Work Session Meeting October 14, 2025

MINUTES

Work Session

Tuesday, October 14, 2025 @ 1:00 PM

City Council Chambers, City Hall

PRESENT: Councilor Johana Bencomo, Councilor Yvonne Flores, Councilor Becki Graham, Councilor

Becky Corran, Mayor Eric Enriquez, and Councilor Cassie McClure

ABSENT: Councilor William Mattiace

1. PETS OF THE WEEK 1.1 Carol Nielson, Animal Services of the Mesilla Valley presented Pets of the Week.

2. AGENDA ITEM 2.1 ADDRESSING HOUSING INSECURITY AND EXPLORING ALTERNATIVE

LIVING OPTIONS. Natalie Green, Neighborhood & Housing Revitalization Administrator introduced the topic.

Jenn Lopez, Project Moxie gave the overhead presentation.

Councilor McClure asked going back to our comprehensive plan Elevate, I am just curious as to when this became shifted from housing diversity to crisis modeling? So, if we go to page 169, in Elevate. I am just going to do a little bit of reading. Housing diversity refers to the mixed of housing types such as single family detached, duplexes, townhomes, multi-family, mobile homes, etcetera. This goes back to a little bit to what you were saying to, with who is the audience for this, right? And it is a shifting in audience, right? As the baby boomers age and the millennial generation starts families, housing preferences are changing. Many empty nesters seek to downsize and live in housing types other than single family homes. Alternatively, many millennials want to live in a setting that is walkable and close to destinations which often times doesn’t translate to single family neighborhoods, and we had goals

attached to that. We had timelines attached to that. I would like to see where that is going. This is approved, this was the plan. This is our comprehensive plan from 2020.

Jenn Lopez said I did not refer to your comp plan for this. What I was responding to was a conversation around homelessness concerns and then just giving you a framework for thinking about is our solutions if we are going to do them a crisis response solution or housing solution so it really wasn’t in relationship to that.

Natalie Green said in terms of the comprehensive plan I would honestly defer to

Community Development. They are really the implementor of market rate housing so if staff is going to do affordable housing we are going to do it and it is not to say that we can’t do some of those. We are actually exploring townhouse kind of quadplex/duplex situation in the infill near Nevada Street. So, for our programs it really becomes an economy of scale, right? So, where that investment can be made, where there is funding sources. So, I think we talked about the LIHTC Program, that is the biggest funder of affordable housing in the entire country. So, I can take something like a million dollars or two million dollars and leverage that with LIHTC and get several hundred units. Where I can take that same amount of money and I can invest it in single family housing but at that point depending on the level of subsidy for each family then I am only building 10, 15, 20 so I think staff would need a little more direction on what affordable housing projects you would like us to work on, but the comp plan would be a whole different discussion. I will add to council that our consultant Root Policy has been reaching out to folks. They will be here next week.

We will be hosting a community and housing needs open house in anticipation of redoing the affordable housing plan which is the plan that primarily guides the work that we do in housing and neighborhood services so that will also be an opportunity to put in some of those additional goals and while I am up there I will just tell you that

Wednesday from 3 to 7 it is open house. People can pop in and out. We did post on the city’s Facebook. I will make sure to send a separate email after this Work Session to you all and that will be at the Las Cruces Home Builders Event Hall off North Main

Street and so we are certainly exploring single family, duplex, townhomes, but again it becomes for what population and we would evaluate how we finance those.

Councilor McClure said I am going to push back just a little bit because we actually do mention tiny homes in this, and I know we have met with Culdesac Tempe and I was looking to see what has been requested from some of my constituents and a lot of time it is car free. To a large degree it is a matter of what other models can we look at? So, we had discussions with that, funnily enough they were really interested in Las

Cruces and part of this too was partnering with NMSU to provide additional off campus student, staff, and faculty options. Things like this is kind of what I wanted to see. I really do appreciate all of the information on the unhoused and I want to support that effort continually, but my question is why aren’t we doing some of the things that we said we would be doing? We had two meetings with that and I would like to see where we can go with that, Action Plan 2 had adopt clear building standards specifics to tiny homes. Why are we not using some of the ideas provided by our Realize, that is what I would like to see as well.

Jenn Lopez said this is my last slide but I think this is where you want to go I hope.

So, you might see it in planning document or a strategy to do tiny homes, you still need all of these things to happen, right? This is sort of an outline of feasibility we do every time we do a project and I just think it is a great exercise leads to clarity of can we do this? For who? And who would be a partner and who is going to do it? We say get consensus on the problem you are trying to solve. Be clear on the target population to be served. So tiny homes solve what problem being very clear. Who in the community sees that problem the same way that you do? And what is that population that wants to have a tiny homeas a solution, right? We do a lot of environmental scans just like we did for the Work Session. It is not rocket science, it is just a lot of conversations to get. I am teaching a class up north with 12 communities and my first session I say you need to check your assumptions with community, right?

And you need to do it in a way that you are going to end up with the right housing for the right population and it takes a little bit of time and then if everybody says yes, like my friend Chris I see a need for folks coming in from Durango who want a small rental to get, I see the things. He was willing to do it. The question becomes if you do tiny homes, who does it, right? Is there a provider and that is great then you have somebody to be a thought partner on it, right? I will be really blunt because that is my job. When I work with local governments I am trying to mitigate your risks. The best way to mitigate your risk is to make sure there is a partner that can take things on in case it is not you, right? Because you have limited staff capacity so who can do it?

There is an operator prospective potentially, maybe not, right? So, my friend Chris just manages his own property, right? So, depends on who you are serving but just getting really clear on all those roles for your project and then how much will it cost? We have high level numbers. They don’t mean anything. We can’t really do feasibility, and we do this all the time unless we have a very specific site so that we can say yes it has water, it has sewer, it has zoning, right? It has all the things. We can put in actual cost to that. There is a pro forma to it. Who is going to build the tiny home? What is the cost rate? So, you really want to have a pretty strong pro forma about it. Is there an operating cost? So again, if you are not serving people who need services then the operating cost might be very low. It could be just like a some kind of HOA structure or whatever. And then where will your capital come from and how long will it take? So again, just a little feasibility check list. So, I think maybe the question is maybe this hasn’t been flushed out.

Councilor McClure said part of the question too is that we do want to do a survey. I think the Mayor has talked about what does the status look like right now? We have a lot of unknowns. Partially because we don’t share data. If you read siloed in there. It is absolutely siloed in there. We don’t share data in meaningful ways that make people understand what we are doing. To a large degree we are doing a lot of good things but the thing is those 5,000 homes that we are still missing can look like a lot of different things. So multi-generational housing, ya I might have done tiny homes but I have my mom with me so I would like to look into can we do stipends on that? What does that kind of programing look like? And I think Realize has enabled a lot that we can do. And I would like to look into that.

