Community Services - Regular Meeting

Seven. Yeah. I was just making sure we have enough folks here. So let's do quick introductions around the room, and then we'll jump to the folks online. And then we are switching the order slightly.

If you noticed on the agenda that was sent out, we have Dan Osborne here from the community development department, kind of viewing our theme of having, guests kinda share topics that are of interest to the health council and pertinent to our comprehensive health plan. But Dan has a training to go to at one, so we can't do the traditional council staff, chair updates, roundtable, and then presentation, so we flipped it. Dan's gonna go first, so that he can also get to his training, and then we will do, member updates, council update, staff update.

Do you wanna switch do

you wanna switch to public Yeah.

We can do the public comment after. That's a good point too. I didn't catch that on

the agenda. Meeting. We could

do Yeah. We'll do every all the business afterwards. Okay. So I will start with introductions. For those that don't know me, I am Jessica Strong. I am the social services manager and staff liaison to the health council. It is good to see everyone here and online.

Oh, you too. Yeah. Sit. Just leave it there.

I'm Lisa Hampton. I'm the health council chair.

You that's nice.

And thanks for coming.

Hi. I'm Heather Muck. I'm new to the board. So

Good to see you in person.

Celeste Rothman. Member? Sheila Haven, board member.

I'm Leslie Wallstrom, a guest invited by Lisa.

I guess I'll speak up so you can hear me.

Randy, writing county counselor. Dan Osborne, Los Alamos County Housing and special projects manager.

Care specialist. Beverly meal plan for the day here as just a citizen. But, also, county council member. Yeah. Nice to Also Medicare specialist, but that's why I come in all Yeah. Basins.

Medicare specialist. Right. Love

it. Perfect.

Awesome. Those are those are some other big hats to wear. I'll just call on folks online. Leticia? I'm Leticia Martinez. I'm a nurse practitioner, and I'm on the county health council. Cool. Cool. Thank you for putting your video on. You might wanna turn your video off because your sound's a little choppy once you turned it on. Not that I don't love seeing you. Let's see. Tyler.

Hey. I'm I'm Tyler Jones. I'm a fireman and previous ER nurse. I'm currently working in elderly nursing and working with the Los Alamos Visiting Nurses.

Cool. Cool. And

just for for everyone's sake, Tyler, Leah, and Heather are our three new health council members. So with that, Leah. Hi, everyone. I'm Leah Blackwell, and I'm the chaplain with Los Alamos Visiting Nurses.

And a county council member. Yes.

Yes.

I mean, a health council member.

Yeah. Not not quite on county council yet. But stick around long enough. We'll and I'm not sure. Giselle, are you is Giselle on, or is it just her notes? She might not be on. Giselle recently had a baby, so she she may not be able to join us. Okay. I think that's all the health council members. Brandy.

Everyone. My name is Brandy. I am the health and wellness program manager and interim fellow for the Los Alamos Community Foundation.

Glad you could join us, Brandy. Jeremy Espinosa.

Hello, everyone. Jeremy Espinosa with the New Mexico Department of Health, public health department, health promotion team. I'm the Northeast Region community epidemiologist, everybody. I I may have to leave early at 12:30 because I have another meeting to get to, but it's good to get

It is absolutely the theme of the day, Jeremy. No worries. And, Jordan, we saw your note. Jordan is our case coordination specialist at the social services office, and her mic doesn't work. So we need to to work on getting that tech fixed. Oh, there's Giselle. Look at that. What perfect timing. And while Giselle is getting set up, I will also speaking of multiple meetings, Joyce Richins is our other health council member. She works at the Los Alamos Medical Center.

She is in a meeting right now and will join us for the second half of the meeting. So I appreciate I know everyone is juggling a lot of things. Giselle, do you if you can unmute, do you wanna say hi real quick? We'll wrap up our introductions. Sorry. Yeah. I'm running a little bit late. But you know this No worries. Is We're glad you're able to be here. So, yeah, hello, everyone. My name is Giselle. It's just introductions. Right? Just introductions. Okay. My name is Giselle Martinez, and I work with the firstborn program here in Los Alamos, and I'm a home visitor. Great. Thank you so much.

Thank you. I forgot, Jordan.

Oh, Jordan put a note in the, chat because her microphone doesn't work. She's at the social services office. Yeah. So alright. So with that, I'm just gonna slide it over just so you have the mic. I am gonna turn this over to Dan Osborne to walk us through some of the county's affordable housing initiatives or general housing thoughts.

Sure.

We probably have twenty, thirty minutes and then q and

a before you go to bounce.

Okay. Yeah. I'll just sort of start at a high level. I was hired, gosh. It's almost been two years ago now, which is pretty amazing. It's gone very, very quick. I come I, was born and raised in the in the Denver area and then have worked in the Intermountain West as both planning manager, community development director. I've held positions on various boards with the Whitewater Festival, which was fun, and then also the Leadville Planning and Zoning Commission as the chair and then the Leadville Sanitation District as a board member. So I've got a lot of sort of just general community development. And about four four years ago, I really wanted to transition and start working on housing.

And we started working on LITEC, low income housing tax credit credit projects in Summit County to provide affordable housing, for our lowest income households and residents. And we ended up partnering on, almost 300 units with Vail Resorts, the Summit County government, and then was able to get stand up this project and provide these these housing units for the community. And that really sort of shifted my mind, that I started moving out of community development. I really wanted to work in affordable housing, and boy, has that taken off. There's a lot going on.

And so that that brings me to Los Alamos. Los Alamos had an affordable housing plan. It hadn't been updated since 2010, and so that was one of my first initiatives that I got off the ground. We hired Sites South. We went through an RFP and procurement process, contracted with Sites Southwest, to update, our affordable housing plan, And we, we we got that done, in, I think, nine months to a year, but pretty quick.

And I felt pretty good about that. And then we had a longtime partner with Los Alamos, housing partnership that provided affordable housing services on behalf of the county. We sort of provided the funding. They ran the programs for us. And there was a homebuyer, homebuyer program, basically down payment assistance, and then a home rehabilitation program where we float the money.

They're non amortizing loans. They they we record a note against the property, and then when the property sells, that money is get is paid back. The loans typically range between zero and one and a half percent for the life of the loan. It's gotten a lot of peep we've I think we've sold out, almost 1 and a half million dollars of the life of that program since 2016. Last, March, Steve Bruiser, who had run that program on behalf of the county since 2016, retired. He sort of created and stood up this full organization. It's it's pretty amazing the work that he did for Los Alamos County. He retired. That organization no longer existed, so that sort of put us on our heels. He gets to retire, but we weren't expecting it.

So we immediately got an RFP out, and we have recently contracted with the Santa Fe Civic Santa Fe Community Housing Trust who are now picking up those programs for us. We're just on the initial, initially getting out the marketing. We have a few people in the application process. We have not issued a loan yet, but we're getting very close. In fact, they'll be up here and we've got them coming up here sort of as needed, but we're working with them to get office space.

They're gonna be sharing office with office or getting office space in one of the banks, so they will have a physical presence in Los Alamos. We'll not quite ready to announce, but we'll hopefully get that out in the next next couple of weeks, once they get their their lease, finalized there. And so we'll have that on on Hill support. So those are kinda some of the the the bigger things that we've got going. And then I met Jessica, and

We were like, we should do a lot of projects.

We have a lot of opportunity to do some other things, but we have so much need across the housing spectrum from low end from homelessness and unhoused all the way through the low income, and then we have the high salaries here. So it skews our need to the top end. So we so as part of the affordable housing plan, we actually increased where we can participate some sort of zero up to about a 120% AMI, and that's very unusual for other other communities. We we now have the ability to participate for, you know, for somebody that's making a 120 or a $130,000 as an individual or a couple $100,000 as as a household, and that's very unusual and unique. Right now, we are trying to sort of target that missing middle.

Many of you know that we recently brought on both the Canyon Walks and the Bluffs senior apartments. Both of those are low income housing tax credit projects. Essentially, that is a private developer who brought, federal funds to help them provide, below market rate housing to folks making between 3060% AMI primarily. The LITECH is a Reagan era program that was essentially a way for wealthy individuals to be able to to get a tax credit to lower their tax bill by providing equity to projects to get these built. It is one of the more successful programs that we've had over the years.

