had a go
bond cycle in four years was
any project that we owned land well i'm
sorry any project that we had not only
construction ready but if it had a
master plan so if it was a cip with a
master plan
and we owned the land then we were ready
to go so that one came forward on the
survey that one came forward from staff
and so one of the challenge from public
works which makes sense is
there was a push to get more trails out
there and so a gentleman mentioned
there's the disconnect
we would love to connect our trails but
we have
another jurisdiction that owns land
along the trail that won't allow us to
have that so we could fund and say let's
allocate five million dollars to connect
the trails and if the owner says no
then then
we're not able to move forward so that
was one of the ways
one of the things that we just wanted to
share with you that's why we didn't come
forward
and push trails much because we still
haven't figured that how can we connect
these gaps because we don't own that
property additionally we are currently
doing the master plan for the library
expansion so just wanted to make you
aware on that one when the master plan
expansion
and master plan for the library is
is completed obviously we could bring
that forward and would be a great
opportunity
in the upcoming gold bond but that's why
we didn't bring it up before today but
we'll get with the consultants
in that master plan it has critical
needs of the library such as
how are the rooms going to look what
what areas how large are we going to go
with certain spots so
that's why we came forward with uh
with that as as we did
and i think
the last thing that i wanted to let
everybody
know is in the upcoming work session
this survey that is currently up is
actually our second survey so i just
wanted to make that clear i want to make
sure that
if people in the community took the
first survey this is the second survey
and this second survey is not
hosted by our consultants but was hosted
by
our survey specialist who's the third
party that we that we deal with so
one thing that you'll notice in our
upcoming work session is that we'll be
able to compare this survey with the
second survey and have additional
information that hopefully
you may see you may see some
similarities with the first
but you may also see some differences
from the first survey or from different
needs from there we hope to come down
and start
getting your directions to start
narrowing down projects so that we can
come to city council in july and
hopefully start finalizing something so
just wanted to wrap it up for you and
let you know uh where we are but um
america ten and council there's nothing
else thank you connie i think councillor
flores has a question
thank you madam chair and thank you mr
uh tamropeo
so as far as not accessing connecting
trails i know the state
the state has a law that allows um
private uh
how would you call it access on private
lands to connect private
public lands
the city could possibly have something
like that
probably i don't know i mean it would be
a question
of uh it would probably be very limited
but i mean if it's a question of that
impeding our ability to connect trails
it seems to me that we could
have a similar
ordinance i don't know
i think that
our city attorney would have to comment
on that but maybe not now
not now
but
it's something that we can look into
because
we need trails and and we need to also
preserve what we have and if we don't
use them and or
be able to access them it's no point
having them so thank you very much and
maybe that's something we can work on
thank you thank you thank you very much
any other questions comments okay cena
thank you connie for that
um next is our telstra fund overview
barbara de leon
i'm sorry mayor
yeah i'm sorry
no no no i'm sorry
if if
if we move forward i think it's
and then i know it's kind of a mystery
how uh certain people were on a blue
ribbon committee last night but i think
that we may want to get consent that we
want to go that route to eventually
bring back a resolution and have uh you
know group of different various people
throughout the community help us support
this
so i just wanted to bring that up
okay mayor thank you
okay next up is 3.2 telstra fun overview
work session number 22-026
barbadillion
and company
leanne demush and
our finance department
we hardly ever get to see you
welcome
good afternoon let me just bring this
presentation up
hmm
all right good afternoon mayor pro tem
mayor city councilors
barbara deleon chief administrative
officer for the record and this
afternoon we are here to provide you
with an overview of the genesis and the
stewardship of the telstra fund
and we are going to make this a team
effort
so with that i'll go over what we'll be
presenting and who will be bringing you
the the information so i'll be providing
a brief background on the fund and then
next up we'll have our treasurer erica
jacquez
discuss how the fund is invested
our comptroller jose trevigno will be
talking about allocations
from the fund that the council has
approved through resolution
natalie green
our housing and neighborhood services
manager will be discussing the
allocation specific to health related
public services
and the community impact of the
allocations from the telstra fund
and finally leanne damouche our
financial services director
will be guiding a discussion
on the telstra funds investments and
uses
so with that i'll go ahead and get
started
on the background of the fund
so in 2004
the city and county jointly owned
memorial medical center
that year they entered into a long-term
lease agreement with province healthcare
was a 40-year lease
the net proceeds from that lease
26 million dollars
was the first source of funds for what
we call the telshare fund
the fund was restricted
to health-related programs
and health-related capital projects and
there was a moratorium placed on
spending for from the fund for a few
years as the council received public
input on the best uses of the funds and
determined how to invest the fund so
we'll hear a little bit more later about
what happened after the moratorium was
lifted
on march 13 2019
the
city's portion of an escrow fund which
had been held back
to address potential claims from
memorial medical center was distributed
to the city that amount was four million
dollars
so the total of the initial 26 million
dollar distribution from the 40-year
lease
and the release of the 4 million dollars
from escrow
is 30 million dollars that makes up what
we call the corpus of the funds all the
proceeds that we receive that went into
what we call the telstra fund fund 2705.
with that brief background i'll go ahead
and turn it over to our treasurer erica
jacquez
thank you barbara
hi erica hello good afternoon
erica hawkins city treasurer
i'm going to start by going over our
investment policy
the investment policy is las cruces
municipal code chapter 2 article 5
division 2.
the intent of this division is to
establish the authority and procedures
for the investment of the city funds
the criteria for selecting the
investments and the order of priorities
should be as followed the first criteria
is safety of principles and the foremost
objective of the investment program
investments shall be undertaken in a
manner that seeks to ensure the
preservation of capital in the overall
portfolio
the investment portfolio should remain
sufficiently liquid to meet operational
requirements and unanticipated cash
needs
also the investment portfolio should be
designed with the objective of attaining
a market average rate of return
under this division the following
investments are allowed
u.s treasury
u.s agency money markets mutual funds
and commercial paper
these instruments are safe and low-risk
investments any money identified as long
term may be invested in the state
investment pool or the sic
quarterly investment reports are
provided to council council periodically
reviews and approves
any sic investments
the investment strategy
the money in the telstra fund was
identified as long term resolution
approved on june 18 2007 established an
investment strategy
it allowed the treasurer to manage the
investment
of 40 of the proceeds that 60 percent
remaining
was invested in the state investment
council of that 60 percent 30 was in the
large cap
20 was in the small medium cap and 10
was international
annual investment income
annual investment income for the telstra
fund has varied throughout time
the investment the investment income
earned from 2007 to present it's close
to 8 million dollars
with an average of 495 000 per year
investment income is defined as profit
that is earned from investments
the book value is the price paid for the
investment and the market value is the
current market price of that investment
market value
value is theoretical any gains or losses
are realized with the investment is sold
fund value fund value what makes up the
fund value fund value is the sum of what
you put in
the fund which is the corpus plus any
investment income received as dividends
and interest minus any allocations spent
out of the fund
our um sorry
the telstra fund market value as of may
31st is 37 million dollars
the market value of the state investment
council
is 30.1 million dollars the market value
of regular investments is 6.5 million
dollars
our regular investments is in u.s
treasury and u.s agencies
the tail source cash balances 400 000
dollars this money is what we currently
have in our bank and it earns interest
overnight
now uh chelsea will come over and go
over that location
hello
good afternoon jose trevigno i'm the
controller
so what is the telstra facility fund the
tushar facility is a special revenue
fund
as defined by accounting principles a
special revenue fund is used to report
proceeds of specific revenue sources
to be used only for the specific purpose
determined by city council
on october 2004 the towshare fund was
restricted to health-related programs
and health-related capital projects
to be determined by city council
three years later on october 2007
city of council approved resolution
8-112
which was adopted with the definition of
health care services as the proceeds
from a transfer from the telstra
facility fund and any general fund or
other monies
shall be dedicated to the health-related
public service fund which
shall be used to support the continued
physical
mental developmental
emotional and social well-being
safety and housing needs of the city of
las cruces residents
and to improve the lives of the sick
indigent or low-income people of
the city of las cruces
so what has the telstra fund been used
for
most recently in 2019 city council
approved three resolutions for emergency
immigrant refuge
humanitarian assistance also known as
asylum seekers
the total amount that was allocated was
one million seventy five thousand
dollars
for its efforts in aiding in a system
assisting asylum seekers who have come
to the u.s the city of las cruces was
recognized as one of the 13 real life
heroes on world humanitarian day this
story was published at the usa.com and
if you google it it'll still be there i
went to make sure it was still working
so
in addition
following asylum seekers we had another
emergency
that not only hit las cruces but all
over the world
from april 2020 through february 2021
city council approved resolution after
resolution for emergency assistance to
support activities related to coven 19
emergency response
the total amount that was allocated
towards covet was three million eight
hundred thirty seven thousand five
hundred
in addition to emergency responses the
telstra fund has funded other
initiatives such as the ones shown here
i'm not going to read them all
but some of them include property
purchased at 1101 west amador for
community of hope expansion
the purchase of the horse and hound
facility for the casa de peregrinos
expansion
another allocation includes 577
600 for the messiah valley desert hope
affordable housing development to house
homeless individuals and provide
supportive
services such as case management and
behavioral health assistance to tenants
and here we have an fy23 adopted
allocations uh this slide may look
familiar this was presented by mr matt
science during the fy 23 budget approval
and the amount that was approved by city
council to be funded by the telstra
facility fund
is
three million one hundred eighty one
thousand one hundred and twelve
that will fund the programs that are
listed here which is for fire transit
health complex
uh liftoff las cruces and pal police
athletic league
and with that i will turn it over to
natalie green
good afternoon again natalie green for
the record in 2007 the related public
services program was formalized by
the council former councils had
traditionally funded social services as
early as 1987
so the health
the allocation to the healthcare
program was just a formalization of that
process
it included a competitive selection
process that's conducted by the health
and human services advisory committee
and it's done in accordance with the
council adopted application and policy
guide and then
just a note that the committee is
proposing revisions and updates to that
policy guide over the summer
all recipients have executed service
agreements with targets and measures to
meet they do report those demographics