Councilor Graham said I am not promising that I won’t have other questions but just building on what Councilor McClure said, also thank you everyone for being here, those we have heard from and those we have yet to hear from. What Councilor

McClure’s comments are making me think about, it is so hard to characterize this

population because it is so multifaceted and I think right now I am thinking in the simplest terms, the very simplest terms we have a housed population and an unhoused population and then we have people who are kind of in this liminal space, housing and unsecure on the bubble and I think your presentation showed us very elegantly that that population is growing as we sit here, and I appreciate all of the materials you gave us in advance. As you say, who are we serving? Who is the audience as my fellow rhetorician was framing it and recognizing that for again my vocabulary isn’t perfect here. When we are talking about a higher needs population, so people who are perfect for permanent supportive housing who need services, who need support, who need on site access to counselors, who need, we all need trauma informed care, but who especially in need of trauma informed care, permanent supportive housing is the answer. It also takes a really long time to make it happen and the concern that I am feeling while this liminal space of people who are housing insecure are potentially falling into being unhoused where are places that we can move faster to serve that population, also recognizing that once someone becomes unhoused their needs are going to rise precipitously because of the trauma, because I have learned so much in my four short years here about that often times it is about the effects of homelessness that people attribute to be the cause of homelessness.

You became homeless because of substance use disorder, because of mental illness, when in fact it is being unhoused that leads to that situation so huge word salad to say and if I am mischaracterizing what you are saying Councilor McClure please jump back in but for a less high needs population where are spaces that we can move more quickly than permanent supportive housing tends to take?

Jenn Lopez said my response to that is people who have less service needs but are living on the edge, it is not another housing unit, it is an eviction prevention program or rapid rehousing. It is money, 9 months to 24 months of stability counseling, cheapest intervention you are ever going to find, so I think that is one piece of it, right? We are talking about your continuum, right? Again, we came in thinking there was more of interest of talking of the unhoused, but we can talk about across that continuum, and I am sure that staff has data on the different interventions across that continuum. What I am trying to say and this is my, well I am trying to be as helpful as possible is be prepared for the unhoused to grow. If you only have one thing to work on, be prepared for that to grow and look for resources to get ahead of that and you will save yourself thousands of dollars as a community if you can do that. To me this

Work Session was on homelessness and if you want to do one across the continuum,

I am sure Natalie would do that.

Councilor McClure said I really want to throw out things like we had a developer come wanted to build downtown. He wanted to build a grocery store, with livable spaces up on top. These are the things where maybe it is not something that everybody wants but somebody will choose it for themselves, and we are not giving them those options right now. That is what I would like to see. I am not finding that. I feel like Realize enabled a lot, right? I am beating this dead horse again, but the thing is look do we do accessory dwelling units and help with stipend. My neighborhood has big areas where

I could put two more on there. I would love to do that. I would love to have that availability to do stuff like that where we are helping not only homeowners, but we are helping people who could live in more flexible living arrangements.

Jenn Lopez said we have done a ton of research ton ADUs. In Colorado we have gone a little hog wild. We have gone a little crazy on a bunch of interventions and we are learning in real time, again some of it has failed and I am happy to talk about that but ADUs we found that you can allow ADUs by right but you also have to provide financing for the home buyer to be able to afford to actually build the ADU, that is not a bad thing but again it is a great intervention model but it has to be a full package.

So, you have to have funding and then the plans, right? You want to have pre- approved plans. That is sort of the trifecta so again I think there is pilots that could be adopted.

Councilor McClure said that is exactly what I am aiming for is pilots right now for different types of ideas that I know that our housing staff can come up with and I would like to see options like that.

Councilor Corran said I agree. I would love for us to keep expanding what is possible in terms of that end of the continuum and leveraging Realize and getting a public bank and trying to figure out ways to fund things and more systematic, localized approaches. Coming back to what you said about bang for the buck and what that is.

My sense of what you are saying is keep on with considering how we are engaging in the building, right? Which is a different place in the continuum and really important but invest more resources in eviction prevention rapid rehousing. I am guessing landlord risk mitigation which isn’t among these, but I think that is part of this package perhaps of just keeping those folks on the edge in whatever ways possible. I think we have some models for this but I don’t know if they are places where we invest the most money so it sounds like if we are taking $2 million to say that we don’t want more people to become unhoused in the next year those are the two places where we would put that most effectively and effect the most people and keep people put of the system.

Nicole Martinez, Mesilla Valley Community of Hope Director said I think I also thought that this was going to be about homelessness and housing and things like that so I am going to give you a little bit more information then probably you wanted on that but

I think it is important that you understand how complex the data and the systems are and how much we do want to partner and I am not here for dramatic effect. I wanted to touch deeper on some of the things that you have heard from the consultants. I think a lot of times when people think about Community of Hope they think it is that place with people in wooden shelters that sometimes gets them into apartments. We are doing so much more than that and I want to kind of touch on some of those systems and data points because I think it is a lot more complex than people understand. A lot of times when you see me up here, I am just throwing data out because it can be hard to get that data to you in meaningful ways. So, I will be saying things like it takes us 26 days on average to house a homeless Veteran. Which I think is pretty significant for us but as you have heard earlier we are beholden to a much larger and complex data system called the Homeless Management Information

System, HIMS. We have been using it since 2007 and 2008, and it is conky. Lately there is talk of creating a statewide data system that may be coming forward with all of the Governor’s new initiatives towards housing and data and we are most willing to work with the state and how to best aggregate that data and share it responsibly. We are somewhat cautious about having a parallel data system because it is a lot to have

to enter into two systems. Especially when you are dealing with people in crisis, but we are hopeful that the systems will work together in some way to include all programs and all outcomes, not just our federal programs in HIMS. Currently we also utilize an internal database for all other programs that we operate. We have at least

20 different types of housing and homeless related programs. I also recently received some private foundation funding for us to build capacity in our data even more. So, we are internally creating a new sales force data collection program for the agency to help determine what our strengths and our gaps may be. One of the things we are excited from that is having kiosks in our lobby to help reduce some of the duplication that we might be having in our data. You have also heard about the coordinated entry system, and this is a little bit into the weeds, but this is a requirement for our federal funding. We are the grant recipient for the southern part of the state and this tool is used for prioritizing housing for people. So, my case mangers can’t just say I like you.

I think you are going to do a great job. You have to go through this whole coordinated entry survey and then people get prioritized and actually ranked. It is a sticking point for sure. How do you rank somebody’s vulnerability and homelessness, but this is what comes from our housing funding. It has also been a large part of our success in that we can prioritize our own clients for housing immediacy. For example the New

Mexico Coalition to End Homelessness does coordinated entry for most of the rest of the state so you take somebody in Gallup, that has to do their survey at an agency and that survey gets sent to the coalition, another agency far away has to get scored and then the number gets sent back, client gets that number and the clients gets to find a housing agency and figure out what voucher is appropriate for them. We are doing it all in house. They come in, they do the coordinated entry, they get prioritized, you’re going into rapid rehousing, you’re going into permanent supportive housing, you need onetime assistance. We can figure all of that out internally. You have also heard of continuum of care. The continuum care is a part of funds that are just like

Section 8 from our Housing Authority but it is set aside specifically for people experiencing homelessness and I know Jenn touched on this. I apply for these funds and compete against the entire state and all of the agencies to annually bring in over at least $1.3 million in housing funding and staffing funding for Community of Hope.