It is funding for that has been sort of up and down over the years, but it seems as of now, it continues to be funded. We're not sure what's going to happen over the next few years, but we're hopeful. We know that we have enough need, and I get regular calls from Flytech developers. I also stay in touch with the mortgage finance with Housing New Mexico, which is the mortgage finance, formerly the mortgage finance, authority, who those funds flow through. And if we were able to find a site, we could probably get another LITECH development done up here.

We have enough interest from the development community as long as funds are available, but up here, it's it's kinda coming around with my sad story. It's always about land. We are land constrained. We have fairly low densities across our county. One of the things that we found in the affordable housing plan, we had let me just take one step back. In 2019, we did just sort of a housing assessment, and we thought we needed about a thousand units. We need to add about a thousand units. Fast forward to 2024, we reran the numbers. We started looking at it again. We looked at the growth at Lantel, the pit production, some of the additional workforce that was coming up the hill, the big commuter population.

You know, we've got five, six, 7,000 people coming up the road depending on the day, and it would be nice to pull them off the road, get them into homes in our community. But, ultimately, we found that kinda status quo, prices stay the same, traffic stays the same, rental units and trying to find a unit stays the same. We need about 1,300 units. If we wanna start moving the needle and start lowering rents, hopefully, making housing more afford affordable or in my mind, affordability at this point is just getting stable.

So the question is, like, 1,300 total additional.

Yeah. So it would be an additional 300 on top of that just to meet the status quo. If But we wanna move the needle, we need to get closer to 2,400 units. And so we with the affordable housing plan, we tried to create some production numbers to say, hey. We need this many in this AMI group. We you know? So we need this many in the low income. We need this many in the missing middle moderate income, and we need this many in in the higher income brackets. So we're kinda those brackets? Just quickly.

Well, I so so from the federal standpoint, anything below 50% is low is very low income. And so the LITECH programs typically take the 30 to 60%, AMI, and then you sort of have that next tranche, which is the 60, to 80% AMI. And that's actually the hardest to find capital and development partners with. And then you sort of have that 80 and up from there, which is more of the market rate.

And so AMI is

Oh, I'm sorry. AMI is the area median income. So that's that's yeah. The area median income in Los Alamos is about a $110,000. Just for round numbers, that's for a single person household. So it's quite high. The state is, you know, 50 something, 40 some 40 to 50 something in the state. And those numbers go up a little bit every you know, up and down depending on what the markets are doing and what the what the employment markets are looking like.

Celeste, did you have a question?

Well, that's what I was gonna ask. Yeah.

110. Yeah. And it it tends to creep up a little bit. But if we go into a recession or some other things, they they will go back down, but the general trend is up.

And that's household.

Right. So

if you have 200, that would be a default level stuff.

It would be more. Yeah. Yes. And you

said that these developers are aiming for the 30 to 60% aim?

The low income housing tax credit developers, that's their niche market. And that money, the LITEC dollars, the funding, are only it is only available for folks in that income range.

And what is LITEC again?

It's the Low Income Housing Tax Credit program. It's a federal program run through HUD. And like I said, it's been around since the eighties. It was

Is that gonna get killed this year?

We don't know. We're we're we're seeing we I saw this morning Bitcoin. Yeah. I mean, I saw this morning that they are already starting to cut back at HUD specifically, and specifically around some of the homeless programs. Anything that is, sort of targeted, I I don't I don't wanna get into it too much. The answer is yes. We anticipate that there and we are already starting to see some real issues with just as you know, I've 've so let let let I'll I'll get to some of these. Some of the other things that we're doing is we do have some county owned land. Some of it is county owned. Some of it is former land lab land that has been transferred to the county.

We then try to act as an intermediary between the development community and the county. The lab gives gives us that land with stipulations. You have to use it for housing or economic development or other things. So as that comes to us, we then write a solicitation and say, hey. Our comp plan says our affordable housing plan says, you know, we need higher density housing. We need housing for these income brackets. So we write the solicitation specifically. We put them those out to the development community. When we put those out last year, we had very good responses. We have two that are active that I'm working on.

One is the 20th Street parcel, which is sort of across from Ashley Pond. It's over where the smart house is. It's a little under two acres. We put a solicitation out for that for market rate housing with a retail, like a mixed use retail component. We're currently in negotiations with a development partner, to build up to 300 units there and some, small business retail space. Those will be market rate units. So they'll, you know, they'll be, know, $2.03, $4,000 per unit depending on if it's one, two, or three bedroom.

Rental or rental?

Those will be rental. And

then is it where are

you in the process? Have you awarded the contract?

We have not awarded it. So the devil's always in the details on this, and this is the hardest part to convey sort of back to the community and to stakeholders. We issued that solicitation about nine months ago, and we had three respondents. All three of them, were strong. We typically try to look at what is their financial capacity to get the project done.

Do they have bonding you know, do they have their own resources and whether it's loans or private equity? We look at who their construction partners are. Do they have a construction, like a Moss Construction or a James Corp or somebody that they're partnering with that can then actually come in and do the construction and have a workforce and supply chain? And then does it meet the, you know, does it meet the needs of what the community is? In our downtown master plan, our comprehensive plan, and our new affordable housing plan all say, hey. It's downtown. We want to get a little bit more density. We want more people downtown. We want to make it walkable. We want to do those things.

As, like, any of the knowledge that we learned from the Marriott deal that was supposed to go there been conveyed to these soliciting so that they are not walking in blind with, like, the area and the property and being on the canyon and all of that?

So that's where the devil's in the details. So we do try to learn, you you know, learn our learn from our, you know, previous ones. You know, the the the Marriott deal, you know, that got COVIDed a little bit. But there are some realities of doing development in Los Alamos. Know, you never know what you're gonna find when you dig. Yeah. And so that's where we're at now is we are in a due diligence phase or not even due diligence because we haven't signed a contract yet. And this is where there's a little bit of risk to the developer. They are taking a look to do their to make sure that they're not walking into something that, you know, they're in the process of surveying the property. We have made them aware through the solicitation that we have an expectation for a Canyon Rim Trail through there.

They have agreed that they wanna do that and make that part of their part of their project. So, essentially, it will the Canyon Road Trail will come through there. It'll link into the urban trail, so it'll sort of create some continuity between the two different capital improvement projects that we've been working over the last few years. But in addition to that, we also know there are gonna be some off-site requirements. We add 300 houses.

There's gonna be impacts to the transportation system. There's going to need be upgrades that need to happen, to the roadway. We're currently working you know, our our public works department is currently working on, you know, Trinity Drive and rightsizing the road and making it more multimodal and some of those things. Those are things that the developer actually 100% agrees with, but we need to get cost estimates before we walk into a deal with them to say, hey. We we our community's expectation is that you add these amenities and do this additional work.

Some of that is off-site, so they're in a county role to participate in the road upgrades and some of those other, pieces. So where we're at right now is they're surveying the property. They're working with our engineering department to understand what the what the road design requirements are, and they need to get a cost estimate to do that. And that's why it's taking so long to get it done is we're working with so I'm sort of the project manager on it, and I'm coordinating between DPU, public works, the developer's engineer, you know, our master plans, our parks plans, and those kinds of things to make

sure rotation because there's probably gonna be a street light if there's 300 units there.

Yeah. Absolutely. So that's that's one of the big parts is we know that it's gonna need some sort of signalization.

Yeah. Parking.

Yeah. Yeah. And in this case, parking would be internal parking, so it would be structured parking. So, hopefully, we they call it a Texas wrap. It's where they put the parking structure, and then they wrap stuff around it. So that yeah. So you go in, pull in, and then there would be structured parking, likely an automated system where some of those details out. But that's where it's always hard because everybody's like, why is this taking so long? And it's because there's a lot of details and a lot of money at stake in these deals.

So I'm assuming this has nothing to move forward.

This one will have nothing to do with something. Yeah.

So I have

a question. Could you and a lot of people have asked this. Could you discuss a little bit the the latest housing that is planned, the affordable housing on eleventh? Was it '9 is it ninth? Yes.

