Work Session Meeting June 8, 2026

MINUTES

Work Session

Monday, June 8, 2026 @ 1:00 PM

City Council Chambers, City Hall

PRESENT: City Councilor Johana Bencomo, City Councilor Becky Corran, Mayor Eric Enriquez, City

Councilor Cassie McClure, City Councilor William Mattiace, Mayor Pro Tem John Munoz, and City Councilor Michael Harris

ABSENT:

1. AGENDA ITEM 1.1 CITY STRATEGIC PLAN UPDATE. Chris Faivre, Community Development Director introduced the topic.

Brittnay Poss, Single Space Strategies gave the overhead presentation.

Councilor Harris asked in the report that we got, we got surveys of community needs and stuff and so I was wondering if you could just give us a quick explainer on how you conducted the survey, how many results we got, where it was advertised and stuff like that?

Brittnay Poss said we did not run those surveys. Those are surveys that you all had implemented, it was a year or two ago, 2024. I think you all have had a presentation on that survey already. John, do you have the number of responses that they got before? It was a representative sample. We felt really good about the data. They did all the waiting and all the stratified sample and all of that and so we felt really comfortable with that data.

Janelle Johnson, Single Space Strategies continued the overhead presentation.

Councilor McClure said I am split a little, but I try to fall back on my lane which I would say is communication. I would say for example the Climate Action Plan. Not a lot of people know about it, but we are starting to implement things that people, residents

should know and we don’t have any of that. I think housing diversity is something we really need to discuss to a large degree. I think we should be more innovative than we have been.

Councilor Corran said all of these are exciting and really interesting but I think for me one of the fundamental things that I think is called out that has the longest term implications is the economic diversification and workforce retention in particular and I noticed thanks to calling out Project Jupiter in your thing as a threat in our community but I think it is a really good. I think it was a mis-context and a in the context of infrastructure and development readiness, but I think a lot of what you articulate in the report that you had is related to improving the conditions of everyone here. There are some specific measures about our lagging wages and our lagging employment both of which are behind the state level averages and I think as a city I don’t know all the ways and I think of this because I feel that we have done a lot of good work on housing and infrastructure development, our zoning code. I don’t know if we have done the same kind of like paving the way for good economic development for good paying local jobs here and I think that is a fundamental way we can make a dramatic shift in thinking about it and also understanding the greater context of sustainable sort of businesses both in the truly sustainable lasting for a long time but also not harming the local environment or the local community values and so I feel like that is the biggest way to help us move some of those measures that I feel like are fundamentally important like wages and employment rate and I don’t know how the city may or may not be facilitating that economic diversification especially on the local level since it was called out as something that we might not do as well as well as we do for other bigger corporations or industrial sort of partnerships.

Mayor Enriquez said I think these are all great. I think they line up with that we have discussed, what we talked about, but I would also agree that when we talk about now and we talk about first and where we are at in this current point is budget cuts and do to our expenditures exceeding our revenues and I agree with Councilor Corran. I think that we need to be stronger in economic development. I think we need to prioritize that. We need to look at as you say the growth. What attracts individuals and people to Las Cruces, what would attract businesses to Las Cruces and what do we need to do? What also hinders those things I think is very important to our community because all of these strategic plans are great but if we don’t have the funding then something is going to be lacking and I think it starts with the economic development.

Councilor Harris said I think I largely agree with Mayor and Councilor Corran that economic diversification and workforce retention is the next thing to focus on. Housing diversity and supply I think we will start to work itself out with the new zoning code. It is unfortunate that some of the new stuff that is being built today is being built under the old code for reasons and I think one of those reasons is timing and getting permits through the process but I think we are on the right track there and it is going to work itself out but really focusing on how we can, the pie chart that was in the report, how we can make that a lot more even then just having the three sectors that basically employ everybody in this town and that will make us a more resilient and economically prosperous place to be and then that flows through all of the other things on this chart. So, once you are economically prosperous then all of the other things get easier.