I do want to switch gears a little bit because a few years back I heard someone at a summit say that people who work at agencies are working in silos. I said what? Who is doing that? Are we doing that? We partner with everyone on the campus. We work with FYI, and we have La Clinica de Familia, our links with grants and so many coalitions across the state and statewide initiatives, in meetings and while I do think that silos is a little bit of a buzz word, it is not without its dangers, and I don’t want to be a siloed agency because lately I have seen a lot of new comers come in with ideas that to me have been siloed. There have not been ideas of collaborations. Some of them are ideas of the past that have been shown time and again to not work for communities but since time has passed and people are new and unfamiliar with best practices. They are a bit more willing to throw out some of these ideas. This can be the time for pilot programs, but they should be ones where they are strategic and we are talking to each other, not over each other and certainly not revisiting programs that do more harm than good. This is the time to utilize things that we know work and we know housing works and we know that the city is making great strides in this department and not just the city. We are partnering with the county, Jamie I know you are right behind me, on a new pilot for people exiting incarceration to help

homelessness, Chief I need to revisit that with you. I know we have had one conversation, we are getting closer, and I do want to keep that conversation going.

We also work with assisted outpatient treatment programs and the RISE Program. I hear lately the return to the idea of the emergency shelter. The idea of discharging someone from jail to shelter, sending our families to shelter, getting people hidden off the streets, people exiting recovery to a shelter but the peril in this is that you are all saying let’s keep people homeless and let’s spend a ton of money to do it. I started at

Community of Hope in 2006, to run the family shelter and it did keep people homeless. Staffing that was a nightmare. It was at the time that the director and I decided to ask HUD if we could instead move people out of the shelter and into their own apartments and I went out and met as many landlords as I could and I moved every single family out and I only had one family that returned and I said let’s do more than this. Let’s get people off the streets permanently. We did this ahead of the curve.

A few years later HUD stopped focusing their funding on shelters and instead made permanent and rapid rehousing the focus but the focus has changed again. We have heard from our current federal administration that they want more shelters and not housing for people. Are we following that playbook when we know it is wrong? We all want a simple fix, but this is not that. Another shelter is what you do when you don’t have what we have in Las Cruces. This new pipeline for housing. We must also increase the wrap around resources and housing including substance use treatment and mental health solutions. Solutions, what is working? We have heard consultants say things like Amador Crossing, also Camp Hope which still doesn’t utilize any city funding and is affordable. We have also been utilizing motels. They haven’t worked for every community. We have some really great motel partners but that should be something that’s very short term. We served 166 people in motels last year with 489 stays. That is how many people you would have seen outside on the streets with our emergency responders going out. We weren’t working with them in the shelters. We used county funding for motels and we used out family basis motel funds while looking for the long-term housing solutions. We also have the great work of the

Grajeda/Huckabee Fund. I heard recently that it can be upsetting to have families living in motels but I would prefer to have a family there than sleeping outside or sleeping in their car. As long as we can make sure that is short term. Using motels also means that the hotel is paying their own staff. The city is not paying for the staff.

The agencies are not paying for the staff. They are paying for those operations, and it could make better sense than possibly starting a new shelter. I also wonder who would run the shelter if we brought one in. Would their work orders get attended more quickly? Would the city bring in an out-of-town company to run it because we all know how long that has gone on in our state and in our own community? I think we should be looking at some motel conversions. Those are some new ideas. We also have the

Community of Hope ten-year master plan so we can better respond to things like natural disasters, to refugees, unforeseen circumstances, the Kitchens have plenty of design opportunities at this point to address this. We are also talking of building a new

Jardin. What will we do with our empty Jardin? We can do whatever we want. That makes since it is in the lease but we have ideas and we should be talking about those things and how we can smartly use the assets that we have. Some of my fears for the future, homeless prevention and permanent supportive housing are threatened to be cut. Last year we housed 2,869 people. That is including 1,004 children. If you reduce that you get the number that Jenn presented to you earlier over all. We are housing families and adults. We need to preserve what we have and if we use all of your funds

on things we know don’t work, what have we done? How will we provide any safety net for those affected by these times? And just a comment when I hear things like what we are doing is not working. I heard that from the state level top, I have heard that locally. I immediately conjure the knowledge of how we got here, and I think it is important to drudge up a brief history lesson. In the 80’s institutions were shut down.

The promise of compassion of community-based clinics were supposed to be opened and that didn’t happen. The institutions were indeed shut down but there was no safety net for folks who could not manage living on their own and still to this day struggle to do so. So, we are left with our most vulnerable on the streets. That is what didn’t work. That and skyrocketing housing prices. On a more micro level I would say that what we are doing is working for many of the people, in fact our funding depends on that. Imagine if we hadn’t housed over 2,000 people last year? We are meeting the thresholds and in most cases exceeding them. We also have programs like Mano y

Mano and outreach which have been invaluable solutions in addressing issues of people surviving on the streets. We do not want to see people wallowing in substance use on our streets or even in the privacy of their own homes. I think about recovery all the time and that is why I constantly reach out to my partners at Amador Health, ideal options, La Clinica. I am not the recovery specialist but if I am not thinking of how to incorporate it, I am failing. We have ideas on how to bring more recovery units to our town and I do want to partner on this at least talk to me about it. Council please do not full steam ahead anything but let’s keep talking. I am open for one on ones anytime or call me into the Mayor’s office, whatever we need to do just know that I want to be part of the solution. I ask that you lift us up so that we can keep lifting up our community with hope.

That ends my actual comments, thank you but I do want address just a couple of things. I will say we awarded GRO money from the state and we got $200,000 which was discretionary funding. I asked for that funding for one time assistance and so I didn’t have to use clunky old HIMS and we could just have housed people who were coming in. I need one month, I need three months and we spent that $200,000 that was for 2 years in less than a year. We over spent it and we ate a bunch of that money. It was very useful for people but it was hard to say no. That was something that where we had this pot of money and we made sure we could say but for our assistance that you are going to be able to stay housed on your own once we are done. I know that coordinated entry can take a long time once somebody gets scored to get into housing and so it makes it feel like there is a gap. I do understand that sometimes it could be really quick like our Vets it can be really quick, with like rapid housing that could be really quick. A lot of times it has been dependent on our landlords. We are so hopeful with Amador Crossing that that wait time will be much, much faster because we will issue those vouchers and they will get to go right in.

Then with some of the other affordable housing complexes that are coming online.

The Landlord Risk Mitigation Funding, that is what I applied for when we had ARPA funding that came through. So, we were the first in the state to start that type of funding and it has also been an invaluable resource. It has helped us with people who do come in who just might need that gap money before they need to have all the wrap around supportive services. You know, like somebody who has an authority voucher, they just don’t have to have case management. They can take care of it on their own, but they are experiencing poverty. So, there are programs that we can do that get to that level if we can use some of these targeted programs that we are doing that aren’t

monies from the city for landlord risk mitigation is quickly drying up. I did pitch it to

Secretary Nair, and she has agreed that some of that funding is coming to Community of Hope and sees that it obviously has valuable place here in this community so that hopefully we can quickly address as many people as we can.

Councilor Bencomo said first of all I want to thank you for being here, just very happy to see and we have been worried about you, and I just am very genuinely happy to see you. Thank you for your comments, I don’t have any questions particularly on that. I do want to talk about some specific things that you mentioned, Jenn but before

I get to that I want to real quick address the conversation happening right now and if I may be a little honest I think I am a little bit surprised by it because I think it is incredibly important that we focus our time and resources and to diversifying housing options at all of these levels but particularly at the transitional supportive and up level.