So the county just recently approved a participation agreement to essentially buy down the rents on 87 apartments for the next twenty years. The affordable housing plan allows us to provide a subsidy to developers when they provide affordable housing. So we are providing them some dollars. They then will lower those rents for the for the next twenty years. There's a process to income qualify folks. They have to report back to us. We get to look at their rent rolls, those kinds of things. It's the first time we've done this in Los Alamos. I'm sure there will be hiccups. We are working really hard to get it to get it off the ground.

This is very common in other communities. There are a few communities in New Mexico that are doing it, primarily Albuquerque. I think there are some in Santa Fe. Up in Colorado in the mountain towns where I had previously worked, there are thousands of these, like, thousands of units with deed restrictions, and they can be deed restrictions on rental properties. They can be deed restrictions on individual market rate for sale units. So they kind of run run the breadth of it, but it's the first time we've done this. It's new to our legal team. It's new, to our housing department community development, But we we just got it rolled out, we're very excited about that.

I think you had a question about renovations.

Yeah. So would that money go towards renovating the units or just, like, just the subsidizing rent so that we could lower prices?

So about $33,800,000.0 is going just to subsidize the units to bring down those costs through time. There's another $520,000 that we're making available. It'll be on a reimbursement basis. They do some work. We give them you know, they bill us, and we give them, some money up to $520,000.

Those will largely be around ADA improvements for, some of the 1st Floor units and then additional things if you know, what we are really wanting to see there is we wanna see the the cost of utilities go down for folks that are living there. So we'll be making improvements to the boilers that are, god, I don't know, 60 years old to put in mini splits and you know, so the heating and cooling systems that are are popular now and much more, energy efficient. So those are gonna be the things that we target, with with those with those dollars. About 75% of the units have already been rehabbed by the current property owner. That's part of what made this deal interesting to us.

They're in pretty good shape. And for some of our older units, that's not always the case. So the addition you know, the other 25 or 25% or so of the units, that's where we're gonna be targeting those rehabilitation dollars. So somebody moves out of the unit, it hasn't been rehabilitated. We'll be looking at flooring. We'll be looking at, you know, kitchens, bathrooms floors. Those kind of things. I mean, some of them have, like like they look like gym lockers where you go in there and you've just got a little partition between the, you know, the the, shower stall and stuff. And they actually were gonna you know, they are converting those over where it's like a proper insert or, you know, like a door on it, and then there's a proper vanity, those kinds of things. And then same thing with the with the kitchens.

Typically, the upper floors get carpet. The lower floors get some sort of laminate floor.

Go ahead. I have a couple questions. For the last four or so years, there have been several developments in Los Alamos that just seem to be frozen into the ether. You know, the one down here at the bottom of Central, you know, the old hilltop house over on North Mesa, the is it Arbolas or whatever? Arbolas And I'll what is that are you guys involved in are they mandated to have affordable part of the housing affordable? And what's going on?

So I'll take your first part of your question the last part of your question first. We have no mandates to require developers to put any portion of affordable housing. Right now, we have sort of we're looking for partnerships. We've put that out there to the development community. And if they want to approach us, we'll talk to anybody. That's kinda how we're handling it now. Many communities do have affordable housing requirements. And if you're gonna build x number of units, some number of those have to be you know, it's 5% or 10%. Some number of those have to be, affordable. The reality of that is unless you have a very strong economy and very high demand, it's hard to get those deals done because the developer can do it.

They just pass the cost along to the market rate units and cross subsidize. So if you get a handful of units that are affordable, that price is gonna get tacked on Yeah.

That's

to the market rate. It's pretty common in big big fast growing places. Happens all the time. Not controversial. So more like Los Alamos where we have low demand, low supply, it's gonna be very controversial.

So I have a question. On those specific units over here, they're I'm assuming they're full because everything is full.

Everything is full. Which one?

So the 9th Street That's the the county is putting money in. They're occupied. Occupied. Yes. So what is going to happen to the people that are living there if they are now low income? Because some of the people are younger single people who have a decent job here and might now get bumped out of their housing because they no longer move low income.

So that is always a concern. And so we tried to build in off ramps for just that. You know, the the folks that are that are that are qualifying under the 45%, they stay. They calculate the rent, and they stay. Folks that are making above 45%, then they're gonna pay either the 45% or just 30% of what their income is, you know, divided by 12 to get to their rent. If you start making over 80% of the AMI, so that you know, again, that's somebody making $90,000 a year, is not nothing, but I rec you know, it's it's a good salary, but I recognize in Los Alamos with the other high cost of living, there are impediments. It is our approach that they then have two years. So, you know, I start yeah. I have a windfall. I get a promotion.

You know, whatever. I get some new certification. I'm making more money. I'm now above that threshold. I can stay up to 80%. I just have to pay more. Once I make 80%, you've got two years to find new housing. So you don't get kicked out right away, but you have two years to try to

But you do

because it's going here.

To get into more appropriate housing. Yeah. It I mean, it's tough. And and that's where, you know, my approach and the approach to the affordable housing plan is we are trying to create more units for everybody. And to go back to sort of your your original point, why aren't these other projects getting done? Well, I heard they're developing. So it it is yeah. It it's it's land, labor, and financing. You know, sort of Interest rates.

Financing first, and then labor. Yeah. Financing is turned upside down.

Yeah. But those are kinda usually the the three cores of

The three levers.

Yeah. The three levers that we have to sort of pull, to get to get housing projects. And in the last ten years, everything is flipped, and it's only accelerated since since COVID and the end of COVID. And, you know, we have some county owned projects that the county has participated in, The Bluffs, The Hills, Canyon Walk, where those were either transfer parcels or that we provided the land or some sort of a subsidy. We've gotten those done where we've had been able to have a role and be able to say, hey.

We have some oversight. We have some ability to sort of move some of those levers. We've been able to get those ones largely across the finish line. Right now, the private sector and this is not just in Los Alamos. This is the one place where I always say Los Alamos isn't special. In this one way, this is the same struggle that everybody's having across the country. And then add where we're at at the cul de sac at the end of a road, we typically have about a 30% higher cost to do these things anyway. And then just as Jill said, people building and long term investment in housing is not the sexy place to put money anymore anymore than it used to be. Finance costs have gone up. It's harder to get financing, and then it just trickles through.

It's harder to find labor. Its materials have gone up. We saw them really spike in COVID. They've come back down. I've seen all kinds of crazy stuff happening now with the tariffs. And, you know, even just the first round of tariffs, we saw an increase in material costs. And then what they're projecting, just what we've seen in the last I mean, the market was down $1,500 this morning. That Points. End up. Oh, I'm sorry. Yeah. Points.

Points. Right? 4%.

So we already and the big things that we have the hardest time getting are things around, you know, the the electric the electric buses, the the the transformers, the wiring, the meters, like the the bluffs to get them across the finish line. We actually sort of gave them some of our stuff, like the county, and then said, when you your stuff comes in, just give us that, and this will keep you moving. And that was my original role on that is just liaising between the development community and us to get them done. And our public works department stepped up and got stuff done, got them hooked up, got the lights turned on, helped them with some materials that they were having trouble sourcing. Please.

I have the elephant in the room question. How is the so I was born here, seeing the whole thing. And how is the lab is the lab helping? I mean, other I see you said they donated some property. But are you guys putting some pressure on the lab that was a signal? I mean, I I'm sorry. Don't It

is a public meeting.

And so what isn't the are you pleasuring? Is anyone talking the lab? When is the lab gonna get involved? Because when I grew up, the lab owned all the housing. Back in the early sixties, they decided they don't wanna be landlords anymore, and they sold all the housing not. Well, they can't anymore. DOE won't

have. Yes. So that's another one where the devil are in the details. Many many of the sort of the parameters of what used to happen are no longer available to us.

That's your federal government. They own the schools.

You know? And I I don't wanna speak you know, get too far over my skis. But, yeah, we we regularly meet with Landell. We have our sort of peers at the lab. You know, county council is often engaged in conversations, but the reality is we just have a limited supply of land.