Councilor Mattiace said Councilor Harris probably took some words out of my mouth and that is if you have a very safe and a well-being type of community, if your community is, the structures and everything is upgraded and you have Metropolitan

Recovery Act taking some of the abandoned buildings and the unsightly looks of the city then the economic portion grows, economic development grows and if that grows then you have some revenue to do some of the other things without the city being attractive to new people coming whether from California, I don’t want to many people coming from California but have people coming from all of the states. The Organ

Mountains really kind of shape our people and I don’t mean to be sarcastic. They are beautiful to look at, and it is a great place to live and I think we have the diversity of the housing. I would like to see maybe housing spend less money on the housing that we are building. I think Cassie and I, Councilor McClure, Councilor Munoz we have talked about tiny homes. To where if you spend less money but provide more housing then maybe that money could go toward some of the other features, public safety, and community wellbeing, fire department, and we have unbelievable, number one in Fire

Department and crime is going down which is a good sign and if we sort of model the city of Las Cruces after the people that I have known for 59 years that I have been here. They are very kind, they are very generous and I think you saw that even with staff and very cooperative to have a good city. I think we can build better on organizational effectiveness and communication so that the public knows this. So, when you have your summer meetings, summer is only what a week away? So, you are going to have these meetings in the summer which, when is your first meeting? A week, two weeks from now?

Janelle Johnson asked the first of our public meetings? That will be the last week of

July.

Councilor Mattiace said the last week of July.

Janelle Johnson said we put it a little later in the summer so we could account for the folks who leave for vacation with their kiddos and come back a little closer to the school year.

Councilor Mattiace said with those meetings they are going to be representative of the public meaning they will be the real estate people, your developers, schoolteachers.

You will have really big meetings and the reason I say that is because I think that communication and your organizational effectiveness to get that out there and get the word out and what we are doing with the new strategic plan it is only going to be successful if we have hundreds and hundreds of people that will give us some feedback. I think the seven of us could do a good job, but maybe not if you look back in the last ten years but maybe we will do a better job and you know have the budget in place and we will have things that will be I think for all the people of Las Cruces and we will be number one in public safety so that is my priorities.

Janelle Johnson said before I move off of that I do want to say we are going to have 6 total public meetings. One in each of your districts as well as a few focus groups. So, we are trying to cast a very wide net. There is going to be a survey that goes out. We

are trying to target youth. We are trying to get as many people out and also I just need to give a thank you to city staff who are helping us with that outreach. It is a pretty big effort to get everybody out and provide several different modes where folks can participate in this process. We are really hopeful that we can do exactly that you are talking about and get a good sample.

Councilor Mattiace asked will that be continued in June/July in our like utility bills? Will that message be in our utility bill?

Janelle Johnson said I believe so, ya.

Councilor Mattiace asked how will that be distributed in the school system?

Janelle Johnson said I think we have folks that somebody in the community outreach team sent some stuff out to school partners to let them know about it and also when we do the youth focus group.

Councilor Mattiace asked will New Mexico State University students, will they be involved?

Janelle Johnson said I think so, ya.

Councilor Bencomo said I think all of these you were really able to encompass everything really well in these key priorities. Maybe I will cheat a little bit because I think aligning priorities and resources to me feels like a really important one because it can actually go under all of the rest of them, right? Strategically spending resources where one community is asking us to like responding to community needs in a much more strategic way. I don’t always think we do that I think we sort of saw that in the little bit of tension that existed with the new GRT funds and how we best spent those and so I think aligning priorities with resources can go towards all of these. Even when we think about housing diversity and supply, which I agree with my colleagues. I think we have done a phenomenal job at that even that there is tension between what the public dollars that are being invested and how the market is also responding to what needs to be built. The private market also needs to step up the plate a little bit and I think that we are going to start seeing a lot of that because of Realize in our land use zoning code. So, I will say that there. I agree that economic diversification and workforce retention is something that we have not done a good job at in the last 10 years or before. What actually really caught me is, the take aways that I had that was really interesting was the age distribution that I hadn’t really thought about. The narrative is that our community is a retirement community and then I saw the age distribution was highest in 20 to 29 and 30 to 39 and so how are we building a city that is responsive to young working people and perhaps young families and responding to their needs in terms of workforce opportunities. And other big takeaway here was low wages, high poverty rate yet we are still seeing a higher cost of living and higher home prices and things like that. Those to me clearly need to be addressed and I think within the context of workforce opportunities, diversification, economic mobility is something that I have been talking about since our Budget