I think that is the goal. I think that is what Realize we hoped to do, right? I would love that and I think and I just want to zoom out a little bit because I feel like the last year or two there has been a push by some members of this council and some advocates for us to focus on crisis modeling, even if experts, even if data is saying that is the wrong way to go that ship has happened and I feel like, I don’t agree with shhift necessarily, right? Sometimes I fear that the desire to do crisis response is more of a desire to fix the visibility of homelessness versus the root cause of homelessness. I think we have gotten stuck in that in the past. We did a shopping cart ban. There is political fodder about camping ban, like all of these things are sort of things that are going backwards and that are crisis focused as opposed to long term focused. I guess

I am not surprised by this presentation that you came with some of those things because I have noticed that shift as well, but I do appreciate you naming the realities of those. That a lot often crisis intervention may seem like it is quick, but it is also very expensive, and it is not durable. I do appreciate that. That is all I will say there. I think with this conversation it feels like what needs to happen is that we just need to be clear and you did note that so then it might have been me from this report that it seems that we just need to be clear about the plans we have with the public and more direct about and I think even just from this conversation it is clear that we need to be clear on the road map to address homelessness right now in the short term and then that road map to transitional housing and then the rest, like how do we keep people in their homes and then how do we make sure that we are diversifying housing and I think it is important to name that across this entire spectrum there is still push back against all of these ideas. I am not entirely sure what some folks are looking for, but I just think we have to learn how to navigate that and talk about this a little bit better and part of it I think is a narrative shift. I do want to name three things in terms of pilot programs that I have heard already sort of like bubbling and I do think you know motel conversion, we have been talking about this for a long time. It felt like in the past maybe it wasn’t the right time or it wasn’t perhaps the right opportunity. I do feel like with the MRAs potentially that could be a really good opportunity or with some of the recent news coming out of some motels. I know you have good motel partners but there is also some bad motel partners and neighbors, and I think there is a pathway where we can sort of navigate and negotiate with those partners that aren’t as good as neighbors to figure out a potential strategy. So, I do think there is something to be worked out there that I do hope happens in collaboration. I recently talked to Jardin de

Los Ninos, and they are very sad that they couldn’t be here today. They have some great ideas for some housing options for single moms that I think we should consider.

I don’t want to speak on it because they are not here, and it should be up to them but again to me it is about following the lead of a service provider that already has a plan.

That is just looking for additional funding and then I think if we were going to be any sort of program up it would be landlord mitigation. In your report you talk about, it says, in New Mexico 76.6% of renters that make less than $50,000 are cost burden, meaning they spent 30% or more of their income on housing cost such as rent or mortgage payments and utilities. To me those are the folks that are most at risk for becoming homeless and potentially an area where we should be hyperfocused on so that they don’t lose housing and become unhoused. So, to me those are three takeaways that I am taking. I do want to say to the tiny home pilot, there was an organization last year, a non-profit that was thinking about doing something like this with like DACC and some high schoolers that would make the tiny homes and they were really interested in it and they were sort of really wanted to make it to a specific population which was actually youth exiting the foster system and what that could mean for building a community like that but they couldn’t find a non-profit that was sort of willing to say ya that feels like it could be part of our mission and don’t think that is like a shameful thing. I think people are being very clear about the increased burden that they have. I think people are being very clear about the federal landscape and what it is going to mean for a lot of our non-profit partners in the next few years and so I do think there is, people in our community have a lot of ideas and I want to make sure that we are fully exploring as many as possible and recognizing that none of them are like a silver bullet magic wand solution and that sometimes it does take time and while that is frustrating I think doing it right is better than doing it fast. I guess I didn’t have any questions but maybe for next steps I would like to learn more about motel conversions and the way that we can do that responsibly for potentially that like transitional piece. I do want to know Natalie how much we are investing now?

Natalie Green said I will say that if you don’t take into account Mano y Mano since most of the funding goes to the residents it is $281,250. That is what we invest in homeless services and that is inclusive of both Mesilla Valley Community of Hope and then some of the shelter services we fund through La Casa. I did want to take an opportunity, I think the piloting stuff can happen through the MRA so I just wanted to invite Chris up real quick to talk about Realize and opportunities in the MRAs because

I think that is where those pieces really come out of, out of Housing and

Neighborhood Services but in collaboration with Community Development, Economic

Development and the MRAs.

Chris Faivre, Community Development Director said there is a lot of roads that kind of lead back through and to Community Development, starting with Elevate Las Cruces.

There were definitely some things and goals outlined in Elevate that were taken into account when we went through Realize Las Cruces which for those in the audience that may not know that is when we redid the land development code that was adopted this past February it has been up and running this year and we have seen a lot of interest from our development partners that are looking at a wide range of things on both your traditional single family homes but also we are seeing a lot of interest in redeveloping within the MRAs and there is still some additional tweaks that we can make to Realize that will make that even easier and potentially more affordable. I was just having a discussion with Natalie about some options this morning so amongst staff we are continuously trying to work to find ways to further those developments

and I know Elizabeth Teeters and her team are working real hard on programing for those MRAs but specifically you know Realize a couple of things that really kind of lend itself to some of the redevelopment options I would say would be the increased density that we have allowed in all of the residential areas. Some of the restrictions that we have removed from lot sizes right so now you can increase that density in those sort of things work sort of hand in hand within the infill areas or those specific

MRAs. One other thing I would just throw out there to as you all know we are just really getting the NAT Program off the ground but I do think that over the next few years we are going to see a lot of vacant land opportunities specifically in the MRAs that may allow some of these pilot projects to come to fruition whether it is working with some hotels that could be doing a little bit better or with land that becomes vacant through demolition however that process would work but I do think we are going to see some opportunities there whether it is for tiny homes or for other types of things but we have seen really good response from development community. They do seem very interested in redeveloping in the MRA, in the infill area and I would say even more than I was expecting within the first year and I know there was some uncertainty with Realize when it was adopted and then at the time it was put on hold but since the summer to now we have actually seen quite a bit of interest and would just encourage everyone to keep working together to keep making Realize the best it can be to address some of these housing options.

Mayor Enriquez said Natalie and Jenn thank you for the presentation, Chris thank you for your comments and for mentioning the NAT Program. That is also something that can be utilized and something in the future. Nicole, thank you for all that you do. I really appreciate everything that is going on there. One of the things, that last slide where you talk about feasibility and all those things. That is really the next steps that

Councilor McClure had mentioned, the survey that is going to take place. We are going to gather some grant money that was provided to us from the government to do a survey and this would include the stakeholders in the community, which is Police,

Fire, the hospitals, the Las Cruces Public Schools, our court system, recovery, non- profits, Community of Hope, absolutely for sure. As you mentioned it is only going to get worse. This is to put the resources where we get the best return on our investment and get some results for the problems that we see. Some people may already see it as a crisis and others may say it is a crisis ready to happen. Either way we need to do something, so this is to build on and also developers, partners will be involved there so that it is just not a city problem as an organization, it’s a community problem and we all have to come together as stakeholders to see how we can combat this and come up with the best solutions and never, never am I saying that we are not doing good or we are not doing something right because we are and you are Nicole. It is how do we build on it? How do we supplement? How do we compliment? That is what we are trying to do and that would be the next steps to make sure where we are putting the resources it goes to something that is correcting the issues that are taking place because if you drive around the city you see people camped out throughout and we want to get them housed. We want to find them a place and that is what this survey will do with the stakeholders so as Mayor Pro Tem stated we want to get the community input. We want to find out what are you dealing with? What issues are you faced with and how we can support that? So that would be the next thing so again thanks for your presentation and adding some of those because we don’t know what the answer is. Is it converting hotels? Is it tiny homes? What is the answer? Let’s get

the input from the community and find out what are the issues and what direction do we go best into.