DOD DOE can be reluctant to, pass it along because of a variety of concerns, typically environmental, but there are lots of different, other other factors in that. And the process takes potentially decades. And and and this is, again, you know, it's this is a tough conversation sort of across the country in, you know, many developed countries. We have got we have had an expectation for the last generation and a half that we should all get a single family detached house with a white picket fence and a dog. And that land development pattern with the pressures that we see today and the escalation of costs doesn't really work anymore.

And that's where we've been very fleet in our comprehensive planning, in our downtown master planning, in some of our updates to chapter 16 that we've done over the last few years. Now we just gotta get over the hurdle to to to con to convince the finance community that it's a good bet.

So and and I'd just like to

add a couple of things to this

because it is a public meeting, and I think we need to be clear that we're not bashing anybody.

Right.

A town

that is a one horse employer. Yeah. We watched growth of that one horse employer double in five years. We were a metropolitan area of 2,000,000 people, we would have been upside down trying to catch up and we're population of 20,000. So some of it is just impossible to walk away from.

What is also pinched this is, though, because it's a federal lab, because it's the largest national lab, lots of investors have come in and gobbled up single family duplexes from an investment standpoint because they know the employer pays a lot of money, and so the rents can be higher than market value. And we had no we have no backstop to that. You know? People sell to whoever walks in that can write a check.

Market. Right?

They give you that. Doesn't matter if you're

They're gonna argue free market. This is what we're get.

Retirement fund. It doesn't matter. And so I think some of what as a community we are going to have to figure out is how do we help people that social services deals with to kind of get to the front of the line as opposed to the back of

the line.

We are gifted with an amazing GRT revenue stream that we just get. I mean, we have the employer

on the Yes. You know?

Yeah. And it won't go off the hill. So I'm just curious with the And with the county, you know, a priority has got to be to bring the rents. I mean, I can look at maps, and it a house that was in 2019 up here was on on the market for $298,000. That same house today is over 6. Mhmm. Nothing has happened. It's the same house. It's the same town.

But that's nationwide.

I mean But I'm

just saying it's It's Albuquerque.

It's everywhere. Have a luxury of being a very wealthy county unlike most counties at San Antonio. So I'm just curious. It seems like there could be some really interesting opportunities that the county could say, you know, we're gonna kind of lead as opposed to catch up. And we've got the invisible 2,000 that we deal with as a board of we could grasp this because for the most part, these are not problem issues. These are really people that went through divorce, were in an abusive relationship, rotated out of the foster system. I mean, these are people genuinely trying to stay up here and be productive. And it just seems like such a huge opportunity, and I'm sure that's why Jessica has connected me.

Yeah. So so, yeah, to to to bring it more back around to the health council, Jessica and I we we don't get enough time to collaborate is

the honest answer because we're we're our hair is always on fire. It's easier. Need for a person, a connector, a whatever?

So, you know, I well, I don't think I think it's more we just need bigger plates. And

Yeah. So that that you know, every everybody always thinks that we just need to throw more people at the problem. Time. It's time. It's It's really more time. Like like, we we can do and figure this stuff out working with you all to get that stuff done. You know, it's time. It's money. And, like, I always feel like I'm painting such a gloomy picture. There are opportunities, but there are real challenges. G r GRT is down, and it's going down. It's trending down. The healthy reserves are gonna be going down. We know that these trends are happening, which are only going to exacerbate and make it harder to solve these problems. Some of the innovative things that, you know, we have talked about are the wraparound services, housing.

We've got a property down on some you know, down by Sibrillo. We have you know, we've made runs at other properties that we might be able to get control of, and there hasn't been an appetite to do anything with the community. We accept and understand that. The the the price is high, but there's also an opportunity cost of not

acting. And Longview

County where we're at your Zas private development.

So it is Yeah. That that's private development. Yeah. Sherwood Rounds. That's another one where we are trying to help with the development. We're gonna be straightening out Longview and trying to help facilitate some of that work. Very complicated deal. You've got a Jill probably knows better than I, but there's an association. There's multiple owners. There's multiple businesses.

But they're committed. But they're of a percentage of what they bill without incentives. I mean, they just don't raise their

But, again, not not affordable.

How Yes. Affordable. I'll finish this sentence. It is. So there's you know, they're carving off a percentage of what they build and targeting first responders, teachers, whatever, because that's community. You know? That is what everybody's trying to establish. It's hard to do, because that means they basically have to cut cut their bottom line profit center over the whole system, but they're in

it for the long haul.

They see lots of opportunities up here. And I do think things will level out on the private sector. It has been hard for investment to come in and look at this town and get over the fact that it's the it has one big employer. And if that employer gets a a budget cut, you know, suddenly it's it's got some issues. So I I think there's real solutions here. Yeah. And it's really a collaboration moment. I know Phil works with you all the time.

Yeah. I just had a question. How how is that affordable? Is it affordable not low income, but it is affordable correct. Price range?

Yeah. My my

understanding, yeah, my understanding is that those homes will be under $500,000. So they would fall, you know, sort of literally in that missing middle, which is helpful.

Like that 60 to 80 that you were talking about?

Yeah. That 60 to 80. That's sort of that hardest market to be able to provide housing for, especially if you don't increase density. If you increase density and shrink the size of the houses Yeah. You have some opportunity. The yeah. Those are some of those levers that we have, in land labor and materials, some of those things that we can start moving around. Mhmm. You know, I come from a background where we also work with our faith communities, certainly around homelessness, where we provided, safe places for people to, sleep in their car or to you know? No nobody wants to believe this stuff is happening in their communities, but it absolutely is, and it's becoming more and more common.

Some of it are just folks at the lab who just don't wanna drive home, so they wanna sleep sleep overnight. Some of it are people who have come through hard circumstances and are trying to save some money and get back on their feet, and that's their only option. Some people are doing it by choice. Like, I have teacher friends that they choose to live this way, as a lifestyle choice. Whether they do that forever, I don't know. But right now, that that is a choice that they are making to do. So we have tried to create safe spaces and safe ways for them to, park in you know, we we haven't done that here, but it's programs that I've done in other communities where we work with the faith communities. They set it up. There's an application process. You can camp here overnight.

You there are some rules. You can't cook in your car. We have a bathroom and trash cans for you. You have to use those things, and people don't even know it's happening. And it's we've been doing it for years up in some account. It just happens in the background, and nobody knows. Right.

And so that's been some of the brainstorms we've had. Where can we, again, make it safer or more comfortable? I mean, just as a human for for somebody who is sleeping outside in January, given our ice storms. Oh, hang on. Give me just a quick second.

But the the other conversations, if we had more time without our hair being on fire all the time, there's a need for additional types of housing for older adults, for example. So the bluffs is great. The number that were set aside for low income filled up immediately. They had a wait list before construction was finished for our clients, but that's not enough. We need supportive housing with wraparound case management, as kind of assisted living, but for people with ongoing mental health or substance use challenges and are 60 and are on Medicaid.

Right? That does not exist. There is a need for it's a small need, but if we talked about it on a regional level, you had mentioned young adults aging out of the foster care system, like some transitional housing with a different type of case management. Right? A young adult case management to get them launched into adulthood. That has been, again, we don't have a huge number of people who are unhoused here, but a percentage has been

Yeah.

17 to to 22 that the alternative is opioid use or joblessness or other, you know, hardships.

But that's labor force. If we can start to connect those dots a little bit

Right.

And and so we

we've talked about there's some specialized, but would it always be full four units, six units, 12 units, 20, or should we be having a bigger regional conversation about, you know, we get 20 units of a 60 unit something. Right? And so there's just it's a lot.

Before you leave, I just had wanted you quickly to tell us where we are on this eight eight a because that is So the eight So down on DP Road.

So the second one, so we put out the solicitation for 20th Street. That's largely gonna be market rate. We also have the 88 A parcel, which is down on DP Road. It's sort of kind of adjacent and then sort of behind the bluffs. There's 22 acres or a little less than 22 acres that go down there. Again, went through a solicitation process. We had a nice turnout. We had three different development groups that came in and solicit you know, put in a proposal for that. We went to council, talked to council in closed session. They said this one seems like the one that we'd like to do.