Retreat. To me those really I think if we put a greater focus on that we still start seeing

a difference on the rest of these community vibrancy, community wellbeing, and community safety and so I actually do think that it needs to be more important and we just need to get out of the bubble of economic development that I think that we have been in and really start talking about economic mobility and diversification and retention.

Janelle Johnson said thank you Mayor and council for indulging us in our first question. We are going to move on to the next round, and this is really focused on the public engagement phase rather than going out there and asking Las Cruces like a broad like what do you want question. Our goal is to understand what do you need to hear from them before drafting the priorities. This is going to be a twofer. So, the first question in this round is where would public input be most useful to you before priorities are drafted?

Councilor Harris asked following from the economic diversification workforce retention

I kind of wonder like if you could choose a job, I guess what kind of job opportunities are we missing? I think that a big problem that I just kind of get the vibe, I have lived here my whole life so I see this, but like you see the jobs that are around and you kind of just assume that is it and nothing can change and so maybe leaning towards that.

What kind of jobs do you think would be nice and I wonder like it would be nice to have here because I am just thinking of what other people could do. If you were to want to move up or across and do something different, what kind of opportunities would you like to see, education opportunities, job opportunities, all that kinds of stuff.

There is interesting kind of comments based on the communication stuff. It kind of goes from the private sector too. We live in an interesting town where we do actually have some high-tech industry but by the nature of that high-tech industry we are going to talk about it and you are not supposed to so there is some miscommunication that you have to leave to get some of these higher tech jobs. So, I guess that would be my interest.

Mayor Enriquez said I think that is a really difficult and tough question. I think it is hard because even as we just seen for example our voter turnout is very limited. So even if we want that input there is always limitations but I guess to answer getting the stakeholders, getting a lot of the stakeholders and getting the information from them.

If we are talking business, bring in some of the business stakeholders, our youth, our students from the university, the community college. Bringing in the stakeholders I think would get more of what I always referred to the as boots on the ground that are actually doing it and working with it and bringing them and getting their information on what the dilemmas are, what is working, what is not working. What do we need to stop doing? A lot of that information I think would be valuable but trying to get that to come to the table is what I feel is always a challenge.

Councilor Corran said I do think to echo what the Mayor is saying but also really thinking about the context of this is fundamentally we have to make decisions. This is like a 6-year plan. Does that mean that I will be able pave the street that the residents have been bugging me about forever in my district? Probably not. My district is over resourced and generally if you looked geographically in terms of new development that is what my district looks like, right? It is a place were we have experienced a lot of

growth and development in really positive ways and for me to say oh I would love, I hear from my residents in my district that I should fix the street and we should, however I hear from those residents, right? So, I think thinking about strategically the folks who are least heard from, if you have never sent me an email then you are the person that fills in the survey for this thing, right? That is the basic qualification where people are that I would like to hear from and I do think also that means looking at, we have done everything in incremental ways, 6 years, a plan here and a plan here that looking at that in a big, I think Parks & Rec were called out in this as one of the top three I think things that people were looking for and we have been having this conversation about where we should invest in new recreation facilities and I think I would like to be able to answer that question, right? And that includes input from people in the places where there isn’t a rec center. However you all might be able to target the information and input and collating all of the other information that exists is just kind of out there would be very powerful or I think to me to see if you can just say if you have never emailed your city councilor we want to hear from you then maybe the places that we know of that we have strategically left behind we can make sure that we think about those and add that as a variable in an equitable understanding of what we might do moving forward I guess.