Cleave Hattersley, Member of the Public said I am a four-year resident here although my wife’s family has been here for forty years or so. We lived in Austin where I was a member of the entertainment and political communities for about 45 years, involved in all sorts of homeless issues as well as political issues. I am a member of the Austin

Music Hall of Fame and also managed Kinky Freedman’s gubernatorial campaign, first candidate to ever get on the ballot as an independent candidate. I wanted to ask everybody in the room if you are familiar with the term flying signs? Can you tell me what flying signs means to you?

Councilor Graham said I believe you are referring to panhandling with a sign in hand.

Cleave Hattersley said that is correct and the fact that only one person actually offered that tells me that there is a certain disconnect with that community and the rest of us and I wanted to offer a suggestion. Some friends of mine and I have recently discovered a program being run by one man in Los Angeles, it’s called Soft

White Underbelly and what he has done over the last years is taken his own personal fortune and given all of these under served, underprivileged homeless people a chance to speak. He films them. He lets them tell their story. He asks them what their specific needs are. Now I intend to do that here in this community. It is private but if the city council understands what this does not only focusing and understanding these people better but also giving you a format for promoting because once the community sees real people just like the rest of us maybe with unfortunate circumstances when they tell their stories they feel better about doing something for them and that is what I think needs to be done and that is what we are going to do. I think it is here, the hearts of these people are in it. We congratulate them for doing the work they are doing but the money has to be used faster. It has to be used more efficiently and the best way to do it is to know whom you are serving.

Mayor Enriquez said I will add to that on the surveys, it is not only getting stakeholders but it is working with NMSU and their students and their research to create a survey so that we can go out to the individuals out in the public in the streets that are suffering at this time and find out exactly what is going on in their lives. So, there is another component to that survey as well.

Jeff Curry, Member of the Public said I am a for profit developer born and raised here in Las Cruces. We have developed over 70 properties in the southwest. We manage over 160 properties, all affordable housing. That is about 7,000 units and I have had the opportunity to see in multiple states developments and how they are handled. I wanted to start by just saying that Las Cruces is top notch. You guys are doing an amazing job. I serve on a federal home loan bank board called the Affordable Housing

Advisory Council. I happen to serve with Nicole, and we get to tour in other states on what are considered best practices for dealing with homelessness and what they have shown us is exactly what Nicole was doing when dealing with homeless people. They are showing us what is the best practice and that is what Nicole is doing. Also, I want to commendate what Natalie has been doing, changing the zoning standards and

removing barriers to creating additional housing is great work and I want you to encourage you to keep on that road. For me I had one cautionary tale and that was that during the pandemic of course we were trying to address these emergencies of homelessness, I was brought into a project in Santa Fe and said what can we do quickly? Can we do a motel conversion quickly? We had tons of money, and the idea was to do a motel conversion. I said yes, absolutely, let’s do this. It seemed like a slam dunk but because it was new, because we were dealing with groups of people who hadn’t done this for years or didn’t deal with housing it stagnated and I have now been working on this since our first award of $4 million in 2021 and now I have $11 million, I am still trying to close the final gap so that I can start construction now. It is not easy to do something new. What the city can do, which I feel like is the most bang for anyone’s buck is to follow the process of ensuring that developers have an easy access to put on more housing but the federal tax low income housing tax credit program is the most bang for your buck to guarantee more housing in a community.

That is my biggest recommendation for you and what I see from outside.

Jamie Michaels, Member of the Public said I am with the county’s Health and Human

Services Department. I am just going to start off with a little bit of data. The county over the last several years has invested just under $700,000 a year in homelessness services. It is a combination of county gross receipts, grant funding, and state appropriations and that money is awarded through Community of Hope through competitive RFP process and a contract we have with Community of Hope. So just under $700,000 kind of average over the last three years. We are as Nicole said in the process of developing a transitional supportive housing project. We looked at the data and during 2024 there were 450 bookings into the county detention center where the individual listed no home address, and they were misdemeanor crimes that they were booked into the detention center for. We also have been operating several different criminal justice diversion and reentry programs over the last eight years and collectively across all of those programs about half of the people in those programs are also experiencing homelessness and those programs are all for people who have substance use or other mental health disorders. So that is the combination of housing and mental health services and that is why we decided to do the transitional supportive housing. It will be on Motel Boulevard, right across from the County

Government Center there is a vacant lot the county purchased with money from the

Governor last year and we also received some grant funds from the state to develop the land to make a lot of outdoor living space and we will be utilizing, repurposing two modular buildings that were previously used by volunteer fire departments. Each of the units has four bedrooms and four bathrooms and then the common living and kitchen space so those will be moved from the outlying areas to that location and each will be able to house four people. At this point it is for adult males in diversion programs. There is quite a bit of space there for future expansion. That is the update on that. You also mentioned emergency housing like during a crisis either if we have more people here who are seeking asylum or in a natural disaster emergency. I don’t have all the details but I know that the county is also working in creating those types of shelters out at the fair grounds so there are some resources for that type of emergency during a natural disaster emergency. I just want to make sure that is on your radar.

Eric Salcedo, Member of the Public said I am here on behalf of Rembrandt Alley, a

local architect that has done amazing work here in the city and he has a huge heart for helping and he wasn’t able to make it today. He asked me to step in for him so here I go. This is my first time doing this and it is pretty interesting of how it works.

Was there a time that there was a law against panhandling? That was enforced here, was there a law in Las Cruces that you couldn’t panhandle? And is that law no longer in place?

Natalie Green said there is a First Amendment Protected Right so that people have the ability to hold signs. So, we can’t regulate one group that holds a sign that says car wash versus help me. However, the city did institute some safety, but it is a time and place issue so there is safety precautions where folks cannot stand on medians of a certain width, with a certain speed and then there is a few other, they can’t enter the lane of traffic but again it still falls under certain protections under the first amendment of the constitution.

Eric Salcedo said thank you for clearing that up. One of the reasons I ask is when they came up with the numbers of the homeless people did they take into consideration the professional homeless people that migrate with the sunbelt? That was my question. Is that there are people, they follow the weather and they have an endless summer but they don’t want to be in a program that is going to help them.

That is their lifestyle. They travel, they make a living out of it and it is a mix of the need and then there is the people that are taking advantage of the public’s kindness, but does that get mixed in with the surveying?

Natalie Green said we have considered that. One of the things we are actually planning hopefully for the spring I would like to bring Greg Colburn, he did a data analysis on homelessness across the country and pulled a lot of data and did an assessment of those things and is weather or is it drug use, is it financial insecurity and he scatter plotted them all across the graphs. It is a great book. I have a copy should council want to see it and the one consistent data point is that the vacancy rate that homelessness is a housing issue. There was lots of communities that have great weather but have low levels of homelessness. There is lots of communities that have very terrible weather, for example Boston, freezing cold but yet has high rates of homelessness. So, there wasn’t any consistent data that weather is a contributing factor to experiencing homelessness but yes and I don’t want to take up all your time.