Go work with them. So, again, we have been working with them for about the last six months. And the biggest hurdle with that one is since we started the conversation, the financial markets have changed almost a 180% on that. We were we're we are originally looking at, like, 359 units. Those would all be, targeted at about a 100 we would just average that one out at a 100% AMI. So that's clearly that missing middle. Some of the units might be 80%. Some of the units might be a 110. We would we're we're still trying to hammer that out. And every time we hear a whiff of tariff or supply chain or financing, that means the AMI that they can serve just went higher.

The total cost of the project just went up. And now we're having to and the commitments that they're asking from the county, GRTs are going down. We have other obligations. We have other priorities for our community on how to spend those dollars. I'm not sure we're going to get a deal on that done. Excellent. And in that case, then I will say, can't do this. Should we look at a LITEC? Should we look at some other private sector Or go back to them too. Or go back to, you know, go back to the other solicitations and say, tell us about your proposal again.

Is this still viable? Where what can we do? And those will be conversations that I have with counsel, get some direction, and then we'll come back to the public and say, hey. We we tried really, really hard, but everything in the last six months, everything went upside down. And yeah. So I I'll probably be coming and talking to you. I'll sort of let you know.

I'll just sort of let the cat out of the. And

I didn't get to Heather's question. I know you have, like, two minutes left.

Yeah. I just need to bounce because I gotta be down at PCS.

Go, Leslie.

So I'm just a guest. But

So glad you're here.

I'm encouraged to hear

you talk about work with the faith community because and this is kind of a question, but also a comment. I think there's some creative ideas that could come out of that relationship. And I won't go into it right now because I know you have to leave. But you got a lot of energy in the faith community that I think you need to tap into.

Yep. And

and I will just hook in here. I am connected with Doctor. Tyler Taylor from the Interfaith Group on what he has launched. And then social services led a meeting in December. Actually, Jeremy helped lead it to tap into some of those. The doc Reverend Tina Deyo at the Unitarian Church has been really involved. Father Theo at the Orthodox Church has been really involved. And so trying to piece that together Yeah. We for a complementary piece. Absolutely.

We really are talking about this. And when I say all options are on the table, I truly mean that. If if, Leslie, if you know if you know somebody in the faithful New Year has an idea, send them our way.

Yeah. Connect them.

I'd have a

Yeah. Great. Come on.

Come Come on.

Come wasn't gonna say it, but yes.

And come up with ideas. Don't tune them down at this late meeting. But just Yeah.

We're we're open to that.

It's out in the real world, parcels of land that you might not be aware of or you know? Yes. I'm not constrained by the facts so I can dream big dreams. It's you're

you're speaking our love language.

Sorry. I

will follow-up with you, Elizabeth. But wait. I wanted to make sure we got to Heather before you have to bounce.

Everything just wanna make sure that we're talking with our law enforcement because I am I have a lot

of friends in the law enforcement.

And I've talked about the homeless situation here in Los Alamos. Even though it's super small, a lot of them are nervous because they've come from Santa Fe, and they've come from Albuquerque, and they have seen what it what happens when you put a homeless, like, facility Yep. In different areas.

We work very, very closely with the police, either them. So so Jeremy's position was actually started from a grant we received to do outreach to folks who are homeless. Right? And even though she's moved into a new position, that position is now open, but hopefully, we'll get it filled soon. Part of that was building those relationships with the police and then both them having our resources to be able to give out so that people come in so that if they wanna seek help with food help, with housing, etcetera, we can do that.

But also then building those connections with our counterparts in Bernalillo County, in Rio Reba County. If if you are passing through, we do have a wonderfully safe community for people to spend the night. But if if we can connect you to your people in Rio Reba County or Bernalillo County, we've made those connections too. We've we've definitely had people who, for example, have spent time at our detention center, but they're not necessarily from here, then they get released, and then we help them get connected to the services where they wanna end up. We had one person, truth or consequences or Silver Spring or Taos.

And so that's part of our job too, right, is this may not be the place. How can we help you get there? Lack of transportation, lack of resources in those counties too. We we all deal with this all the time, but we have built, I think, really, really good connections. I mean, we've literally had the police call and say, like, hey. We're in your lobby. Do you, have a minute to talk to somebody? And it's never a minute. Right? I'm I'm totally being a little cheeky with it.

But, like, they've brought people to us that we've tried to get into detox right away. We have gone out when they have gotten a call or we have some kind assist when there's been a call about somebody maybe behaving erratically. It ties 100 to our comprehensive health plan that it we haven't started work on yet, but how do we build an effective crisis response team between police how

to be reached.

Right. Right. Right. But but it it did come back to then then where do we take the person? Right? Where is the regional mental health place or the regional detox center? And a lot of that is getting built in other counties. So, absolutely, those connections are so important. I'm so sorry, Celeste.

What about employment? So What about people put

in sweater? So we do actually have one that we're working with. Council gave us permission. It's 2400 Diamond, so it's right at, you know, kinda kitty corner on Conoco Hill there. There's an empty lot that we're working on there. But, again, it's it's a challenging lot. It's a county owned lot. We would give that to them as part of the development. They have a, a family up here who has interest in doing exactly that kind of thing. The site has some challenges. It's got some existing utilities that need to be moved. It's great. It's got some drainage issues.

I'm actually thinking bigger. I'm thinking, so you can all let it open. It's complex. If you wanna get it, you have to think again. If you wanna you know? There's a lot of things. I mean, I've done a lot. I'm I'm I I just really believe sporadically, people can really amaze you what they can do, and they can do it to code it, and they can do just as good a job as people. You see, you're having trouble with labor. Let the people who are getting the buildings do labor.

Only gonna pause that so that you can get to PCS, but it sounds like we need a bigger

Some kind of

housing brainstorm brainstorm conversation.

Dan, thank you so much for all your time. That answers to And

I much prefer this guy. I'm not very good in front of counsel, but I I love these kinds of conversations. I always get so nervous.

A friendly group. Thank you so much. Have fun at your journey. We have a

At

at this point, it would be, like, August by the time you could get on both of our calendars. Yep. Yep. Sounds good too. And I just wanna give a shout out. Joyce was able to join us, but Dan was in the middle of talking. So, Joyce, if you wanna unmute and just quickly introduce say hi and where you are.

Hello, everybody. I'm Joyce Richins, and I am the at the hospital, Los Alamos Medical Center. And I am the infection prevention nurse, an employee health nurse here. So happy to be here. Sorry I'm late.

No worries. Lots of people had multiple meetings today, so glad you could join us. Alright. I feel like we just got a crash course, like a master's level urban planning development. That was a lot.

A lot of work

to be

done. A lot of work to be done, and it's comparable to to what we see at social services. Like, you think they're, like, we'll build a how 300 units, and then, like, you just keep peeling that onion, and it's transportation and pipes and a signal. And, yeah, it's just so many things all the time.

To keep in mind, from the time somebody walks in the door, like the project on Longview and White Rock, from the time they walked in the door and said we have a great idea has been almost, if not just over, two years, and they're still in the last throes of getting boxed around, no offense, by the county of, oh, wait. And I have one more rock you need to do. More rock. So this is hard.

It's hard work.

Everybody overthinks everything. That's just the nature of the beast up here for all of us. But I appreciate that Dan is open to having some because there's a lot of conversations that need to happen with this. It is we if we started tomorrow, it would take us ten years to even get to a 15 units. Yeah. It's just a massive lift.

Yep. And ten years.

That's okay.

I'm gonna

bring us back to the agenda.

I really in from here.

Go for it.

So I just wanted to ask anybody in the room or anybody online, is there any public comment that is not related to items on the agenda? Does anybody have any public comment they need to make? Well, I have a request. I

was the victim of a scam two days ago, and it was a very it was not pretty.

And,

very costly. Although I pride myself on being smarter than the average bear, but I'm just went down the rabbit hole so quickly for even the police, even the FBI has said, wow. That's a pretty powerful Can

ask you a question?

Well, I want to take on, as a health council, I want to recommend that we do an informational, currently always being updated on how to avoid scams as I have had ad nauseam conversations with Los Alamos police, the Santa Fe police, the Santa Fe sheriff's department, the district attorney's office, the state Okay. I mean, I it is very clear to me the top target are women over the age of 50 Mhmm. Probably living by themselves. Mhmm. And so this is an opportunity for us to create power. So because no one's gonna fix it.