Councilor McClure said I agree this is a little bit more difficult one. A little more tact on it. I have not been born and raised here and one of the questions I used to get all the time was what keeps you here? I think one of the questions we can ask is what are we doing well that people want to see more of that we can support as a city. Also, it is really easy to complain to have people sit and really think about what keeps them here. I am sure we get the land of entrapment a lot. Of course, we are going to get that with these questions but beyond it I would say that the people are what keep me here. It is, it is the people. It is the culture and a lot of people who do have the ability to leave do stay and figuring that out would be really interesting.

Councilor Bencomo said I think it is the balance between the folks that are already highly engaged and obviously those are important folks to continue to engage and it’s the folks that aren’t, right? I think to me always the hardest is the folks to try to get are the folks who are to busy working one, two, three jobs, right to sustain their communities and so for me I think some of the most important voices and places to engage would be working people, low income households the folks that rely mostly on public on the function of government and local government the most to be able to tell us, inform us how we could be doing a better job.

Councilor Mattiace said I keep thinking of the organizational effectiveness in communication and I think it is very difficult to reach a lot of people and maybe on a strategic plan proposal maybe we should just put in there and not tell the truth that we are going to raise their taxes and we are going to raise their utility bills and the place will be packed. People react to what is important to them and so I think it is your job, you are going to have to make this strategic plan actually important to them, not to us.

I mean play down the role that we have because if it is important to us, they are not going to like it. They are not going to attend but if it is important and valuable to them and their children and their home ownership and their neighborhoods and the safety of the city I think you will get a good turnout not only in survey but I think you will get a good turnout in the different locations that you have if you do a good job trying to

reach a lot of people with something that is important for them. Their home values are very important, and their neighborhood safety is very important. Their education, their children and the safety of their children and the schools are very important. So, if we accent an economic development, the jobs for these kids that are in I think the Mayor said it best that the jobs are the future for these kids that are in elementary school and junior high just like Councilor McClure said they are going to stay here. I love Las

Cruces, I just love it and they want to stay here and they want to grow up in a city that has good jobs whether high-tech or whether skilled but I think that is the reason why people like Carol, the Library Director and others have attended, I know Sonya has, our afterschool program meetings because we need to develop that. That would be one of the priorities that we have to align with and that is training our young children in skills and career paths and so all of that I think is important for these people when they see a strategic plan. Do they want to see a strategic plan that says you are going to be in all electric city? I don’t know. I wonder about that but if the plan is going to be no choice and we are just going to decide that our strategic plan for the next 6 years is to have an all electric city you’re not going to get a lot of people, maybe you will get a lot of people attending. Maybe they want choice. Maybe they want a choice between natural gas or solar or electric. But if you confine it to certain things in this strategic plan that only align with certain people or certain priorities you are not going to get good attendance. And that is what I like to see. I would like to see a general request that we are helping more people in Las Cruces enjoy the rest of their life here.

Janelle Johnson said Councilor Mattiace I am actually going to do the next follow up question based on some of what you shared so we will start with you there. Before we go out to the public with these discussion areas what do you think based on your experience with your constituents and being a resident of Las Cruces yourself, what would make these more useable more clear? Like what needs to happen to these to make them really resonate when we do go out to the community?

Councilor Mattiace said I think I almost kind of answered that. One thing you can do is serve good food. If you have some food available I think you will get a lot of people attending and if you open it up to families, if you have it at an hour, I am trying to get council meetings to meet at least one time a month in the evening so we can have the working people actually attend and I think the mayor amenable to that. He is trying to work on it but if we could have a good hour to where working people could come and children could come, have food and then, like I said have subjects in there that are good for them. Like is your neighborhood safe? Is your home value increasing? What do you think about our Fire Department? Kind of give the questions that they really love about Las Cruces you know our Police Department or traffic stops. You know there are things that are happening right now, our Metropolitan Recovery Act and how are we going to rebuild Solano and El Paseo and how are they make it nicer or our nuisance ordinance. You have been doing a good job trying to get some of these abandoned buildings, Chris and that department. Some of these abandoned buildings and unsightly buildings, condemned and made to where the neighborhood looks good. I think that is what people are interested in, I think. You don’t know until you put it out there, but I think that is something that is personal to them. They are not interested in the big picture. They are not interested in what is going on in a world, what it is going on 10,000 miles away. They are interested in what is going on between their three or four neighbors in their street, I think.