to us monthly as part of their
monthly
request for reimbursement
i did include just a total for fy22
to date as of our last
monthly invoice round
all the collective impact is that they
have served well over a hundred thousand
people and i have that broken out into a
spreadsheet that we're happy to share
i also wanted to include some sort of
non-demographic data more qualitative
data and so i have a few examples that
i'll go over
the first is our boys and girls
club
again
youth development programming has a
significant impact on youth development
and how they
their future and so the boys and girls
club estimates that the funding with the
funding the city provides it saves
families approximately 1.5 million
dollars a year in child care expenses
la pinon
in addition to their monthly programming
and their building expansion
they've been able to expand their
programming so they are now doing child
abuse exams and then in august they'll
be starting domestic violence exams and
those exams are really used for the
evidentiary process so you know they
have a direct
correlation to the ability to
assist the conviction process
for el cruzeiro and my friend's place
again they're providing long-term
tenancy supports to families and runaway
youth
the council was very proactive in
meeting an urgent and unmet need for the
community at the time there was no place
for people between the ages of 12 and 17
to go if they were experiencing
homelessness so the telstra fund helped
relaunch the my friends place it's been
self-sufficient
after they committed five years of
funding and my understanding that's been
self-sufficient since year three
for casa de peregrinos for expanded food
programming
they did both their food rescue and
their mobile pantries their food rescue
for just last year rescued about 5
million pounds of food they were able to
distribute that to about 30 000 families
and again that's food that's being
gleaned from grocery stores and so
that's also five thousand pounds that's
not going to our
self-solid waste central facility
our third district court they do their
uh from a quantitative standpoint it's a
smaller amount of service but again they
do very intensive case management
services
for
our veterans to keep them out of the
criminal justice system so as part of
our funding they were able to leverage
that and get a bureau of
justice assistance grant in the amount
of five hundred thousand dollars and so
we still continue to support that
program
roadrunner food bank in dona ana county
again as part of their childhood
initiative program has distributed five
thousand or five hundred thousand pounds
of food
they estimate
uh that that saves families
approximately 1.2 million dollars in in
monthly food or annual food costs and
then
they also run a senior hunger initiative
and they estimate that that cost savings
is about 300 000
and again for a fixed income family
the survey reported that most of them
say those food distributions allow them
to
use their scarce resources on other
things other than food so like utility
housing stability medical costs
for southern new mexico diabetes
especially in the last year given the
shortage of specialty care they've been
filling a lot of that medical gaps many
of our primary care providers in lieu of
the ability to send someone to an
endocrinologist or a special specialist
for diabetes care is using
southern new mexico
diabetes for that and so they provide
not only detection services but
education services
for those of you who don't know las
cruces only has two endocrinologists one
of them does not take medicaid and then
the other one while both of them are at
least six months before you can get into
a specialist so
for
a community given our poverty rate which
has you know a lot of direct correlation
with diabetes diagnosis they provide
that essential service
and so as part of their
[Music]
metrics that they reported to us
not only did they test about 6000 people
this year not just with glucose but with
blood pressure cholesterol a1cs and
others and a lot of their reports
sorry my
documented out of range results and then
for communi hope i wanted to include our
expedited social security income
program so that is a program that we
fund a person that helps people who are
unhoused
secure their
social security benefits again if you
don't have a permanent address or a
permanent house you even though you may
have a
disability it's very hard to access
those services
if without this person
they have a very successful rate
even prior to this year they had almost
an 80 success rate they processed more
social security income
applications than all the other
sore reps in the entire state with the
exception of unm who had like a staff of
20 and so they were very successful and
that helps people not only access income
but healthcare services and then that
allows them to
end their homelessness and really
contribute to the grt and our landlords
and so that's just a sample um council's
interested in more we can provide that
and i will pass this next phase on to
leanne demouche
good afternoon mayor mayor protoman
council for the record land damoch
finance director and i've got the best
part because i'm going to be up here
taking a lot of notes from you hopefully
we have delivered
um some of the topics that you as
council were looking for
we do listen to you and we write down
about our notes and part of our notes
are in this discussion topics that we
have here we've heard you talk about you
know how are we going to use this fund
uh we have these definitions do we need
to change the definitions and look at
that
what do health related services mean to
the council i think this recently came
up for one of the counselors as a
question
future investing
how should we invest the fund
where should we go you know where should
we be investing these funds are should
we go
you know less out of the long term and
go more into the short term of our
investing um and then also too one of
the things that i've been bringing to
you and also to our finance select
committee is to reevaluate or recess
this risk tolerance questionnaire and i
think actually i'm not quite sure if the
mayor's still online i think he is but i
think the mayor was the only one that's
on the previous the current council that
ever took part in that risk tolerance
questionnaire that we did this was done
back in 2006
it was a council assessment allocation
strategy and i hear the mayor
that's why i'm still here
okay thank you mayor um and then just
further
further guidance on reporting of the
telstra
for the allocations and the impacts that
came across very strongly from the
council on what are the impacts where is
this you know so that way you as a
council can take that back to your
constituents and so we know that that's
really important to you and so we
directed that part of this presentation
towards that direction as well
and so these are some of the discussion
topics of course that we brought that
you know bringing forward to you that
you know we we caught in our notes and
some of your past council meetings and
work sessions but however we'd like to
turn that discussion
over to you and take notes and answer
any other questions that you may have
addressing the telstra
fund thank you leanne i'm gonna i'm
gonna start with mayor
yeah because i may lose you because
we're crossing over
so just a couple things
thank you for that presentation just a
couple items just to maybe have a staff
or your department look at
leanne
so let's say we were to
maybe shift some of that money
in the next year or so i i broke it down
like for example 5 million and to t
bills or treasury bills
that may be for one year
uh treasury notes another five million
those
i think we can do two years
and then
i don't know if you've ever heard of
it's called treasury
inflation protected securities or tips
and i think the maximum on that is five
million that we might be able to do and
that would be for five years
and and that's specifically meant to
help us with uh regarding inflation and
that's why there's only a certain
limitation on that and these are all
through the treasury department so a
little bit should be a little bit safer
so i just wanted to
use that as a discussion or a
conversation starter and then kind of go
from there and then i you know right now
i think
you know we're we're
in some unprecedented times and that's
why it's concerned me a little bit and
that's why this this discussion is very
timely
because i don't want to be
you know in my opinion
where we're still at i think we need to
kind of pull it back a little bit for
the next year or two and see where that
goes and then also that's why i like
when we're able to use this money
with our
housing partners because if they could
pay us three percent interest or so
three three and a half i mean that's
that's pretty good and so anyways that's
that's all i've got um i'm sure so if uh
i lose you
if i lose you
i'll
maybe try to pick you up a little bit
later but for the most part i'll try to
listen as much as i can and i'll
probably be off in the next 20 minutes
thank you mayor
um we have
eric i think wanting maybe to say
something or alien or well mayor mayor
protest council i was going to have
erica she uh in one of her slides she
showed you what um the resolution showed
i was going to maybe have her cover
where actually this the funds the
long-term funds where we have those
invested right now in the percentages do
you have that
oh
yeah it's 20. there you go
so um the first
the first one is what the resolution
approved
i'm sorry will you say your state your
name for the right erica jacques
treasurer
uh the first one is on what's on my left
the resolution approved this is the 60
percent that the resolution allocated
it's 17 international
50 large cap and 33 small cap that's
when we started in 2007
and then this is our current one to the
right it's international it's at 13
small mid cap is at 28 and large cap is
at 59 percent
so mayor murray protem uh and the
council i just wanted you to see that
we're actually not too
much off from what the original
resolution was
so as far as where we're investing our
funds for the long term
thank you leanne
councillor bingo mo thank you mayor
um i just have a couple thoughts but i
would like to say leanna yes on this
discussion topics you know
when you ask when you ask me i'll speak
for myself how should we invest them
where should we invest them
as a 34 year old whose family has
no dealings in the investment world
i wouldn't even begin to
tell you where to start and so for me i
think my ask would be
can you give us sort of
some options something to react to i
think for me would be really helpful you
know we've been having some of that
conversation in the finance select
committee
um
that would be helpful for me something
to react to as opposed to this sort of
more broader question that i frankly
have no idea how to answer in this
current moment so mayor mayor pro tem
counselor bencomo
that's a i totally understand where
you're coming from and actually i went
back and listened to the 2006
work session that was brought forward
after
it was bringing forward the results from
the questionnaire
from the
risk tolerance questionnaire actually
heard the mayor he sounded very young
[Laughter]
but
actually it was through this risk and
mayor i know if you're still online i
know that you remember this during the
risk tolerance questionnaire they
actually were able to derive a mix of
where
they felt for the next 20 years that
this fund should be invested
it was put on by
the rbc but it was the other side of rbc
which has to deal with investments we
hired somebody to come in and do the
risk tolerance questionnaire they came
up with the mix of where we should
invest this
these funds and at that time of course
we only had the corpus the initial
corpus which was the 26 million and so
they brought forward their
recommendations of how that mixture
should be invested and did a very good
job
and so we i would our recommendation i
think from the finance department is
that we've been saying is that maybe we
bring forward and hire somebody put out
an rfp to maybe have somebody come in
and do a risk tolerance
questionnaire and give us where they
feel like in the next 10 15 20 years we
should be investing this fun thank you
leanna i really agree with that i would
like to see that happen i think we've
been again talking about it in finance i
would like to see this risk tolerance
questionnaire come up and now can you
explain that process does it happen in a
setting like this or is it like one to
ones or how does that happen
um well my understanding from listening
to the presentation that i did was that
the company that they hired
rbc came in and actually met with each
individual counselor i think they did an
initial and i'm not sure because they
didn't go into specifics in the work
session that i listened to but it sounds
like that there was a questionnaire that
was sent out and most of these questions
were giving you different scenarios of
how you would like to what your
investments
risk tolerance is are you wanting to go
strictly 100 i'm just giving an example
100 into the international market or do
you just want to invest in t-bonds or
would you like to see a mixture of doing
you know something that's safe but still
you know can give you a higher