Eric Salcedo said really quickly, what I do have here is there is different recommendations from Mr. Alley. He took it upon himself to go ahead and actually draw these out and he has found areas within the city that are vacant that he has suggested that these could be possibly used for combatting the need for the homes and just to show a few there are starter 400 square foot tiny homes. He has it all scaled out here some townhouses, layouts and again he has got a huge heart to help our community, and he is a very notable architect and I will leave these with Natalie

Green and if anybody would like to take a look at them. He does have a hotel style floor plan that was very successful in San Francisco, and it is detailed in this as well.

Natalie Green said I will just add real quickly, one of the projects we are doing we are actually partnering with Mr. Alley on the property on Nevada, so it is a piece of

property that the city had purchased quite a while ago that is not being used so we are working on the subdivision. So, we will take that piece of property and subdivide it into six lots and do some home ownership. We have also taken some of the NAT properties and we have been able to subdivide some of those. We will likely be coming back as part of the housing plan with some recommendations around infill and some of the fees for infill because that six lot subdivision if we weren’t the city we would have incur probably about $30,000 to $40,000 worth of fees just to get started and so that could be a detriment to some development in the infill and the MRAs.

Kasandra Gandara, Member of the Public said I am a former Mayor Pro Tem and I am here to speak to you on an urgent strategic need to expand La Casa’s housing capacity through 100+ bed in emergency and transitional housing facility. At this very moment 30 women and children are being sheltered in hotels and twenty more remain on a waiting list, waiting for safety and stability. In addition, La Casa is now housing several senior citizens, a growing and often overlooked population experiencing homelessness due to the limited income displacement or the loss of family support.

To meet those needs we are proposing a comprehensive housing strategy. One that integrates emergency shelter, transitional housing and supportive living options. Our plan includes a conversion of underutilized hotels into trauma informed transitional housing and the expansion of our voucher program that provides flexible immediate housing options for families, survivors of domestic violence and seniors. In partnership with the county La Casa also is exploring the purchase of dedicated homes for seniors, which would allow us to serve at least 8 additional seniors who are currently unhoused or at risk of homelessness. This smaller community-based setting offers stability, dignity, and access to essential services such as health care, case management, and social connection. The broader vision is a state-of-the-art 100+ bed facility that operates with the continuum of care combining shelter, wrap around services, behavioral health and workforce development. This aligns directly with Dona

Ana County Resilience Leaders framework and advances our shared goals of ensuring every resident, child, parent and senior have a safe place to live and thrive.

We are asking for the city’s continued partnership through planning, investment and interagency collaboration to move this vision forward from strategy to action. Together we can end the cycle of crisis and create a stronger more compassionate Las Cruces for all. Thank you for your leadership and for standing for those who need us most.

Natalie Green said we will just add that there are 8 vacancies at Pedrena so they are taking applications for seniors. So, we still have 8 units left at Pedrena and then we will be fully leased out.

Councilor Bencomo said I just wanted one more request and maybe you are already on it Natalie, and Federal Landscape Team that we have here at the city. I was very concerned about the Continuum of Care Funding. I feel like that is not something that is not being talked about. Obviously state legislators are addressing Medicaid and

SNAP but I fear this is not being talked about so Natalie if there is an analysis that we can take and then sit down with Chairman Small around this I think it is very important before the thirty day so that it is honestly on their agenda if you haven’t done this already.

Natalie Green said that was exactly on our mind. In fact, Jenn and I just had a conversation around Continuum of Care Funding so we would love to have that meeting with Representative Small. We are tracking what is happening at the

Continuum of Care for those who aren’t familiar, there is two continuum of cares of

New Mexico. There is the Albuquerque Continuum of Care and then the Balance of

State Continuum of Care. So, the Balance of State covers Las Cruces and then everywhere else in the state. I will say that I am the Chair of the Balance of State of the Continuum of Care of both the executive board and the membership board. We do track that fairly closely and will continue to communicate that back and forth.

Tony Watkins, Member of the Public said I am the Housing Director for La Casa, Inc and I just wanted to build upon the question about the continuum of care because we have about 66% of our voucher funding for rapid rehousing is Continuum of Care

Funding and so the concern about that going away would hit us very hard. So, I just wanted to bring that down to the local level, that is what it would look like for us. It is about 45 vouchers, and we don’t have enough vouchers to serve the people coming out of our shelter, so we have a 90 bed shelter. We have about 70 vouchers total and when you combine the risk of losing those vouchers with the kind of arduous process of the coordinated entry system you can see how people get hung up in that system and just not able to. Major capacity problems with that as well as needing more hotel vouchers. And I just wanted to thank you for the conversation. I think it is a great meeting of the minds and I look forward to being a part of it in the future and I am looking forward to that survey and especially as the gentleman said bring the voices of people with lived experience to bare on how we move forward because they are going to see things that we won’t see.

Natalie Green said I will just do a quick shout out to Tents to Rents who uplifts the voice of the unhoused in our community.

Nicole Martinez said for the Continuum of Care Funding a lot of it is tied up in the coordinated entry grant that we have, rapid rehousing and then permanent supportive housing and some of what we have heard from what is being proposed from the federal is to do away with permanent supportive housing. That they would cap it then at two years and it is specifically funding that is set aside for people with disabilities, so it is terrifying to think that people who have been in the streets a long time because there is a chronicity number that they have to meet of how long they have been outside along with that disability and it can often take longer than two years. This is also something that has been threatened to happen to our Housing Authority as well.

So, people being capped at two years, I don’t like to be an alarmist but it feels like alarming times hearing things like that. So those are things that I am really worried about. If we do get capped on our permanent supportive housing programs, then that means that after 2 years you will start to see a lot of people going to the streets and we will need to work with the council on then turning that funding into homeless prevention so that people will stay in their homes and prevent their homelessness. We will label it however we need to but that is what we will be looking at the state level from our City of Las Cruces partners. I will say that it is obviously worth exploring the needs of La Casa at this point at this time too because Community of Hope does absorb many of their clients with a lot of our permit with rapid rehousing funds which we are here to do. They are people experiencing homelessness but to help them too.

Bolster their programs again and I am happy to be part of that conversation.

William Gilman, Member of the Public said I am a local resident, small business owner, parent. I wanted to comment on the report. Some of my noticing, I felt like there was not a lot of urgency in this report. It is a do nothing we have got it on lock even though people here saying all this funding is going away there is no saying we should do X, Y, or Z about that or what possible options are or how we are going to stitch together funding from philanthropic foundations, the state, the county, etcetera.

It was also pretty light on data. Like in one of its key findings we should tell people more about what we are doing, okay well this would have been a great opportunity, right? We had a couple of months to put this report together. It also mentioned like

Houston is a big success, sweet tell me more about that. Instead, I had to go research it myself. One of the things they did is they set up their own continuum of care for the region. It is three counties. I think we probably need that here. Probably just for Dona

Ana County because we are 1/20th of the size of Houston and we need to serious talk about where are we going to find this money. Money everything like the report heavily focused on money but if we are talking about dignity and housing and human whatever, money isn’t everything and also money is not always a cost if it is spent.