So, yeah, we're a little bit.

That's what I was gonna say. They have it's not Well,

we need to do

Bares. They've scared, scam awareness, something. Yeah. And they have a whole program. So what I would recommend before we start building this silo, reach out to Jackie Gruninger.

Oh, this needs to be everybody.

But They already have a program in place is what I'm saying. And the focus is seniors. And you went to I

think I called. Oh, great. They have a book club. But I if it's to connect it

to the health council but, Jordan, I'm totally gonna put you on the spot here, from our office has been working Yeah. With the senior center. So let's just figure out a way to get, like, you, Jackie, Jordan.

Well, it's a it's a statewide thing.

It's a nationwide thing.

Told four times yesterday. Scams have now reached a proficiency of federal level crime, which means all local agencies have a limit as to how much they can go after. And yet the federal agency called the FBI has most of their cybersecurity folks have been cut. You know? No follow-up.

Good luck. Yeah. And so from the, attorney general's office yesterday Yep. They said every community has got to really get powerful information out to all their community and help them recognize little things. Because now we've gone down from big things, oh, yeah, you know, to very little you know, there was a comma as opposed to a period in an email address. Mhmm. And so this to me, is called healthy community. We have some of the smartest people on the planet that

live here.

But let's let's poll a group to make it bigger.

Secure that people out. You know? But if it needs

to be bigger than

the smart system health teams will take it on.

Because the police are all

over it. Let's definitely collaborate with what Jackie's doing and

whatever else is Let's going

make a big thing. So do you at some point wanna share with the health council just

How stupid are those?

No. No. No.

No. I

was gonna I was gonna tell you. But two is There's

no reason for details, but what I will tell you is it cost me a lot of money.

So I know of another lady that was scammed out of over $200,000. And, again

It wasn't that bad. But I'm

just saying so them those that you stupid because,

again Del Norte, my friend, and he when

I, you know, went to gather my funds, He said when I called him yesterday, they're they're fraud division. And I said, okay. I know this is a complete waste of time, but blah blah blah blah. And he and he sighed, and he said, I wish I could tell you. You are the first call I've had today. We had six of our customers in a three county area. I said, do you think it was targeted with he said, no. He said, I've made phone calls to Wells Fargo and whatever. So I just think this is only gonna get worse. It doesn't matter what my specific details are.

Well, but how they got you would be So last

time we talked about how we wanna do articles in the newspaper. That would be a perfect one.

Oh, no. I'm already writing one.

Okay. I'm

I'm taking personal load. But that but you're right.

That would be a great

but as a scam. And and working with the senior center, like I think the putting facts together.

I think the health council has to decide, is this something called health? I mean, is this something that

we And

to me,

it is.

Yeah. There's a lot.

What I was told by the FBI was Los Alamos is a county that gets targeted for because of the bill

and its excess to liquidity and Jumping ahead to hang on. We only have 30. But I love the idea about an article. Why don't I ask Jackie to write one about what is happening? Okay. What what her programs are and that kind of I'll add an editorial piece. Right. But just a a short something that this we know this is impacting. Yeah. I'm sorry, Celeste. Go ahead.

No. I just I mean,

I'm just all saying thank god we didn't talk

for it. Right? Still naive. Yeah. Yep. Well, let's be a naive.

That's just But

we're sorry it happened. I'm gonna close out your public comment now. We're gonna move on. And and the action from here is to what is the action?

We'll we'll we can connect with Jackie and Jordan because Jordan's working on and I know the Crystal, the victim's assistant, the PD is working on it. Like, let's Yeah. Let's insert the health council into the work that's happening and make it bigger.

Sounds good. Okay. So did anybody have any comments or changes to the agenda of last month's meeting on March?

The minutes.

The minutes. Last month's meeting in March? Okay. I see it. Alright. So we accept the minutes. We have consensus on that. So then the next thing would just be we're skipping Dan because we already had Dan. So I'm just gonna give a quick I'm just gonna do a little bit of housekeeping, and then we'll we'll do a roundtable. I'm gonna pass around a sheet for signing up for outreach events. Most of these, if not all of them, are you guys participating in social services. And so you can help get

the table set up, and

Okay.

You can have a staff person.

So you just want a body or two? Yes. Okay. So I'm gonna pass this through to the body too, and it's fun times. Yeah. The other thing we just talked about was the article. Thank you so much for your article. It was amazing, and it's got a lot a lot of visibility. It was in the newspaper. Cases. It was awesome. So we don't have anything for this month, which is best going away. I'm gonna pass this around. And if you do want to try to reach out to Jackie on the scam, just a scam article. And then if anyone else has any ideas or wants to

I don't know if Tyler's still

Tyler, I have I think

he he had oh, no. Tyler's still here. Sorry.

So he's gonna do a thing on falls. He's gonna do Yes.

Tyler, you were gonna do an article on falls

In May.

Prevention in May. Right? I should

say guess I should say what we have. So Tyler, aging at home falls prevention in May. In June, Jill's gonna talk about regional health initiatives, collaborations. That's wide open. Wherever you wanna take it is fine. July, I was gonna give an update on our health center working group, what we're what's happening with that and how what the next steps are. We're presenting to health council and then to county council on that. August is open. And then September, Joyce has volunteered to do another article for us on the respiratory virus season and the drive through flu vaccine clinic. October, November, December are open. August and April are open. So I'll just pass.

Because I just kinda wanted to tag team Tyler. Okay. That's fine. Alliteration. Because he's doing one on how to. I wouldn't wanna do one on how to ballproof yourself.

Do you wanna do

that? Like, just to make yourself

Just to make What do you wanna do at this month, my dear, or you wanna do it with him?

No. I was thinking, like, a separate. Okay. August. Senior center. Hope I'm in the class. This is actually well, yeah, that, but but my article is what to do to improve yourself so you won't Yeah. That's that's what Mobility. It's in mobility.

I only caught part of that, but I I heard something about my article, or do you guys

Sorry. The that you're writing something about preventing falls at home, and Celeste was suggesting maybe one on personal strengthening, producing falls on your reducing falls on yourself.

I wouldn't say it. Okay.

So she wants me to write the article kind of based around No.

We were just saying maybe, like, a a two parter. You write one, and then she'll write one.

Oh, okay. I

say we we send these forms along online, especially because for those of the folks who health council members that are online, only so if we wanna get to member roundtable council update, and I have a fair amount on staff update Okay. That we can get to So

let's do a quick

member roundtable, and then we'll turn it over to Jessica. Heather, do you have anything that you That's almost

Okay. So

that's fine.

So let's Heather does not have any part of doesn't have an update for the the member roundtable.

And now I'm confused as usual. Say no. Can we do what we wanna do in the working group for them? Can I

So we I'm sorry? We didn't ever establish a prevention working group. We talked about it. Yeah. Get this thing Well, it doesn't have to be a working group. Okay. That's fine. Yeah. Yes. Yeah. That's I thought because we established the health center working group, and it's formal, and we're having meetings every two weeks, and we have four board members and some people and from the public. But we don't need them because this was one of our action items Okay.

From our recommendation, the directory. Yeah. Just and I just wanna tell you briefly what I've come up with and see what you guys think. Great. So if I download it and then This is it right here. All 70 whatever pages of the baby nip Mhmm. Thing. And it's really good, by the way. And then I went and I read this really carefully. And my idea is I hate reinventing the wheel. Why don't we just make this bigger? And why couldn't we make this so this is, for those of you who haven't seen it, the spring activity guide. It's published by the county once a year, I think it says.

Four times a year?

Yeah. Well, this says it covers February 23 through 2020. Oh, yeah. You're right. I read about it. But what I'm thinking is, why couldn't we just add our directory to the end back of this? Because this has a bunch of super cool stuff in it. And I I I think it would just be such an amazing resource if we could just add the directory onto the back of this. I don't know if counselor had looked at this very closely, but you have it That's one

of the doc we get the hard copy of that every quarter. Yeah.

It makes the what that is? No. No.