interest you know rate coming into
um it's it's it's looking at how risky
you would like to take for these funds
okay that just seems like the
appropriate next step for this one given
um how long it has been given
the recent
emergencies we've had and had to step
into the telstra fund and
frankly emergencies that are coming up
like climate change related emergencies
right and so i just think it's important
that we have that kind of conversation i
will say on the other side i only have
ideas for how to spend it
so
perhaps the risk questionnaire might i
might they might hate me um but i did
want to know before i pass it on to my
colleagues that
i wondered for a very long time and i
know there was advocacy efforts in past
from organizations from non-profit
organizations
like community of hope casa de
peregrinos and perhaps other
organizations who already are in
operating out of city owned buildings
like la casa and la pinon
um for them to be
a
direct budget item um instead of them
having to come
do the
um
this application process right this
competitive application process and i've
always wondered right we have
organizations like mavida
um film las cruces
dlc downtown
downtown las cruces partnership who do
have um direct line item
um
investments right they don't have to go
through a competitive process i'm
curious why i guess my question really
is to get to the point of it is um is
the telstra can the telstra fund be
dedicated towards something like that
so first of all mayor mayor pratim uh
council ben como i'm going to try to
answer your
first question about
the different you know film las cruces
levita merv
we actually have contract service
contracts with them and they have within
these contracts they have their
performance based and i think they come
up here and actually give a presentation
to council on a quarterly basis of what
their contract and their performance is
so if if these other agencies that
you're talking about if we do something
where it's a performance based
it would be something that we as staff
would need to look into to see if we can
do something like that i am unsure and
i'll let barbara looks like she wants to
add on
thank you yes barbara deleon for the
record so
i believe historically and natalie may
be able to add to this as well
the intent of the health related public
services funding
was that it would be at a certain level
that would not affect the corpus of the
funds so it would be limited to a
certain amount of money uh per year and
i think as natalie showed it it rose
it initially started i believe at 300k
into 400k most recently is at a 600k
annual um allocation from the fund
so by grouping all of the funding for
those nonprofits under that budget so to
speak
um it allowed for the control uh or or
the planning
of funds spent that wouldn't affect
the corpus of the fund i think if you um
add line items that that's certainly
under the purview of the council lineups
to the budget of programs to be spent
from the telstra fund for specific
organizations we certainly should in the
fy 23 budget we have programs funded
from the city that are under the tel
shore that are coming directly from the
telstra fund like mihcit for example in
the fire department
so again that's something that the
council could decide what we would just
need to make sure that we track is if
it's still the intent of the council to
keep expenditures at a certain level for
the fund and this could be part of the
discussion that we have within with
investments in risk tolerance um then we
just would need to very carefully track
that not only the expenditures and
allocations from the fund but also the
investment uh income and market value of
the fund so that we can balance the need
to preserve the fund with the need to
fund these health-related public
services and other programs thanks
barbara that's really helpful and thank
you for the language yes performance
performance-based contracts
i think that's worth the conversation
especially given
um
how much these organizations do for our
community already and how often they're
coming to us for any type of funding um
regarding any type of project
and having you know having making them
jump through all these hoops on a
competitive process um that could also
open up a wider pool of non-profits who
are able to receive the kind of funding
than that um the programs that natalie
spoke about so i i just think that's
worth the conversation for us to
consider
as we have this conversation on the
telstra front thank you mayor proteg
thank you councillor benkoma councilor
flores thank you madam chair
and thank you leanne for your
presentation
i think that we have
we have to keep in mind about the
telstra fund
uh what we have to keep in mind at all
times with the telstra fund is how the
international market is doing
irrespective of the fact that a small
portion
of our investment or our
um what's it called indicators or
whatever
does take into account the international
market
uh the way things are today right now
i mean with inflation
and
just everything being topsy-turvy and
things will probably get worse before
they get better
my suggestion would be that
we can't make any decisions that would
have a long-term effect because right
now like something
like i don't know when you'll be
reporting to the city council next
but um
i think that we're going to see
significant changes in our july meeting
for the
financial select committee
insofar as how the market's doing so i
think that um that's something that we
always have to keep in mind
to me i don't know about the rest of the
people in this room
26 million dollars sounds like a lot of
money
but in fact it's not when you think
about um
how it could possibly if we don't
protect the corpus the corpus can't be
touched that means that that that 26
billion can't be touched but if you put
it into an investment
and the market falls
so
there goes your money down the toilet so
those are the things we have to look at
and to make any changes right now that
would
require um
action by the city council
would be i think uh a slippery slope
so that that's certainly a road uh that
i would want to take at this time
maybe
you know after things you know we're
coming out of that great depression or
whatever it was called back in the 80s
and uh wouldn't you know it we're coming
out thinking are things coming up roses
and in fact uh we're really
i mean we're in a really bad spot
finance
market-wise so
those are my two cents thank you and
thank you so much i mean thank you
barbara
thank you counselor florida's counselor
karen
thank you um and actually to that sort
of thing about decisions that we're
making in this moment
um
[Music]
you did mention you did allude to sort
of that in the upcoming budget year we
have
i think that
something around to the tune of five
million dollars
of
three three million dollars of recurring
so these are new
things some of which are recurring and
some of which are not
and are they
i think when we made when we had the
conversation and thinking about mih and
cit
those
uh in the context of coming from the
telstra fund
that is
those would be recurring
um
sort of things that would consistently
come from the telstra fund so
how do those go on to the balance sheet
of versus
the health and human services grants
and then the the how this how do how do
these affect the corpus and how does
that i just learned that word today in
this context so thank you um barbara for
that but how do these affect the corpus
and and is that among the variables that
would be part of sort of our risk
assessment and our understanding of how
to plan going forward and and making
those types of investments in our in our
efforts and in general investment
efforts so mayor mayor pro tem uh
counselor corinne you're absolutely
correct in
what your your thinking is
there some of the uh items up here you
look at transit this is just a one time
it's the match that we need for
uh the seven electric buses if we get
the grant we're going to be using this
as a match um let's i'm going to knock
on wood because i want this grant to
come through
so
hopefully we get that if we don't it
goes back into the telstra fund so
the long term i would see that i'm going
to look at
our fire chief jason smith hopefully
we can
with general fund funding get the mih
and the cit program off of the telstra
and get it back on to the general fund
as
our general fund keeps growing hopefully
because of the internet sales tax
the growth of our city
bringing in
new businesses such as the new leader
that's coming forward for artico as as
we keep growing our grt is going to grow
with it so hopefully a lot of the line
items that are on here are going to go
off this telstra fund and go back on to
the general fund that is that's what i'm
anticipating that's what i'm working for
and i think mr peeley is working towards
that as well
hopefully that answers your question yes
any more questions counselor cran no no
okay
leanne
um
slide 20.
would you
oh i'm gonna i'm gonna ask erica to come
back up here
so looking at the pie the current pie
and where you're investing
there are
am i
safe to assume that there are various
institutions or companies that you're
that you're investing in in these
categories correct
erica hawkins for the record yes you are
correct so
um well international is pretty
straightforward but the small mid cap
and the large cap is based
on what that market i mean sorry that
company is worth so it's like if we're
investing like in big companies
or smaller worth and the big ones are
like in the 10 billion dollars
yes okay so
i don't know about the rest of the
council women here
i would like to know which companies we
are investing very specifically
i think that's an important thing
especially when you look at the
international pieces um
[Music]
and and i think that as far as um
and leanne thank you i should say this
publicly and should have said it a long
time ago leanne and i participated in
the national league of cities
um financial
sort of how we're investing and what
types of markets
and companies we're investing in and i
learned a lot there and they wanted to
specifically talk to you so you made a
huge impression leanne so thank you for
that and barbara thank you for allowing
that to to occur i think that is um one
of the
most important things but they talked a
lot about equity
and and
and being inclusive and and i i think at
the at the core i believe this is what
we stand for and we should be investing
in those
the kinds of companies that are all
about that
right and um
and so it this is helpful but i'd like
to know more specifically what those
business you know companies are about
um how they are investing right the
money in in our money into whatever
they're about and it should align very
much with our values um in in my
in my um
opinion
yeah so mayor mayor pro council one of
the things that we may do and i'm and
i'm not going to promise this but we
should be able to do this is maybe
talk to the sic
and get a detailed report of what they
actually are reporting into i don't know
if when or do we receive
yeah
i'll go ahead and request
to get that information i believe they
either
maybe once or twice a year we get a
detailed report and then on a monthly
basis we see where each of our
of our um
if it's if the mid is doing good or
wherever they are at that point in time
but i can request that and then provide
that information thank you thank you
erica i appreciate that yeah and mayor
mayor pratim we may even ask to see if
maybe they could participate in some
kind of presentation as well we'll see
um i don't know if we've ever had the
sic i mean it's part of the state
investment council maybe somebody from
the council can
talk to the ca our council and
that would be great i've never been i
don't think i've ever had them here
before
i know we've had um our rbc come and
speak very specifically about some some
things but um
and and i would agree um and i with the
survey i think that's an important thing
and i just want to clarify
that survey that was implemented to
council 20 years ago i'm
suspecting
um did you have to go to bid for that or
did you use our financial partners to
make that up and and meet one-on-one
with council
let me see if erica has information on
that
during the work session that i listened
to counselor there was no information on
that i just know that they hired it was
rbc
it was uh
the person that gave the presentation
was john pickett at the time so
okay
i know mayor wanted to clarify that um
hi mayor
yeah i'm just gonna say i don't recall
us going to bed i think we just used our
uh
our financial partners and they kind of
came up with um
the risk tolerance questions and then we
since we just invested with the state
investment council they have certain
packages so to speak you know if you
want to if you're more moderate if
you're
real conservative or if you're
looking for something that's a higher
risk or higher return
then um
they they have certain packages already
set up so it wasn't like we purposely
picked one company or another
so for me i think for both of us i i
think that route in doing the
one-on-ones and the surveying
but i don't
and if we had to go to bid that would be
uh a really tough because i think time
is of essence here and so could you find
out leanne if that's something that