We need to invest and we need to seriously think about how we are going to invest and yes we want to be strategic, and I think there is some great suggestions, getting a hotel. I think we also need to think about having multiple tiers of overlapping interventions. In Houston the average wait time for housing placement is 37 days. I assume it is significantly longer here. So, what are people doing for those 37 days or

60 days or whatever days that we have here? I think it might be worth investing in somewhere for them to be that is quality, dignified and safe until they can get placed in a longer-term care. If the message is that we need more outreach, these programs have been running for years. Where is that outreach? We have HIMS data I assume is being submitted to the federal government for those HUD funds, like why is that not available to the council now? Why is that not available to the community? Like what are we doing? That is the other thing that Houston really did, with that continuum of care that they built for their region they have their own data system that makes it very easy to identify people’s needs, placements, services, etcetera, put everything together. The city has already made some pretty cool investments in like the Fire

Department Mobile Integrated Health, the LIGHT team. Mobile Integrated Health in particular is right in line with this and so I think it is time to think about how are we going to invest. We don’t say the Fire Department, money down the drain, bummer.

We think of that as an investment in our community and in our safety and our stability and we really need to think about how we are going to do that and where else are we going to get matching funds for it.

Natalie Green said the only thing I will add before we wrap up is we did explore looking at our own continuum of care. We don’t recommend it because we would actually receive less funds than we are getting now and it will also increase the workload because you are essentially running a crazy application and data and the coalition does it much better than the city could do it. 2.2 AN UPDATE TO SHORT-TERM RENTAL REQUIREMENTS. Chris Faivre, Community Development Director gave the overhead presentation.

Councilor Flores asked how are you able to gather this information? Did you do a survey, or just word of mouth?

Chris Faivre said they do have tracking software that allows them to go out and track across all platforms and so that is where they compiled this information from.

Councilor Flores asked you want to have an ordinance that regulates that practice?

Chris Faivre said what the ordinance would do is just require them to register as a business and then also that would put them into system with Visit Las Cruces so that way the city can track them on the business side of things that way Fire can conduct proper inspections and then also that Visit Las Cruces can make sure that they are operating correctly and also make sure that they are paying applicable Lodger’s Tax which they have to pay as well. So, it is tracking for the city, tracking for Visit Las

Cruces as well.

Councilor Corran said thank you for this, we were just exchanging emails. Someone seemed to have a sense to what the rules were before they even came into play. I have heard and I think this is related to things that you chose to include and not include that most of these are small operations, right? These are not big swahts of places being bought up by corporations because that is not what the market demands, right? I think.

Chris Faivre said correct.

Councilor Corran said that is why those last things aren’t included there. They could be an issue in the future but right now this is really individual people, maybe they own one or two or three in the city and are currently doing this as their side hustle I would imagine?

Chris Faivre said yes, that is my understanding of that as well. I am only aware that a few corporations that own multiple units.

Councilor Corran asked I would have a couple of quick things that I would add. I would expand, they are required to do the notification, correct?

Chris Faivre said that is correct.

Councilor Corran said I would like to expand the notification radius to at least 300, I am just thinking two houses down, three houses down perhaps. I would like the radius to be a little bit bigger because people are affected by this. I am all for making this happen as soon as we possibly can and thank you so much for working on it and thinking about it. My sense from people that are experiencing adverse outcomes as a result of short term rentals in their neighborhood is that they are being rented out basically for parties and those parties have hundreds of teenagers say at them. That is a source of a number of police incidents I think that have occurred, incidents of violence, certainly things like noise violations, I think folks have talked about this in the context of shootings and fights breaking out in the street, etcetera. So, I am

particularly interested in the occupancy limits and then also the consequences of what this means for folks. If the police come to someone’s house because they rented a space for a house party and the police come, or they are cited in some way what is sort of the series of consequences that might occur? Are they allowed to continue? It really is one or two problematic folks who just do this all the time as their business model that the neighbors are really upset about. I would like there to be a model that is sort of educational. Sounds like the six-month implementation thing is really a powerful tool for that but then, I would rather folks experience the consequences pretty quickly so that it is not like this is the fifth shooting at this house that we have had maybe we should not let them have Airbnbs anymore. So, I am curious if you can talk about the follow up for what that might look like?

Chris Faivre said we do have and I am just looking at the draft of the ordinance in working with legal on this and the overnight requirements that we are recommending right now are two per bed plus an additional two people per unit so that sets the occupancy within that house within what you can have a reasonable number of bedrooms and beds and that type of thing and then specific to gatherings we put that no more than ten additional persons above the allowed number of renters. Again, those are recommendations. This is just a draft if you wanted to increase that a little bit you certainly could. The idea was to sort of mitigate that potential problem and then we are working with legal and codes to deal with the enforcement component on that on how that would work if you’re cited once, cited twice, and three times so we are working all those requirements out right now. We can probably come back to that when we do first read or second read.

Councilor Corran asked I would love to see sort of a hierarchy of impact, right? If there is a shooting that is more serious than someone not having their pool fence locked, right? Those to me are very different sort of scales of accountability that are happening with this. I would just like to see that as part of that framework of accountability if possible. So, sort of what are the consequences and do they match the impact on the neighborhood and the people around.

Chris Faivre said we actually have some of that already outlined. First offense, second offense and at what point you know we would be revoking there, so as soon as we solidify all that then we will definitely have that we can make that a component of the presentation when we bring the ordinance back for sure.

Councilor Graham said similar kind of question. In terms of the notification process then would a neighbor who disagreed with this plan would they have any kind of recourse? I know that there is nothing that the city loves more than mitigating fights between neighbors and especially you specifically Chris Faivre, is it just a suggestion or is there something tied to that?

Chris Faivre said no. It is just a notification right now. So, they do have to notify, there is really nothing unless council wants to take that step to prohibit that. Right now, it is just a notification that it does, that there is a short-term rental within if we say go to

500 feet or something like that so. It is just to put them on notice.

Councilor Corran asked would it include the 24-hour contact information? That would probably actually be very useful if that were part of that communication.

Chris Faivre said we are going to require that they have all that information provided not only to us but to them when they do provide that outreach to their community.

Councilor Bencomo said I think this great. I am surprised that we don’t have something like this already, so I think that feels really important given the disparity between the number that exists and the number that are actually registered. On the

Airbnb side, is there a way for the city to have Airbnb before someone signs up their home to say hey these are this locality’s requirement for business license?

Rochelle Miller-Hernandez, Destination Management Director said everything on

Airbnb is very vague and a lot of times they tell you to contact your local municipality to be honest with you. Even on the taxes. So to address your comment earlier that you were surprised that we didn’t have something. We did enforce the tax collection quite some time ago and then sent out notices and we do have some rules and regulations on our website, but this is going to be amazing. Thank you, Chris, for all your hard work on this. But even on the taxes it says that they are collecting taxes and that are being submitted to the municipalities, but they are not collecting Lodger’s Tax.

So, they are talking about gross receipts so I went in and calculated and double checked and they state when I contacted them as if I was an Airbnb owner that they need to include those cost in their rental fees and then submit them directly to us. At one time Airbnb was collecting and submitting for the municipalities and there is a couple of agreements still out there but they stopped doing that because the numbers weren’t adding up correctly and it was causing a lot of problems.

Councilor Bencomo asked right now the responsibility of that is on the owner?

Rochelle Miller-Hernandez said yes, just like the hotels have to report, the owners do too. It is subject to an audit if we see any discrepancy. The software that we use does data mining. It is really interesting, and it can predict if you are renting your unit based on activity and then it would be up to you to show that you are not. If we say that you are not paying your taxes but if we have the indication that you are renting your property.