Like, what is our pages right now? Like, how many inserts do we have for what we are trying to put together?

Oh, I don't think we haven't gotten that far. Okay. You're saying just instead of a new printed document, it would just attach to that?

Hey. I gotta tick off, but it was great getting to talk to everybody.

Tyler, before you go real quick Yeah. You had mentioned that Santa Fe has a directory like this. Were you do you think you could get a copy to Celeste

to look

down? I'm not sure. So I just real quick. I yeah. I'm actually going to teach a falls program and a home safety to elderly program right now. But I also helped create a mobile outreach crisis response team in Santa Fe. Yep. Yep. And we've worked on a lot of these things. But so I reached out to the team, and they have the pamphlet.

What they found was and I forwarded the website to people is the pamphlet was not effective because the numbers were changing so much and the information changes so much that they would print out 500 pamphlets, and then probably they became obsolete. So they have what I recommend is a website that we can utilize through social services with all these resources that's kind of functional. And then a QR code that we can have on business cards that people can kind of take pictures of and access website. And that's what they did. So I have a copy of that website.

I actually think you sent you sent it to me, and I think I've sent that along to Celeste. So if that's what it is, it's it's web based now. There's no

Yeah. The the pamphlets, they have boxes and boxes of pamphlets that are no longer useful. So they

Okay. Thank you, Tony.

Many. No problem. No problem. And if if we ever wanna have a discussion on the pallet homes, I'm happy to talk about that too. We also because I'm in the fire marshal's office. Alright. Thank you, everybody.

Take care, Tyler. And help, but it's better

with their own like you say, if we put a couple of feet in the back, this is getting updated every four times Exactly. A

So so Quarterly. Just to kinda what I wanna do. So so this, just so you can see, is the baby net folks. And what they did is they made a complete directory of all the things, the resources that you could possibly want if you are a parent of a child five years or less. Okay? And it's it's awesome. It's really awesome. The problem is, though, is it's really using it online is different. In our our communities, it's hard because we have people who don't do the computer. Exactly.

And and, you know, there's just nothing like it. But So I'm sorry. So what I wanna do is I wanna get the try and force what I'm banging on folks to join me. And I wanna figure out a way to put this. And I have a really good friend who's the librarian science person for the lab, and she's saying she would help. And what I wanna do is what doctor doctor sorry, Kalsa Rytay suggested, which is go into find all the business licenses Mhmm. And find all the Health people. Health people, but also, Lisa was saying maybe we should put vets

in too. Let's let's connect with Mia. Just in again, in the interest of time, I know Dan Dan took the first half of our chunk of time, but let's connect with Mia who does the spring activity guide. Right. Yeah. That's right. Get a sense of, like, if we wanted to add five pages or 10 pages or well, but we wouldn't be adding the whole baby net because they have it.

That's helpful.

Do you wanna try

this? Because I want one resource that we can distribute to everybody in town. So you're not looking over here, and you're not looking over there, and you're not going online, and you're not you know, you just go, oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. It's here. Page It

was the old yellow pages. Yellow pages. Yeah.

Yeah.

And, you know, everybody that mentioned this to, they're all going, oh, that's an awesome idea. I would love one of those. It could be a yellow. Yeah. Just make But but you can us the yellow page. Yeah. But use this because this is new.

It is. It does a great job with it.

I think you probably do it once a year. It's placing it at most of the day.

Do you wanna set up a meeting, separate meeting, and then anyone who's interested, we can meet with Mia and opportunity. Think so.

When you come yeah. Do it when you come back.

Okay. Just hit us up when you come back.

But that's When I come back.

Any Update. Roundtable.

Any other members wanna do updates? Anyone online? Leah, Leticia, Giselle, Joyce?

How's the baby, Giselle? Otherwise,

I'm going to say put counselor Reidy on the spot. Do wanna do a council update?

I was just gonna show this off, but you could

put this in front of the

Okay.

Camera people with the hand. So that's our budget.

Called it up. It's weight training. How much is

It is. It is. It's arms day.

Four seven days.

Don't print it at home.

That's the big thing. I I had a great presentation from Dan, obviously, on the housing part. And the other part is, you know, looking for a place for the action center. Yeah. If we can if we can manage that, because, obviously, there are there are some pieces of of county owned land or school land, so let's not we're still looking at that.

And, so just so we'll just have to see, like, where we are. There's obviously Dan went over. There's a lot of uncertainties right now, and there's a lot of things that are changing pretty dynamically. In in terms of funding, you know, federal comes through the state and then comes to us. So we're just trying to be prepared, as we can, and we do have, the latest information was the the trend the downtrend in in taxes was not as bad as it was the first couple months, but still low. So that's something that's reflected in here. So whatever the most current information is what's in here.

And that's also available online on the county website. It was published on Friday. So the PDF is all there.

I think they don't print them out to people, but you can look at the PDF, and you can go search on keywords. And, obviously, the the health council is not is in here through social services. Right? So there's all the other thing. All the other contracts that we have for social services are listed in the budget.

Yep. You said the downtrend or taxes, you mean, the budget?

The income

from NMSA Yeah. Gross receipts tax

Yep.

Is less.

It was a pretty significant swing because it was actually $20,000,000 more last year, which was a good thing. And then the projection was over the over the estimate was plus 20. And then we had an estimate for this year, and it was minus 20, which is really a $40,000,000 swing.

Right.

And so the the latest information was it was not quite as bad

as Yes, Mayer.

Minus 20 for the year we're currently in.

Okay.

So, the receipts are always are lagging by, like, sixty days or so, from the actual activity.

So they tax they don't tax pit production, but they tax all the other programs. Is that

I I think someone would have to be an expert in GRT and how they fill out their but in general, there's a lot of things that aren't taxed. So, pit production, if it's categorized as manufacturing, is not taxed. Right. So manufacturing has an exemption for taxes.

Okay.

For obvious reasons, we're trying to encourage there's things are exempted because we wanna encourage it. We wanna encourage manufacturing in the state, and so that's exempted. And so, and that nothing changed from the legislature. There was a bill that stalled out to actually not exempt that kind of manufacturing.

That's a

little unfair.

But it it got tabled. Right? He don't like using

the statue.

Well, it was kind of I I think it's we could have lots of different kinds of discussion about that, but it was basically, I would say, for things we're not planning on using or hopefully would never use. Yeah. I think it's the manufacturing of the things people actually are consuming and use in the state or sell to people that are visiting or export to other states. So that's the reason for the manufacturing exemption on the GRT. It's not because people like or don't like. It's just Yeah. It's not the kind of manufacturing I don't think any of them. When they created the exemption, don't think they thought of that.

Yeah. But they are exempt for now. And when are the budget hearings gonna start?

So I guess it's twenty first, which is

in Yep. Three weeks.

A little

more than two weeks.

Yep.

The twenty first, twenty second, and then I heard maybe the twenty third.

We have five days scheduled, but the idea is that the hearings, no matter how thick this is, it's a matter of, usually what takes a lot of discussion is if there's budget options. Yeah. Those take a lot of discussion.

And social services Do want a segue to the budget options?

Yes. Please tell us What a good tea up there. Sure. Is the action the same thing as the potential social services hub?

Yes. It's got renamed

to the action center. I guess it was more it wasn't clear what that was.

There are a lot of action centers throughout the country that are using that term. Don't use the term home. But

it is the safe thing.

Working group is Leslie that we twice And

and our working group just does we're gonna come up with recommendations on what, you know, kind of unbounded, like, we were talking about, housing options unbounded. This is like what should be in the social you know, the health center.

If I accomplish nothing else, it's getting that renamed. The idea of you come into a government place and you get actions done. I just I love that other places around the country are called action centers. On on previous budgets, it is referred to as the hub. But it's like you come in and, like

We're gonna be

get you moved then.

And then our public meeting. So I'll let you know that is.

See, I have no idea where it could be.

Well, we're not Hold hold that thought.

It's not looking at that. The county's gonna be looking at that.

Once they can't

fix that problem. I'm sorry.

But As an employee of the county, I do.

That's what Jessica are you Randy, did you need any more time to give your staff update?

The council update.

Council update.