we're gonna need to do
and then you can bring that back to
council
i think it needs to be done asap and
hopefully we'll be able to to just pull
them
over to do something like this yes so
mayor mayor pro tem and i think erica
has a little bit to add but we're eric
and i will work on that and get that
taken care of thank you leanne thank you
um
and then
[Music]
i i'm not opposed to having a line item
very specific to our nonprofit
partners that are provide the survival
services like our casa de peregrinos our
community of hope
these are lung
standing partners with us that do
such excellent work
and and i think that's an important and
important piece that we should consider
and then lastly
um
i i really like the the data that
natalie um
provided to us i think that's
really important
and and i've
ifo and i have had a conversation about
a evaluation
component like and making sure
that as we are providing funding for
those specific areas of lyft las cruces
or mih that we're able to really show
the public that we're affecting poverty
and
food insecurity um in
in in very tangible ways um i think it's
good to to specifically um
um
understand that we feed
thousands of people and with so you know
tonnage of food but i i i wanna i want
us to be um
more specific about
uh
sort of the effects that we have on
those areas that have been the
priorities that we've given evil
as well and
i think are are important
um i don't think that we have anything
like that currently
that we could easily um draw down those
measurements to to give to the pup to
the public
easily and for me i think it's one of
the more important things as we continue
to use
you know this funding and that those
meaningful ways and then of course i
would say that demographics and um
you know what is the need and the the
specific districts and those distress
areas that i think are are important
um that and and then that we identify
using the health data and through our
health policy review committee and the
three of us counselor karan counselor
flotus and i sit on that and we have
gone over a significant amount of data
and so when we look at those pieces
where diabetes is an important thing
i know one of the top things was air
quality
another thing that's really affecting
the public
heart you know heart condition hard um
what is the right the proper term heart
conditions is another i think
so
we can always
explain to the public these are our top
three
ailments that are really plaguing our
city it could mean obesity whatever that
is and that we say we are investing this
much money to affect change in these
areas
um and and and so
i think
being able to have that at the the tip
of our fingers um leanne in terms of
those kinds of things is an important
thing for me
heart disease thank you mayor he's
listening he's still on
heart disease
okay
and then let's see do i want to say
the other thing that we've been having
um a lot of conversation with access to
health care
and
natalie touched briefly on that those
specialty appointments that we don't
have enough of but i'm thinking about
our folks that
um
need access to
the hospital emergency service or maybe
it's cancer and maybe it's some other
very serious
things and and and not having that
access so having a fund that we could
utilize for people
that um
are lower income that are that are in
the cusp of not not qualifying for
medicaid
i think is also an important thing that
i'd like for us to look at
and with that i will turn it over to
counselor
abeda
thank you mayor pro-tem and thank you
leanne uh i do
have a couple questions and
comments um related to what my
colleagues have said too but one of the
things that's
kind of clear for myself is that if we
start doing line items
in this fun then something like my risk
tolerance would be much lower
i think and so when we have
um
you know maybe different scenarios that
are brought back to us again i'd like to
be able to see
what those sort of correlations might
look like
and i'm
less tolerant of risk towards that um
corpus
so i'm i'm just kind of looking at those
items
the definition that we have
for services
for myself has seemed very effective
when we did
everything that we needed to for
covid response
we were able to use those definitions
but looking forward if there's other
types of emergency responses
that we might have to address
just looking at that definition and
making sure it can be brought forth
as was talked about there's possibly
climate issues
or other types of emergencies
yeah i was going to say
yeah
thank you
barbara dallian for the record um
counselor beta yes i think
there's a very
intricate and delicate balance
with risk tolerance and funding
opportunities when you're trying to
balance that we have many needs in this
community
and that's why i made that reference to
you know if we're still trying to
preserve the corpus
we would approach investments and
allocations in a certain way if there's
other direction that's given
then we can pivot
in the last four years or so we've seen
quite an increase in expenditures from
the telstra fund when i first started
here in 2010 we were just beginning to
spend the i think it was 300 000 a year
for the health-related public services
and that was the only thing that was
being spent from the telstra fund so 300
000 a year then went to 400 000 a year
and then you saw some of the examples of
allocations from
2017 to the present where we have
several million dollars in building
acquisitions and response to emergencies
things like that and then that's why we
we're just being very careful to make
sure that we're tracking uh the corpus
of the fund
we're certainly we've certainly been
able to spend um
increases that we've seen in the fund
and in income
but we have to continue to monitor that
very closely if you if you dial back
your risk tolerance
for investments you're you're not going
to yield as much uh because you're
concentrating on preserving
your funds and so you're not going to
yield as much for expanded opportunities
but again it just all goes back to what
the intent is of the council uh for the
preservation of the fund the growth of
the fund and the types of expenditures
that you'd like to make for the fund so
yes that that will all play into
ultimately um
the information that we receive from
from you about how we manage and and and
how we are good stewards of the fund
that's great thank you and as councillor
ben como had said education on uh
projected
uh i guess market outcomes or analysis
would be very helpful too so we can
understand what that
looks like and thank you mary part-time
thank you counselor i bait that any
other
comments seen none
how about public comment is there any
public comment
scene and hearing none leanne do you
have some final words
that is all from us um
mayor purchase man do you have enough to
move forward yes
we were we did what we were intended we
intended to do yes ma'am you sure did
i've got my marching orders and i'll
work with my staff and mr peely and
barbara
thank you so much leanne and staff
barbara
okay next up is our cannabis
revenue allocation work session number
22-030
economy
oh look at the first story i got
thank you councillor flores as you're
running the show right now
you called it right it's a show
thank you ikani damobiao assistant city
manager and uh here what you have in
front of you
is the local cannabis revenues
appropriations presentation and
discussion
first of all behind me we have uh
various staff who will
who will be presenting
and i'll be getting to that in a minute
on the agenda we have the
review of the finance luc committee and
edprc this presentation
went through
two internal meetings with city council
members on it and so they actually
helped us put this
presentation together so we as staff
accommodated made adjustments
additionally we'll be reviewing the
revenue forecast dr torres
has run some great analysis
we'll be reviewing police impacts and
police needs and fire impacts and fire
needs
just wanted to share that these are not
essentially costs
that police is
is requesting us for
this was administratively from the city
manager's office we wanted to see if
their true cost to the cannabis revenues
as it moves forward we wanted to bring
this to you proactively to city council
so
dr torres went to police and fire to see
if there were any costs that would come
about kind of
the cannabis industry being being
approved and these are the impacts that
you'll see later in these
later in this presentation including
some opportunities from economic
development the third item we'll be
reviewing from
matt science uh
reviewing the tax escalator a little
history on cigarette tax in the city and
replenishing the telstra fund this is
the reason why we wanted to go
strategically after the telstra fund
because there were
many of the questions that were asked in
the edprc economic development prc was
actually hopefully answered in the
previous presentation so we just wanted
to save some time because that was
important to the edprc and then we'll
have
irene parra
compare some of the cities from denver
los angeles and portland and share some
of the economic development
opportunities
so in the finance select committee on
april 22nd there were two things
that
that was shared as major ideas number
one the consensus to replenish the
telstra fund there was a consensus for
that from the finance elect committee
another idea that was thrown out at the
financial committee that i wanted to
share quickly was that there was a
percentage shared that
if
if it was to
if funds from the cannabis exercise test
was to go forward to
the replenish the telstra fund that
perhaps
there's a percentage that would go to
the telstra fund and then there was a
minor percentage that be saved outside
of the telstra fund for projects that
didn't fall under the scope of the
telstra fund such as percentages 9010
20 or 70 30. those were some of the
ideas thrown out again i just wanted to
share some thoughts that were shared
on may 18th staff presented in front of
the economic development prc and this is
where there were a lot of tell sure
questions tell short funding questions
again
a lot of those questions were answered
in the previous presentation but
but questions such as
the history communicate the history
understand the history the creation of
the telstra fund
and
really understand the its intended
purpose
another thought that was shared as well
is to understand the past performance
impacts and evaluate outcomes of the
telstra fund which was
shared before and then also emphasize
workforce training
additionally prioritize drug treatment
plan there was
the idea that it or the priority to fund
evidence-based programs versus just
regular programs that are not evidence
based just wanted to communicate that
and next up we have dr torres to share
the forecast and revenues
thank you mayor pro term and members of
city council my name is monica torres
city economist for economic development
and i will presenting the potential
revenues
for cannabis our model is based on
potential consumption and it is based on
a number of assumptions on population
that is 21 years in november over the
grow rate the population from el paso
that might consume
and from clinton socorro no population
from mexico or other parts of texas were
taken into account
we also took into account
the number of medical licenses and sorry
i think
and potential in
consumption
assumptions on the amount that is
consumed the frequency the price we
didn't take into account any indirect
revenues or any potential supply side
shocks
that said this uh diagram here presents
an overview from our model
we took
the local population and estimated the
population that is 21 years and over and
assume another
grow rate of one percent
then we removed the users with a medical
license
and we use half of the percentage of the
people that have reported that they have
consumed cannabis in the past month in
the
national survey for drug using and
health
from this potential population of
consumers
we took into account a
population that might grow their own
product and arrive to a total potential
recreational consumer
from this there's a wide range of
products and prices
so we
from literature review we found that 81
of the consumers will smoke cannabis
there's 26 percent of users might use
topicals and about 55 percent will use
edibles we assume a price
and a frequency to arrive to a potential
recreational cell we took the same
approach for population outside
las cruces but we only use half of the
10 of the population from
el paso so corona clean assuming that
the rest of the people will consume from
some southern park chaparral or anthony
when we arrived to potential sale we
took one third of the excise tax
the excise tax will be changing over
here over the next years
so for the full
the sharp percent or potential revenue
for cannabis sales
uh fiscal year 22 is more it's lower
than the rest because there were less
available months
now
the cannabis control division just
published
cannabis sales for april and may
we see that medical is very stable sales
we see a small drop in recreational
sales but we have to keep in mind that
during during april we have two very
important events the opening weekend and
the 420 event
and so the approximate
excise tax for april was about 82 000
and for maybe about 70 000.