Janelle Johnson asked Councilor McClure is there anything about these that we should make more clearer? Should they not be combined, should some of them be combined before we go out to the public?

Councilor McClure said I guess what I was thinking about when we were talking about that not quite answering that question, sorry, was we have all of these of these plans and with that we can construct a future we want to live in. Giving them the example and the buy in of what here is what your future can look like but then I see my role to a large degree as educational to walk them to the process and say okay that is also based on funding and this is where funding comes from and funding is very human especially when it comes to capital outlay. So how can we educate what the process looks like so that they don’t get discouraged from that vision that we are trying to create for them that they have buy in?

Councilor Bencomo said I think we all sort of travel in circles where this kind of jargon is very common. I am wondering if there is ways to make some of these topics more relatable to people so there is like capturing folks to come. I certainly hope fearmongering isn’t one of the tactics, but I think more of a relatability to some of these and also Elevate for example what is it like a 20-year plan or something? This strategic plan is a lot shorter term, right? Like what is in your immediate future? What is the impact you want to make and the feedback you want to give the city to make in a very immediate future that you can potentially see right away? But I do think more of like relatability, more relatable language. I will think about some suggestions as well.

Mayor Enriquez said I think it is hard to come up with the proper verbiage or the terminology but growing up here, being raised here in Las Cruces and being out with the public and what I hear. So, the basic needs that I hear from them are a cleaner city, a safer city, higher paying jobs and activities for our youth.

Councilor Corran said when I ran for reelection, I recorded 40 introductory videos every one of them I was like that was terrible, that terrible, that was terrible, edited them all. When I showed it to two very trusted folks and they were both like that was terrible, after 40 edits they told me it was terrible and one of the many critiques that I received in that conversation was the word infrastructure and the idea about infrastructure and fundamentally I think they were correct and I did eventually edit that out of the video. I got re-reelected despite the video, but I think the idea of infrastructure even among us you might not hear a common sort of idea of what infrastructure looks like, right? I mentioned that roads, buildings, the buildings that exist, the utility, I feel like utility projects often get sort of glazed over or are a really huge part of what we have to consider in our bigger portfolio of things that we are spending money on ways that we are investing in our investing or asking people to pay more and on their utility bills for instance I think the idea of infrastructure and development readiness is really nebulous to people probably and it is just hard to say to save you all the 40 takes of infrastructure in whatever that means. I think that language is a little bit vague and also, I think as Mayor mentioned as Councilor

Bencomo mentioned really putting this in the way people think about their daily lives.

Their commutes, their clean water, their ability to not be burning hot when they wait

for the bus. So I think those are things that people are experiencing and the last two things while I think they are fundamentally important to us to focus on I don’t know how the public, the public will want more communication no matter what and considering that communication thing that I do with the city is similar, 40 takes usually

I know that these things take an extraordinary amount of resources and don’t necessarily, they are still not permeating the type of communication that I think that we would hope for. So to me the last two things are things that we as an organization, we as leaders need to reflect on but the public won’t necessarily have enough information to be able to really articulate what that looks like for them so to me those two things I would just want to say I want us to focus on them and work on them collectively and I think we should keep them but I don’t know that asking the public about that, I think it would be a really hard conversation for them to say what do you want to hear from the city? I think people would say like, oh where can my kids go bowling? That is 1000% not what we are going to tell them when we communicate more, right? So, to me I think those two things are important, but I don’t know that public input generally will change how we do those things. I think we just need to invest more and really think strategically about those things for ourselves. Those would be my things and don’t make yourself say infrastructure 1,000 times. Just to get back to this, I am imagining the strategic plan might have sort of like the outcomes conversation and that feels like these first five or six things and then the process related things I think fall from that and may be directly related or may not be directly related to how quickly we can produce permits or turn around plans when someone wants to build something new that is something that we really have to reflect on internally so I am hoping however it is structured can have both an outcome and then these are the things that are associated with that that are internal processes and I think that is more to those last two things.