Councilor Bencomo said perhaps part of the education, if this should pass Chris, should include some of this additional information as well. Might as well get that out there. I just recently heard a legislator and again I have not been able to follow up on her with this or where she got this data but a legislator from Bernalillo County that was talking about like how much of a problem is in Bernalillo County that so many single family homes are owned by out of state corporations, like hundreds or something. I am curious in terms of like these 465 and you sort of said but I kind of want to touch back on it. You don’t see that there is a pattern in Las Cruces for this?

Chris Faivre said I have not heard anything anecdotally but if the data bears out that there is a tendency one way or the other.

Rochelle Miller-Hernandez said no. When we went through the list the other day and I can get the exact numbers for you but there were very few that were owned, most of them were just one property.

Councilor Bencomo said I guess I say that in the midst of a housing crisis there is a difference between someone local having a business versus a giant corporation just buying up houses to make profit.

Rochelle Miller-Hernandez said I don’t really think our short-term rentals are really affecting the housing crisis in our city.

Mayor Enriquez asked when someone comes in and opens a business say they fill out the business registration application and they have to have tax ID number or state number, is this the same thing? Is that going to be required?

Chris Faivre said yes, if you were going to a restaurant you need to show us if you have liquor license, so we are going to require all of that documentation. That specific information related to paying your taxes, the contact information, proof that you have reached out to your neighbors. We can work with them to provide them the list of people that fall within that radius but then they have to come back and show to us that is what they did provide. So, we are going to require all that but before we actually issue that business registration.

Mayor Enriquez asked the other one is notifications to the public or neighborhood or residents, isn’t there already a practice in place for a zone change or a development that it reaches out to a certain area already?

Chris Faivre said yes, there is notification process that is done through a certified letter through the city. This would put the onus on the short-term rental operator versus the city taking it on. I suppose if we were finding sometime down the road that wasn’t happening, we could come back in and tighten up those regulations up but that would be the recommendation now is that the operator does that outreach.

Mayor Enriquez said the message we don’t want to send is that we are not business friendly and we want to make sure that someone loses an opportunity to supplement their income. This is not what this is about. I agree with it. I believe in it for fire inspections, building inspections, so it is safe for the neighborhood and it is safe for the tenants as well that are there because I know sometimes the building official will get complaints after the fact that there was no hot water or the AC unit didn’t work and where does that go? So, this way we hold them accountable and become responsible owners. We are not limiting any potential income sources, we want to see people thrive but definitely we want everybody to be safe.

Padma Valdevit, Member of the Public said I am the owner and qualifying broker of

Rethink Real Estate. I am here today because I have talked to Chris on the phone a number of times. For years we have been trying to figure out a way to pay the 5%

Lodger’s Tax. So, we are a real estate company that does property management, but we also do Airbnb management. So, I have a number of questions and issues that we

have been trying to work through as we try to become compliant with the ordinance that is actually been on the books for a number of years. I think 2020 is when the original request for us to pay Lodger’s Tax was put into place. There is no functional way to do that so our issue has been, and we have been asking the city, we check in with them maybe every six months for the last three or four years because in order to charge that Lodger’s Tax through let’s just take an Airbnb, in order for them to do that we have to have the business license which we don’t take issue with in order to put into the system in an Airbnb we have to have that number that corresponds with an actual account. So right now we have no way of charging that tax and then paying the bill. First of all it is not mandatory with the city so I don’t know why people would add

5% arbitrarily to an Airbnb bill when it is not mandatory that they do so and that there is no functional way to do that. I did actually have somebody at the city tell me just come in and write a check. Taxes don’t work that way. So, we can’t just arbitrarily charge 5% on to our bookings and have Airbnb collect that and then what happens to it? So, we did a pilot property where we have registered it with the city, we are waiting and what we are doing is we are collecting the taxes and we did one business license and we are collecting the taxes, and we still don’t know how to pay them. So that money is accumulating on that one particular property. We vary from about 18 to 25 properties at any given time that we are managing. In addition to that we have asked, and we haven’t been able to get an answer yet to how does a property management company register all of the Airbnbs in their management system? Does every single one of those properties have to have a separate business license or can the business license come from Rethink Real Estate and then list all of the properties that we manage? Again, we don’t have the problem with the tax being collected and we don’t have the problem on paying a cost for each individual property, but property owners are not getting paid through Airbnb, our real estate company is. So how functionally does that work when the money is not coming in to the owner? That is a question that we have asked of both the city and the county and have not yet gotten an answer to.

So, I think that in short what I am asking for is a clear path to be within compliance of this ordinance. Right now, we are not seeing that. We are not seeing it in the county, and we are not seeing it in the city and I think the part of what everybody is missing is the voice on the other end of this that doesn’t have anything to do with business or making the property safe. It just has to do with the logistics of how this has to happen.

So, I guess what I am asking for is a voice when you are deciding these from the other direction. The other thing is where this program where you charge Lodger’s Tax to Airbnbs, if that were implemented it is huge amount of money for this city. Even if I estimate on the low side it is somewhere around $8 million to $9 million which this city needs so I am all for charging that but please I am asking for you to do it in a way that makes sense in the real world and for people who are, when I started doing this, I was doing this for myself. It was in my backyard so that was very easy. Over the years it has built into a business. That business employs ten people now. So, there is another side of this. It is not only just a backyard person with one listing that they are doing.

There is a whole business that is helping to support Las Cruces and we just want the ordinances and how they are set up to make some common sense.

Rochelle Miller-Hernandez said just to address that. We do have a system set up and

I would be happy to sit down and explain it. We do have a page on our website. We have collected in FY25 we collected $43,000 in taxes. We have already collected $10,000 this year. I don’t know where the $9 million is coming from because we only

collect a little under three for all the hotel rooms that we have in the city. Maybe if you rented every Airbnb every night of the year but on average a hotel room is only rented

50% of the time and according to our calculations Airbnbs are only maybe 25% of the time occupied. So, I am not quite sure where that number is coming from but I would happy to look into it but we do have a procedure, and I would love to sit down and explain it to you afterwards.

Tony Watkins, Member of the Public said I am from La Casa. Just real briefly, I used to work with the continuum of care agency that kind of runs the whole thing in New

Mexico. New Mexico Coalition and Homelessness and I have been with La Casa now five months, but it is great to be part of a community that are really putting their heads together and like congratulations on the 800 units on the pike, that is real exciting. I just wanted to kind of connect these two issues on the agenda because it strikes me and it is really just kind of out of the box thinking that did not come from me but imagine linking the auxiliary dwelling unit initiative that you are facing now with the homelessness situation and in the continuum of care we used to get points from HUD from municipal governments that would give preference to people experiencing homelessness in their Section 8 programs and imagine if we did something like that in

Las Cruces with auxiliary dwelling units that we have somehow subsidized or found funding to encourage owners of auxiliary dwelling units to give preference to survivors of domestic violence.

3. ADJOURNMENT 3.1 Councilor Yvonne Flores moved, seconded by Councilor Becki Graham, to adjourn at 3:13 p.m.

RESULT: Carried

MOVER: Councilor Yvonne Flores

SECONDER: Councilor Becki Graham

AYES: Councilor Johana Bencomo, Councilor Yvonne Flores, Councilor Becki

Graham, Councilor Becky Corran, Mayor Eric Enriquez, and Councilor Cassie

McClure

Mayor

City Clerk