just some interesting facts is uh las
cruces is among the top
five sellers in the state
about 55 on average as um
accounts for recreational sales
and las cruces contributes why not nine
percent to the total sales on the state
now with cannabis like with any new
industry there's new opportunities
challenges
a steep learning cure curve
and potential additional costs
so
that said i will turn it over to this
details that will talk more about the
potential additional costs
thank you
good afternoon deputy chief dan's las
cruces police department
in discussing what we were a possible
use for this cannabis
all of this is not strictly cannabis
based i want you to understand um
because what we're looking at is um
getting impaired drivers off the roadway
is where we like to concentrate this and
in our outreach and education
obviously you've seen
much of the
the media with the underage kids and the
cheetos and then
some of the illicit drugs that are being
laced with other things so we also want
to make sure that we're looking at a
safety aspect for this
so and also it aligns with many of the
council priorities like safe streets and
things of that nature because we want to
keep our motoring public safe i know we
want to make the city more walkable
bikeable things of that nature so we
want to make sure that we have impaired
drivers not on the roadway and
endangering those folks and all the
unimpaired drivers on the roadway
as you know we are growing and if you've
ever been at tel shore and lowman at
noon you can understand that
we do have some traffic issues whether
you're impaired or unimpaired so i just
want to go forward with this so in
working with dr torres
we estimated some potential costs mostly
in the training
part for the police department and
we'd like to also make sure that we're
doing outreach and education which i'll
explain as we go on
so let me go to this next one
there have been studies in washington
colorado and all other
areas where cannabis has been legalized
and we do see an uptick with impaired
driving under the influence of cannabis
and what we've seen nationwide not just
with cannabis
is
more people operating motor vehicles
under the influence of multiple
substances whether it be alcohol and
cannabis prescription drugs and alcohol
fentanyl methamphetamine
combination so obviously this is going
to impair folks is driving and in new
mexico as you well know we only have one
uh
per se limit for alcohol which is .08 if
you are arrested and you have a blood
test and you're over 0.08 you are
presumed to be impaired
that's actually fairly easy because
there's been long-term studies through
the national highway transportation
safety administration things of that
nature
now when people are impaired by any kind
of substance whether it can be
over-the-counter
illegal drugs
cannabis
or alcohol or any combination of those
they're all going to react differently
and be psychoactive at different times
depending on when the person ingested it
how much they ingested and what
combination
so when an officer comes in contact with
them because there is a driving
infraction a crash
they're asleep in the drive at
whataburger or something of that nature
could be one of our officers i'm just
kidding we like whataburger
just kidding just kidding but um
so we're going to go ahead and we're
going to do an impaired driving or if
you want to call it dui for the easiest
term driving while impaired okay we are
going to do um our standardized fields
for body tests all our officers are
trained to do so but most of the time we
concentrate much of our training on
being impaired under the influence of
alcohol
okay which is a central nervous system
depressant the same category as xanax
prozac
and um and other
medications that affect that particular
central nervous system in that way
what will happen
through our policy and through the state
of new mexico is you have to be under
arrest for driving under impaired you
will take a breath test if it's anything
under a 0-8
then we would like to go to a drug
recognition expert exam which is a
12-step systematic process which is
developed in 1970 by lapd it has been
certified through nitsa it is in all 50
states and many countries throughout the
world okay
what this does is it takes an officer
who is
very very well trained i was a drug
recognition expert and a drug
recognition expert
instructor because i have a passion for
impaired driving that's
not no not being impaired while i drive
but
for enforcing
for enforcing that i think that's one of
the most proactive things an officer can
do is to get folks off the roadway um
you know with a very very dangerous
weapon if they're not using it correctly
if you think about it it's a two
thousand pound weapon that you could
hurt somebody with so i was very
passionate about that um it's very
intense it's like taking a semester of
biology and chemistry rolled up into a
semester so you need also have very
dedicated officers who are passionate
about it
so um
those officers will come in and do a
systematic 12-step process and determine
what of the seven categories of drugs
that that person is psychoactive at the
time so just as an example
if they if someone was under the
influence of methamphetamine and
cannabis or
methamphetamine and um let's say
fentanyl
they're all going to react differently
so the what the officer will determine
is yes they are impaired and they're
under impaired under this category of
drug it's it's i'm not going to say it's
oh it's you know hydrocodone or it's you
know cocaine or it's just a category of
drug okay
so and then we work with the district
attorney's office and the city
attorney's office to go forward
um with charging this person and and
having uh the criminal
the appropriate criminal criminal
penalties assessed for driving while
under the influence
understand if there is cannabis involved
um it would only be as far as the
driving behavior if it's on them
personally or whatever that's it's legal
so there's no involvement there it's
specifically because they're driving
under the influence okay these drug
recognition experts we also work very
closely with a lot of our community
stakeholders specifically the las cruces
public schools when i was a drug
recognition expert
they do you know in-service training um
every
right before school starts i would get
together with the school nurses because
they would see a lot of
kids that would be impaired obviously
they're not driving but we teach them
hey this is what it might be so you
would have a better way of addressing
their medical issues and getting those
kids help and not
not any kind of criminal but let's get
them into treatment or if they are
overdosing let's get them some medical
assistance and
we can better assess and tell ems and
medical
providers at the hospital we think it
might be this category of drug okay we
also work with
the bus drivers they see these kids
every day they know them so the kids
asking a little strangely you know hey
it might be this and we talk more about
vaping and paraphernalia and other
things that they might see but we also
work with our
the the school bus company
work with our juvenile partners
community outreach anybody who would
like to have some
education about that parents we get a
lot of that from parents what should i
look for if my kids are using drugs or
under the influence of drugs and again
this is all
towards education deterrence treatment
nothing criminal at this point
so that's what the drug recognition
officers do okay so you have a
background of where they're coming from
um
there is a substantial training cost
because
um they're gone for the first two weeks
uh in this intense class and i just want
to let you know it's it's not like any
other training you've ever been to if
you fail one test you fail the entire
class they send you home and you take a
test every day
okay so you go through that and you have
to also complete a comprehensive exam
and then
we send you off to another location when
i went through it was the maricopa
county jail
in phoenix and
these people volunteered to let us
evaluate them there's no criminal
charges um to that and they love to
participate because it gets them
out of a very crowded jail cell they get
some free meals
and um they let us just evaluate them
and they'll tell they'll tell us to oh
no it wasn't this it was this this is
what i took so it also helps um the drug
recognition expert develop their skills
they have to have a certain percentage
rate of passing with what of what they
um
called is what you would call it what
the influence is there's also continued
training
national conferences
also constant updates now what these
dres can do is they can also help train
our patrol officers obviously the
officers that are out there day in day
out making contact with a motoring
public
and that would be a two-day a-ride class
advanced roadside impaired
examinations and not going to make them
a dre it's just going to make them feel
more comfortable with seeing someone
who's under the influence and being
comfortable with making an arrest
because what we teach in the academy is
very very alcohol-based so they're going
to look for very specific things
but many
other
any other substances do not react like
alcohol so we want to make those
officers more comfortable with that and
that is just ongoing training over the
next uh
three to five years we'd like to have
the entire uniformed division trained in
this and what's nice about the a ride is
that dres
can push forward that train the trainer
training so that is not going to entail
a lot of costs it would more just be
with the dress
we currently right now
just have one dre we would like to
go forward to have five to eight so we
can have enough on every shift and
they're also on call so
if you get a call at three in the
morning i remember taking those phone
calls having to go out and do the
evaluation so there are some overtime
costs and
things of that nature so in working with
dr torres we anticipated
training
travel costs because not all not all of
it is in new mexico with the cost of gas
just that was a significant amount um
hopefully um we would also work to bring
the training here to new mexico and host
it which would cut down on our costs
i want to say like in 2006 2007 uh when
i was in charge of the program we
actually brought it down here so it can
be done again
and with there are some federal funds
available through the national highway
transportation safety administration so
but i think
putting our focus to impaired drivers i
know you all get the speeding complaints
and all kinds of traffic complaints but
i think that's where we can really make
a difference in keeping folks impaired
folks off the roadway and our community
education working with our business
partners in the cannabis industry
to let folks know hey yes it's legal you
can possess it you can
ingest it however you wish but don't
drive a motor vehicle
and then we can work together i know
we've already done that with convention
and visitors bureau with some of the
things
and which also you never know could
spawn even more ride share who knows
those kind of other economic
opportunities that folks could have but
we really want to target it towards the
education as well with our young folks
and and keeping them diverted and
away from
all drugs as a matter of fact until
they're 21 and they can make that choice
um and then
making sure that school's a safe place
and working with their community
stakeholders if they're in education
that we can provide to them so we are
estimating and
like again working with doctor toys i
think this is a little on the high side
but this is travel flights you know
taking the worst case scenario we've got
to go to new york or something for for
training or something like that we would
be looking at approximately eighteen
thousand dollars per officer to get
trained um we would love to um
uh you know bring more and more on
and then have a good core of about five
um obviously this is not going to happen
in one year this would be an ongoing
process and then obviously using those
core officers that we've really invested
the money in to train um the regular
patrol officers to keep them their
skills and abilities where they need to
be
i don't know if you want to
ask me questions now or wait till the
end
we're waiting till the end okay yes dc
yes thank you
so um i'd like to thank dr torrez uh
tremendously um
she did a really good job in estimating
uh many of these costs so i appreciate
that and on the next presentation i'll
turn over to fire chief smith
and good afternoon uh
mayor may pro tem members of council
fire chief jason smith for the record uh
so i'm going to be talking to you about
the needs in the fire department for our
emerging business so as cannabis is now
legal in new mexico it is an emerging
business and we do have a lot of
people starting up businesses and
maybe transitioning from a previous
business or being a sole proprietor
somewhere else
but we do have a lot of new people
coming into this industry with no
previous experience on running a
business or doing applications and some
of the things that we've been doing with
community development
is having these wednesday meetings where
we have time set aside to meet with
individuals from the cannabis
industry and talk about their business
the code requirements and
what they need for entering in and
opening up a business
typically the fire
site is represented by lieutenant joe
leos
he attends these as well as our fire
protection engineer looking at a code
review and talking about
what they need to be aware of for what
they're going to be doing in the
cannabis industry so things like selling
retail have a certain set of
requirements whereas when you get into
production there's a different part of
the fire code that applies so the way i
think about this is the car industry so
you go down the street there's a car
dealership right there they sell
vehicles now if they wanted to now start
producing batteries because they're
going all electric right
they have a different part of the fire
code that applies and that's what we're