I'm sorry.

It sounds you

guys have had some long meetings, and the eighth silly bummed. I

think that

was So, like, wait. I know. No.

We've had a lot of good discussion about the portal housing. I think that was another major

I know.

I know. It's fine.

Yeah. And then so the the next meeting is on Tuesday, the eighth. There'll be a couple of ordinances there. But then then we just go into budget, so then there aren't any other council meetings, but regular agenda ones until May.

Okay.

Budget hirings will probably likely be done in three days.

Yeah. Okay.

That's where they've typically been. That's why we schedule

The the fifth day that Wednesday.

Opposed to waiting until the next Monday to finish them. But it could be two days. It could be two or three days. Not five first five days scheduled, but we're not gonna take five days.

And there's not a meeting on the twenty ninth? No. You guys get to rest.

As long as the budget is adopted, approval for then. Yeah.

That's that's a good

That'd be the fifth day of hearings if needed.

Oh, okay. Got

it. So nothing until May. Okay. Alright. So I will give the social services update. I'll give, some of the easy stuff first because it's very quick. Leah just jumped off, but we are she's part of a group that is planning a countywide suicide prevention initiative. We I will have more at our May meeting. We're gonna have a couple of launch things happening in May and then first training starting in July. So more to come on that directly ties again to our comprehensive health plan.

There are a number of us trained as trainers in the county, so that's pretty exciting. Tomorrow was the deadline for applications for the association of nature and forest Therapy to become trained as trainers to take people out into nature, kinda whatever your program is that you would then take out and and do and see what we, see the benefits of being out in nature, whether that is a young adult item or a postpartum mom item or a veteran's or a senior item. But after this meeting, I'm gonna get out an announcement. We're gonna extend the deadline to Wednesday. We do already have four applications in that are all really, really good.

Tyler sent me a note and said he was interested in helping be on the review panel. I will send a note to everyone after this because I know a couple people had to jump. But if anyone else on the health council wants to help review these applications, we I the application is limited to three pages. So we might have 30 pages to review of of applications. I do have a scoring criteria, scoring met rubric. That's the word.

You doing that?

So we will be meeting on Friday, the eleventh, to review them. Okay. But I can send all this out. Tyler just he and I were were chatting about something. He's like, hey. I'd love to be a part. And I was like, cool. But I did not extend that to everybody. So that invite is coming. But that will get started April 21.

Not that I won't be busy on April 21, but, coming to the the budget meetings. But it is a six month program that is run by ANFT. They have a a curriculum that you follow to learn how to merge a program outdoors and then outdoor safety, and then wilder learning wilderness CPR is also part of it, right, just in case. So excited to see what comes from that. I'll have an update at the main meeting on that too.

Working with Peak on that?

Peak might be one of the places that apply for that. Yes. Jillian and I have chatted about it. I don't know that there's anyone I haven't chatted with at this point, but if anyone has an interest in applying, if you have an idea for a group.

Because the senior center does have those nature blocks. Yep. Okay. Yep. You know about them.

Yep. So then back to the budget options. Social services is submitting one FTE, one position on the budget options. It came out of a recommendation from the comprehensive health plan. We are calling it a program specialist because that's the county title that kinda fits.

It is that outreach and education position. The person, where we heard in the surveys, people don't know about social services. They don't know where to go for food or income assistance. The I over the past couple of years, some of us at social services have taken on that outreach and training. For example, Denny is often at the farmer's market on Thursday, so that takes up a day that she's not meeting with clients.

So the idea would be we would kinda take all those training pieces and outreach and education and and put it into a position. A little, update for you, but not with your current public hat on or private hat on. Public health, like, getting They would work right with Jeremy on on the public health piece. So so that's on the budget option. There is a typo in the budget book that we noticed after it went out, for an option for a social work internship that is now not being requested in the budget options.

We actually have other funding, but we are gonna proceed with, trying to get a social work intern at the social services option, which when Jill and I first met for lunch, she and I talked about. And NMSU runs a very successful program during the academic year. So this person would start August, September through June, and we would give them a a stipend, and they would be available for, social services clients. But then hopefully modeling this after the model that Las Cruces uses. They could also, for example, be at the teen center that has an art therapy room.

They could maybe be at the senior center. Right? We could have a a traveling social work. It would be a student. It would be either a They'd be physically here. They'd be physically here. Right? And NMSU is, sure that they have people that attend classes remotely but are located in Northern New Mexico. So it'd be either a BSW student or an MSW student, but I am super, super excited to pilot this. So it's it's doesn't actually go on the options.

The other thing that we are monitoring same as has come up. I know I only have three minutes. There have been tons of things happening at the federal level that we are monitoring the impacts of, and a lot of this just happened Friday and Monday. And and so I don't have answers yet, but I I know it came up at the boards and commissions luncheon. We are kind of monitoring this both in terms of our work and the clients we see and then of our contractors.

So on Friday, there's an office called the administration of community living. The entire staff was, let go at the federal level. They manage at the state level, the aging and resource disability coalitions. I think the c stands for coalitions. Stephanie Gonzalez is our representative in Santa Fe. She has attended numerous of our meetings. She is the ARDC representative. I I have not talked to her since Friday. I don't know what the status is at the state level. But when we have issues related to older adults that may need personal care homes or or other services, they they run the ombudsman part of the ombudsman service for the aging and long term care.

So I don't know what the status of that is. We are waiting to hear more. I've also talked to Jackie at the senior center because some of the funding for the area agency on agings comes from federal to the state AAA, but here, it's called the New Mexico Nonmetro Area Agency on Aging. That ACL also oversees adult protective services, which we also Jordan is still here. We interface with them a lot.

It's part of our work with the police. If we get a call for an older adult that you know, we've had calls of the smell of urine coming in through other apartments because an older adult is living alone, unable to care for themselves, we make a call to APS. So, again, that whole office at the federal level has been shut down. So we don't know what the impacts are gonna be in our state and if we'll be able to keep calling adult protective services.

If Always new names.

Right. And if we can't call adult protective services, what do we do? I I don't know yet. This is new as of Friday, so we're we're trying to figure it out. On Monday, the entire staff at the federal level that administers the low income heat heating and low income heating and energy assistance program we call LIHEAP. Again, it's a federal. It goes down to the states. If somebody comes into our office and needs help with paying utilities, we have a process with our local with DPU here.

But if

that is maxed out, then we do make applications to the state funding. So, again, the entire federal team of 40 people who administered those funds to the state was let go on Monday. We don't know what the impact is gonna be to the state. We're getting out of the cold period, so they're we're not sure if there's still funding through June 30, if there's still staff to do that, or then what happens next fall and winter. So we're trying to figure that piece out.

And then we also heard Monday, the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, we call the acronym SAMHSA, has disbanded the group that helps distribute Narcan to all of the states. One of the things our office does is distribute Narcan to all of our community partners, who we have trained. I have not been able to talk to Jeremy. He is part of my contact at the Department of Health where we get the the cases of Narcan to distribute. There is a, a report just came out last of all, the the decrease in in fentanyl deaths that we have seen nationwide.

Part of the reason is kind of free and easy, readily available access to Narcan, So I don't know what will happen to that either. So it's not tied to this budget right now in two weeks, but it is certainly kind of, you know, what happens if you know, do we make the decision to not give out Narcan if it is no longer available through SAMHSA or, you know, figure out a procurement and a different process and a different budget? I I don't have answers to to any of this, but we've reached out to all of our to Las Clinicas, to the senior center. I know Joyce and I have chatted about what data she has seen, what else has been impacted. So we're just trying to stay on top of it, as best we can.

Just a quick question before

we adjourn. What is our current budget that we're asking to renew? How many FTEs and that kind of stuff?

Renewing all of the FTEs, which is five

Full time?

Five full time plus we're asking for one new.

Option. Okay. Thanks. Plus all your Brazilian contracts.

Plus all of our contracts. So I know it's it's 1 thirty two. Thank you for hanging in there, people on Zoom. Guys online. Feel free to reach out with questions. You know, I'm always available. Meet for coffee. But, otherwise, we will see you

in a month. Yeah. Another. Thank you. Some expiration date.

Turns out