really seeing right now is as this
industry is emerging people are trying
to find their niche trying to find their
market share so they might start off
with retail and now they want to do
consumption or they want to do some
level of production
so it gets a bit complicated so
walking through what you see here on
this flow chart the different activities
that we have going on the meetings the
education special projects
as well as
code review and research
we do extend to them a pre-inspection
where we can actually tell them some of
the code that may apply
and then once they're ready for
opening up business the fire department
is the last entity that goes into their
business to do an inspection to make
sure they're meeting fire code this is
where we run into some issues with our
current
request is people are calling and
they're pushing to get open because they
want more of that market share and
they're not quite ready to open
so we have to say you know what you've
got to go back and look at these aspects
of the code so they go back down to
design review and research
because they weren't ready to open or
midstream they said you know i want to
do something more than just retail i
want to have on-site consumption so they
have different parts of the fire code
they have to meet
but if they are ready to open and they
have everything ready to go they can
pass their inspection and they really
won't see us until either something
happens or there's a complaint which
hopefully there won't be or the next
year when we have to be back in to
inspect that business for
the state
requirements
usually when that that happens they
continue doing um exactly what they said
they would now we have that with many
businesses right now where they just
continue business as is there's no
changes to the to the location they've
got their
either their suppression system serviced
an update or they have their smoke
sorry smoke detectors ready to go the
emergency lights are are fine and then
they pass and they won't see us again
for another year
but what we run into a lot of times even
before we get to field verification or
people are altering their building
or they're altering what they do on site
which can be frustrating for business
owners especially new business owners
who don't understand well this aspect is
legal why can't i do this and
it just takes us sitting down with them
and explaining look these are different
requirements of the fire code when you
switch from one type of business to
another there's a different set of code
you have to have to meet
so that's kind of the background of what
we've been doing to help out our our
cannabis industry uh working with them
uh i think very very well
and trying to be timely to their request
but you can see that when you start
following this flow chart
it can get complicated it can't get a
little frustrating
but we do try to keep everybody flowing
through the process so that they can
open
so one of the things that we're
projecting is
the need for another fire department
inspector
right now we have a total of four
inspectors
one is lieutenant jose leos we have two
inspector investigators and then we have
one fire inspector and then not shown
here is our fire protection engineer who
does a lot of the front-end plan review
so we have over four thousand businesses
that need annual inspections
and
just to be transparent we do not
go to all four thousand businesses every
year we don't have enough staffing to
make it we do approximately half that
number our inspector investigators as
the name implies they also do
investigations
so all three of our inspectors
do investigations as well they also go
to complaints they also
fill in on public education
so
that's just we can't meet the demand
right now
mean inspection time is about two hours
some businesses when it's just a simple
office it's easy to walk in and within
15-20 minutes you know that they've got
their extinguishers ready to go
exit signs work or maybe they don't even
require one because the size of their
building
and we're done some of the other ones
are much more complicated
for the state we took over inspecting
all of the public schools within the
city of las cruces those are very time
consuming when we look at supporting lru
the international airport and our fixed
base operators those take a lot more
time
usually going to the airport is at least
a week-long
ordeal going through there and trying to
inspect all the hangars as well as the
fbos
and wait time right now for new
businesses for what we call a br
business registration inspection is
anywhere from one to two business weeks
so five to nine days and that's first
come first serve
so it can give the impression that we're
not uh simply super
reactive
to their needs but we're just processing
things as they come through and usually
when they call them they say we need an
inspection it's are you ready for your
inspection is your business ready to
open and it's like no i'm still working
on a few things and then we try to
schedule them out
um you can see there are some of the
numbers from economic development
between 21 and 2022 almost a nine
percent increase in business
applications
so economic development they put this
through a model looking at our first
come first serve method of providing
business inspections the number of
business inspection applications uh the
time it takes to do a business
inspection in the available hours
every month eight hours a day 20 days a
month so very liberal i would say
approach to how much time we have to do
the inspections given our community
engagement and education and also our
investigation needs
but looking at five inspectors
we do feel that with a five percent
increase in the number of applications
per day as well as a two percent
increase in our service rate basically
how many inspections we can get done
every day
that we will be able to decrease our
wait time for these new businesses
hopefully below that five days five to
nine days that they could actually see
an improvement
the cost there for the first year of the
inspector is 155 000 that includes
salary and benefits of 87 000 roughly
vehicle and then 8 000 in training
going on past year one that cost
obviously decreases as some of those
capital needs
aren't required
so with that i think we're really trying
to meet the needs of the industry as it
is just emerging
help out our business owners and
first-time first-time business owners of
understanding how the fire code may
apply to them as well as maintain our
service level to the other four thousand
businesses that are in town
so with that i believe i'm
turning this over to matthew
thank you chief
hello
oops excuse me so thank you very much
chief
so good afternoon mayor mayor pro tem
and council it's great to see you all
today so i'll be discussing the tax
escalator as well as touching on the
cigarette tax and telstra fund
so with house bill 2
the state imposed a cannabis excise tax
and this is imposed on the cannabis
retailer so of course there are several
steps into making cannabis available to
users such as a producer who cultivates
a cannabis a manufacturer who
manufactures or packages cannabis
products and the retailer who sells that
to the end user
to qualified users again the excise tax
is only on the sale of the cannabis
for consumption
so this tax does not apply to medical
cannabis this is in accordance with the
erin and lynn compassionate use act also
the
municipal distribution is about a third
so that's 33.33 percent
they're also going to
assess an administration fee of 3
percent for reasonable costs for
administering and distributing the
payments to the municipalities
as you can see on our table below our
current excise tax through 2024 is 12
percent
currently so a third of that would be
four percent uh miss monica dr monica
torres mentioned that our our
average payments over the last two
months was about 1.9 million so that
translates to close to 80 000 for the
city so projecting that out if that
remains consistent we have potential the
potential to receive close to a million
dollars on that so starting in 2025 the
excise tax will increase one percent per
year so through 2030
that excise tax will be 18
so on the graph to the right um let me
see if i can increase
zoom in for you
so you can see the gradual progression
of the excise tax on this this is why
we're calling it the excise tax
escalator so in 2024 you can see the
municipal distribution in blue we start
off at about four percent
and through 2030 that will re
we will receive about six percent on
that
and the green is the state distribution
so i think the big question is how do we
utilize the cannabis tax so this is
nothing really new to the city of las
cruces in the past we did receive a
cigarette tax from the state of new
mexico this was allocated to a
recreational fund under special revenues
and we received about 55 to 65 000 a
year
and those fundings were used towards
playground equipment recreational
centers aquatics parks improvements and
the team program
so in 2012 those funds were reallocated
to
fund
projects at the university of new mexico
school of medicine and new mexico
finance authority for several
initiatives with a focus on health
so continuing
with a little further thinking on how to
use these funds i want to thank my
colleagues from finance for covering
some of the telstra funding allocations
that the funding was used for i'm not
going to list everyone but i'm just
going to reiterate some of the funding
uses that we have used
over the years so in 2017 we had 35 000
for livewell initiative 60 000 for mill
initiatives in 2018 we had 155 000 for
the mono imano pilot program in 2019 we
had the 75 000 for refugee humanitarian
assistance
880 000 for electric bus match
half a million for refugee humanitarian
assistance
401 000 for the non-profit allocation
in 2020 you can see that we increase our
usage so we have six hundred thousand
for atp sidewalks one point two million
for la penan uh one point three million
for the horse and hound purchase
and also close to two million for covet
assistance in 2021 again we had more uh
covet assistance of close to 1.5 million
extraordinary pay of half a million and
then quality of life community
assessment of 117 000.
in 2022 we have casa de pedorinas of 3.7
million
so this graph
shows the telstra funded projects over
the years as barbara delano mentioned
our previous uh allocation was close to
three hundred thousand in 2016
and previously
that number has increased to over a
million by 2018 we had another jump in
2019 to close to 2 million and we had to
spike during kovid for those assistance
for covent uses
of close to 7 million in 2021 we drop
back down to close to 5 million and then
we're back up in our current fiscal year
at the funding levels of 7 million
with that in mind in the great
discussion on the telstra fund we
realized that the telstra fund currently
does not have a dedicated revenue source
so as you can see
the slide that was presented also during
the telstra fund you can see that our
february market value was 42 million
that number has since dropped to may
to 37 million in may
so one of our recommendations and
potential uses for the cannabis excise
tax is to join forces with the telstra
fund
to fund some of the projects that are
important to council
and
that would
provide us with
the ability to keep the telstra fund
healthy and continue to use the
excise funding revenue that we receive
from investment income to fund some of
these projects
so with that all i'm going to go ahead
and turn it over to ms irene bada to
discuss what other cities are doing
thank you very much
good afternoon mayor pro tem council
members and bought a business
development administrator for the record
and today i will be discussing how
other cities are allocating cannabis
revenue
so cannabis has become one of the
nation's fastest growing industries as
of june 2022 38 states have legalized
some form of legalized cannabis
with 19 states including the district of
columbia and guam allowing legal use for
all adults
examining how other municipalities have
navigated this rapidly growing industry
will help the city in determining the
best way to direct funds to support city
departments as well as creating
programming to support the specific
excuse me the specific needs of our
community the city of denver los angeles
and portland provide some good examples
so in 2012 the voters of denver approved
amendment 64 legalizing retail sales of
recreational marijuana
legal sales reached
434.9 million in 2019 and currently all
of denver's marijuana-related revenue
goes into the city's general fund
the city first allocates the revenue to
three key areas including regulation
education and enforcement
of the projected 21.7 million that was
appropriated for marijuana specific
spending in 2020 the city budgeted 7.4
million in expenditures across city
departments and agencies for regulation
enforcement and education efforts
the breakdown per departments reflects
top priorities of the following areas
police and city attorney's office
receiving 18 percent the office of
marijuana policy receiving 17 percent
fire receives 13 percent followed by the
department of public health and
environment and the office of children's
affairs receiving eleven percent
additionally parks and recreation
received three percent the health
department receives two percent followed
by finance receiving one percent
more recently though that denver has
developed a multi-pronged approach to
ensure that communities that have been
disproportionately impacted by marijuana
prohibition can benefit from the
legalization
cannabis social equity work is focusing
on prioritizing three areas one support
for low and moderate housing projects
two
vacating low-level marijuana convictions
and three identifying areas of need in
workforce development licensing
ownership as well as entrepreneurship
programs
taking a look at the city of los angeles
in 2016 the voters of los angeles
approved proposition 64 that control
regulate and tax adult use of
recreational marijuana act
legal sales reached 4.4 million in 2020.
initially all of revenue was directed to
the general fund
however as legalization and the growing
marijuana industry expanded it became
clear that opportunities in this
industry were not fairly accessible to
all
most especially those communities who
had been disproportionately impacted by
the war on drugs
access to capital
business space and technical and legal
support remained various to entrance to
this new industry
as a result the city enacted the los
angeles equity fund focusing on the
following areas
social equity programming and illicit
market reduction
financing for social equity applicants
and owners
workforce and youth development
programming
community safety and violence services
racial equity and reparations
harm health reduction or excuse me harm
reduction in health services and climate
action and environmental services
allocation of marijuana revenue to the
los angeles equity fund will begin no
later than april 20 2023
currently the city of los angeles
allocates marijuana revenue to the
following departments climate emergency
and administrative costs received two
percent
justice fund and families department
currently receive four percent
business technical assistance and gang
reduction receive five percent with
community safety receiving six percent
illicit market reduction received seven
percent followed by a civil human rights
department receiving eight percent
economic workforce development receives
the largest allocation of 27 percent
this program includes grants and low to
no interest loans to provide capital for
planning and operational costs of
building and maintaining a business
funding for la rise which is a pathway
program for unemployment to permanent
work for youth and individuals who have
been previously homeless or incarcerated
as well as programming to support
employment and job readiness for youth
ages 13 to 24.
finally the city of portland
in 2014 borders of portland voted to
approve ballot measure 91 legalizing
recreational cannabis legal sales
reached 4.4 million in 2020. in 2016
voters passed a measure to approve 500
thousand dollars for a portion of
projected annual revenues from a local
tax on recreational sales
per city council's directive a community
steering committee process and community
survey provided guidance on funding on
how funding should be appropriately
allocated to address the areas
identified in the november 2016 ballot
specifically to support neighborhood
small businesses especially women-owned
businesses and minority-owned businesses
including but not limited to business
incubator programs
management training and job training
opportunities and providing economic
opportunity and education to communities
disproportionately impacted by canada's
prohibition
the steering committee dedicated 150 000
to businesses and technical support and
another 100 350 000 to grant funding to
support record clearing and workforce
development
here is the breakdown of those funds 30
percent goes to business and technical
support again for business incubator
programs and job training support and 70
goes to record clearing and workforce
development program programming record
clearing uh looks to address undo direct
harm to those disproportionately
impacted by cannabis prohibition by
removing barriers to housing employment
and education through legal support for
expungement fine reduction and charge
reduction and workforce development
programming focuses on training
mentorship and other workforce re-entry
support
we will continue to move forward um
in participating in the weekly
pre-application sessions as well as
one-on-one consultations
in addition to questions regarding
licensing and permitting the primary
focus continues to be financing
we have also begun talks with our local
partner agencies regarding the
development of cannabis specific
entrepreneurship and technical support
programming the programming would
provide guidance on building a solid
business plan
strategies for success in marketing and
managing and operating a cannabis
business similar to the basement
programs that we currently have in place
within the next year we hope to conduct
a market analysis of our local cannabis
businesses to identify needs
trends barriers and opportunities for
growth we will also be working with the
cannabis control division who will also
be conducting conducting uh tracking
data to include taxes sales of product
type expansion and product development
this data will serve as an outline for
the development of other certification
and degree programming
with our local educational institutions
currently cnm ingenuity which is an arm
of central new mexico community college
in albuquerque currently has online
workforce certification programs in
place
which provides mandated training
requirements in state rules and
regulations
safety protocols and ethics the program
helps to prepare job seekers for
employment in the cannabis industry
additionally unm continuing education
also in albuquerque is offering online
courses preparing students to become
informed and ethical business owners
we are working with our local
institutions and hope to see the
development of
similar programming to support our local
businesses and those hoping to enter
this new industry
and with that
i will take questions
thank you so much
i'm
looking looking yes counselor bingo mo
thank you mr pretend thank you so much
for the presentation everyone that was
very um
holistic and thorough i really
appreciate the thought being put behind
this um and thank you ikani for leading
the way
do you any of you
i feel like what we're missing right now
is
information from the state
i guess i would like to i would hate to
go down a path
where we're saying let's allocate let's
allocate our significantly smaller
portion of the taxes and this and this
xy thing
and then the state says we're going to
do the same thing and then we're not
being strategic with our
portion right and so is there yet any
information that we have from the state
i thank you
councillor ben como uh mayor and mayor
proteg
assistant city manager i reached out to
our lobbyists at this the state
he mentioned
that he is unaware there
from where he sits because that would be
the one
that i would expect is the closest i
know
irene
reached out to various cities in the
state i don't know uh maybe not in your
head or or sharing
we'll see what she knows
i read potter for the record so i did
recently have a conversation with the
director from the cannabis control
division and they are looking to try and
begin sort of a general outline of
programming that they want to also
provide which is why we're sort of
waiting on our market analysis because
we don't want the information to be
redundant we don't want the efforts to
be redundant and so once we get a better
idea of what that is going to look like
at the state level then we can see how
we can tailor it
so again it's not duplication of efforts
at the city level
yes thank you what is
do you think
our timeline like i don't necessarily
think this is an urgent matter we have
to decide by tomorrow how we're going to
allocate
the excise task
tax
what would you say our timeline is like
how much longer could we wait well in
terms of the market analysis when we
were looking at how other municipalities
have done it they waited about two to
three years just so that the businesses
could get a strong footing so they could
actually have some hard data to go on so
in terms of the market analysis we're
looking a few years out but in terms of
programming the state is hoping to have
something in place for my understanding
within the next year okay
um i mean connie do you feel like you
have some recommendation for us to make
a decision on this
for when we should make a decision on
this yeah if
great question uh councillor ben como uh
mayor miyagashima amir putin gandara on
city council
i i would say it it depends if you're
trying to
wait for when the state has something so
that we don't do have duplication of
efforts
from one
from my understanding of researching
this topic the reason
why the state didn't want to allocate
the same time that they legalized was
because it was too complex
there are too many people with too many
things and they said if we're going to
approve this we got to prove this
without allocating funding first
when i've listened to some webinars and
i've listened to some podcasts they said
that it's going to come after i'm
assuming if it were to come it's
probably going to come when it uh it's
going to come earlier next year um or or
in the time when the legislative is on
the on the floor meeting about that so
um i can continue to talk to our
lobbyist at the state level to see when
he's hearing about it but again that's
just if we're waiting if we don't want
to have a duplication of efforts and and
so we're making sure we're not putting
in the same pot then then then that that
is what i see i can continue to talk to
our friends in the state okay thank you
i appreciate that i'll certainly do my
own advocacy and
um
research on my end as well
in terms of that and i mean i guess one
way we for sure would not duplicate
efforts if if we decided to make
this um a direct
injection into the till short fund right
that sort of alleviates alleviates that
concern
though i think immediately
the
issues that fire raised and then
economic development i assume that you
all have had increased capacity in some
way shape or form as well given that
you're doing weekly meetings and
research and all of these things but
certainly i think if we want
the industry to be successful which i
think we do here and we don't have
capacity for
um
getting business site licenses out and
inspections out then we should meet that
capacity so that the
industry is successful and so that we
can continue seeing growth in the excise
task and so for me that is certainly
priority and whatever way we can
go ahead and fund that i think is
critical
in terms of well no i guess we don't
know yet either if the state is thinking
about
allocating any type of funding towards
public safety measures like towards fire
departments and police departments right
that's not a conversation we've heard
any rumblings on okay
um
well i guess i i don't
honestly a lot of my questions are i
feel like
um are based out of that because we have
we don't have enough information from
the state but i will say you know i i in
looking at um
other cities and thank you so much i
mean for that
research
i
i really do think it's
something to consider moving forward to
make sure we have a dedicated funding
source for the telstra fund that we can
make a larger impact again though that
is given the conversation we just had
about how do we use this strategically
and that it makes the biggest impact on
the community particularly on the
community that needs it the most
i would be
i will advocate on this diocese that we
stay away from
funding enforcement mechanisms given
that it has taken such a long time for
the industry to get out of prohibition
and then saying we're going to use
the this revenue
to then enforce this community again to
me feels
counterintuitive and and i would like to
see us
use these revenues
in a way that's going to improve
people's quality of life and
i think that telstra fund has the uh
huge potential of doing just that so i
would be um
i'm very interested in that pathway
forward even if it's some sort of half
and half split 75 i don't know right a
majority of it going to telstra fund and
the rest going towards things like the
pro the projects that
dc danes and fire and
chief smith have proposed um
but that's all i have to say for now
thank you
thank you councillor bingham and
councillor karen
thank you mayor potem and thank you
counselor ben como i think that your
questions sort of get to what i i'm
imagining i feel like um i would hope
that we can
i hope that some part of our legislation
was actually a little bit more proactive
in terms of justice impacted people in
our state and expungement and those
things that are happening i do think
that is part of the state process and i
don't know exactly how
that will trickle down to the folks who
have been historically affected by this
and might
and i so i do i would say i feel like we
have a need to cover our expenses for
the things that we're doing and i would
really like to see that as part of that
model but i think the telstra fund i
don't i i think that
the prior presentation and you're right
and the strategy of sort of framing this
and that is to think about how
to to dedicate funding but i also don't
know that the telstra fund has
necessarily been structured to
strategically help disproportionately
impacted communities and and in some
ways it does specifically related to
health but i think um i would like to
then see us to
not necessarily expand what the telstra
fund does but know if we're putting this
into the telshar fund that there's an
added layer of
there's an added lens of equity that
that really is looking at
the people who have been most
disproportionately affected and i do
think that there it may be some space
where
there are things like legal services or
expungement of of certain types of
records that may not be trickling down
into our communities and ways that we
can support agencies that might be doing
things like that might not be within the
traditional telstra fund model and i
would like to
be as broad as possible and considering
ways to do that so that we're directly
affecting
the change that i think this
this community deserves so that would
just be my sort of caveat to that i
think but i support
counselor ben como's sort of model for
thinking about replenishing the telstra
fund and
perhaps adding an additional lens for
for the specific communities that may
have been affected by by prohibition in
the past
thank you counselor karen um
anybody else
okay um i do want to
um pass on mayor's he he stepped off for
um it's been a bit
but he wants to see the tax the cannabis
tax used for substance abuse mental
health and homelessness if it's
available
and
we had a very robust conversation at our
economic development prc
um i i think we we took in a lot of
information we felt like telstra fund
you know that if we could
actually um
make money from that that that we should
do that it shouldn't just sit in a line
item right um
in in our in our budget but we also i
think
we're clear that we'd like to see it
given to substance abuse
or at least i'll speak for myself um
substance abuse and and mental health
programs very specific um
sanctioned by the samsa the
evidence-based programming i think that
is a very important thing
for us to do and i'll leave it at that
is there anybody out in the audience
they had didn't stick with us really
huh
no anybody in the audience that would
like to say anything specifically about
the cannabis item
nope okay see none
um
it connie did you get what you needed
from us i i did just okay
last question of clarification to you
mayor potemkanda and city council
so
do we want to wait find more information
from the state let's see what happens
there or
what would you
like to do with this what is the
yes counselor
yes
thank you and thank you ikani um mr
i think that uh you say wait
and wait for what what exactly
would we be waiting for that's a good
question councillor flores
i i'm just looking at the if if we were
to wait from the state it's waiting to
see if there's
any appetite for them to start dividing
priorities and start showing us where
they're going
um since that was brought up by
councilor ben cuomo um
and so i'm i'm asking clarifying
questions just to see when would you
like this to come back and
with what direction okay well that's a
very good question
but um it seems to me that you were you
know waiting for the state to do
something is uh contrary to the evidence
or the research that miss para
made in so far as looking at
municipalities so it's apples to apples
type of thing um
and i don't know if um the state would
be able to direct what we would like to
do with those funds since it's our
revenue
so um
i think that's the the question
and the question and so we
i think can start looking at how we want
to distribute the
revenue
is that was that the direction you were
asking for yeah so thank you councillor
flores yeah so we'll move we'll move
forward
i think so
i thank you mr
tom thank you madam thank you councillor
flores councillor avita yes thank you um
in my opinion it this looks like an
issue where
if we are getting some revenue in right
now
the item for getting another inspector
it seems like an immediate need to start
funding
and perhaps uh education as well
that dc danes uh
also
laid out so that would be something and
then that gives us time then to think of
the other options of potentially using
this money either in the telstra fund or
for what other other purposes but i do
think that we need to look on at least
funding um that inspector
item pretty quickly
thank you counselor the counselor bengal
council thank you mayor tim
um thank you for the question i agree
very much that um
priority right now is
funding the inspector
and
you know i don't see harman waiting what
what are we june
the session will meet in january it will
end by march
i'm assuming there will be legislation
on this i really am i could be wrong but
i am assuming that there will be
um
honestly six months eight months to me
that doesn't seem like um
and and this discussion
is us working on it so i don't think
even if we said you know what we should
move on it quicker than if we get to the
end of the year and realize that we
needed to move on it quicker it seemed
we kind of have a pathway forward laid
out you've all you have all done um
incredible work and laying out um the
brakes forward and so i don't
necessarily think we're starting at zero
very much the opposite actually i think
we have a great path forward
but i would like to see
i would like to see more information
coming from the state and in terms of
how they're thinking about funding
educational programs perhaps they are
thinking about funding
pd programs i don't know right but i
think it's important that we that we
wait um but in the immediate so in the
immediate it's just going to the general
fund right
right and
we're not touching it until we receive
direction from right council um so i
fully agree that i think the inspector
is
pretty immediate i
i'm sorry i have to take us back a
little bit i did mean to ask dc danes a
question regarding
any data you may have already on
impaired drivers
from cannabis
deputy chief danes
mayor mayor pro tem councillor ben cuomo
understand that new mexico um since it's
just been legalized in october i mean
excuse me uh april um but we have seen a
trend and so i'm going to
take my information from the closest
state i think that matches this
demographic would be colorado
okay so um
they have seen um
an increase in cannabis impaired driving
in general a slight increase but once it
was legalized it did go up
more than you would expect and i think
um and this is just my opinion so this
this is not
um
validated information this is my opinion
i think a lot of people made the
misconception well it's legal
and and then and then and the
consumption and the driving was two
different things so i think that's
something that we as a state as a city
have to work um very hard at educating
folks that consumption is one thing and
driving a motor vehicle is something
else um they did see an increase in when
they could get blood samples and things
in colorado of um
a cannabis in the blood system
for fatal crashes as well now understand
it may have been not just cannabis so i
don't want to throw cannabis under the
bus okay
and i know a lot of the industries like
don't compare us to alcohol and i
understand that
but i heard a very interesting
analogy and some you know i hope you
don't think i'm i'm not trying to be
funny and this is just a good analogy is
cannabis is like the bacon of the drug
world it goes with everything and so um
one of my instructors told me that i
about diet um but so a lot of people who
self-medicate
with illicit drugs i'm not talking about
medical cannabis or anything like that
or are suffering from other issues we'll
use cannabis
in addition to with like fentanyl
methamphetamine especially on your
methamphetamine users because it takes
the edge off so
yes we're seeing cannabis but there's
probably other drugs on board like i
talked about earlier with a significant
increase with poly drug use whether it
be prescription over-the-counter or
illicit drugs or a combination of all
three including alcohol but there was an
increase and i think um that's going to
happen with anything
you know when you turn 21 and oh i can
drink and you know things of that nature
so i think it's going to um
so that we have seen a statistical
increase and then i think it's going to
level off the more education that we do
um enforcement and and for getting
impaired drivers off the roadway i'm not
talking about the other kinds of
enforcement which you know we're
targeting uh communities and things of
that nature i'm talking about strictly
impaired driving okay um
and i think as we educate just like seat
belts
um you know uh you know you already
you've already seen the billboards don't
drive high and things of that nature so
i think um if we continue to target that
but i think we will see it um it's it's
a new it's a new thing and so um they
did see in colorado they did see it in
washington um probably a 20 to 30
percent increase um
but then it we're going to try to see it
level off more than likely i notice
in new mexico of all our evaluations
before even cannabis was legalized it
was the second most found
drug in the system
at that time but again that could be in
combination so i'm not just again i'm
not trying to single out cannabis so
please don't feel that i'm trying to do
it okay thank you does that answer your
question it does absolutely does thank
you
um that was just information that i
meant to ask her earlier but
again i think we have a good path moving
forward and i would like to see
more information from the state before
we make any final determinations not
that we couldn't roll it back right but
i just why would we do that thank you
cancer flores you had
oh uh
no thank you
okay
i
i understand waiting for the state to
determine where they're using
their funding i think that's important
aspect but i also think there's a need
right now in our community we have a lot
of information a lot of data to support
that and i don't think we should wait i
don't i think when you talk to the up
coalition
natalie green to our community partners
nonprofits that are specifically
addressing the needs of this community
we have enough data to move forward we
just need to decide what the priorities
are going to be and again for me it
would be in providing
funding for those evidence-based
programs for youth our
you know around addiction
um and adults youth and adults but
around addiction substance abuse usage
and mental health thank you okay
cancer florence thank you
so um
i i think there was um
one city i can't remember but there was
a 70
allocation to economic development
programs or economic development
and um and then the remaining 30 percent
was for business technology
and i don't remember the city
specifically but um
but i you know i've said this before
people say the root of all evil is money
but
in our city the root of all evil is not
having money so i think it's important
that we focus on
economic development when you have
economic development then you're going
to have the the capital or the revenue
to invest in other areas too i'm not
saying maybe 70
but
we really have to do that economic
development
that really brings big you know big
industries and when you look at a small
community like i think it was las vegas
that landed amazon distribution center
distribution center
why wasn't it
why wasn't it yeah las vegas new mexico
why wasn't it las cruces new mexico
and um and i i ponder on that i just
think you know what the huda
happened um
and i think that i'm very happy for for
that community
but um i think that we really have to
and i know that
our city manager thank you evo um has
worked very hard at uh he's working very
hard at getting
big industries here as is adavin
lopez in vita
so um
and so i think that
my
my uh my opinion or my
emphasis would definitely be in economic
development because i think that
by
bringing
industries in where people will be
making good money not minimum wage with
all due respect i think minimum wage
jobs are good for college students maybe
but
not for a thriving community we need to
thrive so we need our economic
development to get that boost
so um
that's my spiel thank you very much
thank you madam chair thank you cancer
anybody else
it's okay
we're good connie we're good we'll we'll
we'll take um
we'll try to consolidate everything you
guys said and have something to present
to you on council thank you thank you
connie thank you
okay
i think that
does it
i threw my agenda away so that does it
it is that does it that does it
um okay um motion to adjourn
second and beta
motion made by counselor bludis second
by counselor abeyta christine please
call the role
this is on the motion to adjourn the
work session counselor beta yes
counselor graham yes
counselor ben cuomo yes councilor quran
yes cancer floodists yes mayor pro tem
yes and mayor is absent
okay this
begins our agenda setting for june 21st
item one consent one consent item two
non-consent two non-consent number three
non-consent three non-consent number
four consent for consent five
non-consent five non-consent six
non-consent six non-consent seven
consent seven consents eight non-consent
eight non-consent nine consent nine
consent ten consent ten consent eleven
non-consent eleven non-consent twelve
non-consent twelve non-consent thirteen
non-consent 13 non-consent 14 consent
14 consents
15 non-consent 15 non-consensual 16
non-consent 16 non-consent 17
non-consent 17 non-consent 18
non-consent 18 non-consent 19
non-consent 19 non-consent and 29
consent 20 non-consent
thank you i don't know is it
you