Councilor Harris said I think I also agree that we want to use more relatable language and examples when we go out and ask about things because I think that one of the reasons why we get stuck here or entrapped in the land of entrapment it is that we kind of things are pretty stable and I think you mentioned that I the economic slide earlier. Things are pretty stable, it could be better, but everything is not on fire and falling apart and so if you ask somebody like what new job do you want or what kind of more economically diverse city or vibrant community do you want? It is really hard to answer that question without an example. I got this question a lot speaking about being on the campaign trail. What do you mean by the word vibrant community? It is kind of hard to communicate unless you are like somewhere, it is kind of like you know it when you see it situation. I think examples would be helpful. I agree that infrastructure is a very loaded term and can mean a wide variety of things so that if we are trying to figure out questions. If we are tying like to figure out desires about infrastructure that is also a hard thing to answer as a user of it so like just as a person who uses water and gas and electricity and roads I am like I want all those things to work but that is like the end of my input. Since I am not a subject matter expert on all of those things so my level of interaction with them is kind of like they should function.

In my current role I am learning a lot more about that obviously and we have higher level ideas, but I think getting input on like what you want your road infrastructure to look like is difficult. I will mention transit because it was in the report and one of the reasons why I asked the survey background is that there was a question that said

40% of respondents said that transit was easy to use and 85% said that they don’t

use public transit at all. So, what does that mean? And we don’t have a good example locally of a functioning, all due respect to our transit system which is pretty good and for the resources it has and I think staff does an excellent job but on an global scale we don’t have a functioning like a European city would or larger North American city would and I think that there would be no disagreement in City Hall about that. So, from a public perspective when you go out and we say what would make the bus system better? Nobody knows because they don’t have an example of it. That is kind of my answer.

Janelle Johnson said we are moving into our last round from this facilitation portion and this is where we are going to move back into these strategic intentions and tradeoffs that Brittany had covered a little while ago. To be clear this round is to help us surface those harder choices that otherwise would have stayed implicit and it is not about forcing either no choices on anyone but if we are going to go out into the public we want to make sure that we have a good sense from you all about which of these if any we should really be keeping in mind and make sure that we explore when we are out there in the public talking about this process and the priorities. Mayor, I want you to be the first to answer these questions. Which of these tradeoffs if any should be explored as part of the public engagement process?

Mayor Enriquez said I go back to the economic development and I think that would be the priority and then I will continue with public safety and the community expectations like I said. Like what are the family activities? What are the youth activities? You mentioned it from the beginning that we are growing. Our biggest thing is sunshine.

So, it is our outdoor and recreation and those type of activities but how can we tie those in to benefit us with economic development?

Councilor Corran said to me I am answering this question because I feel like I want us to do the most we can to address equity gaps that exist in any of these categories and so to me this comes in the growth and expansion versus stewardship of existing assets. That is like a geographic conversation about where there might be inequities and then the other part of this is related to sort of downtown vibrancy versus auto- oriented development plans which is putting a very specific name on it but from the auto-oriented outlying part I understand that this is like that transit, bike ability, those things were mentioned the priorities among that people highlighted so I think they get to the tensions of where people are safe and/or commuting short distances easily versus having to commute a long distance where roads are safe, where people have access to service. So, I think to me growth and expansion versus stewardship of existing assets and I put that in there as I am just going to name it. I know that we have talked around this but I think I wish we would have real conversations around things like the airport which goes into I think put stewardship should include how we invest in existing assets and why we are investing in those assets and I would like to put things like the airport in a short term real conversation about what that means for people with things like transit or access and how does it fit the priorities in my opinion increasing equity of transportation in our community.

Councilor Bencomo said I really appreciated this part of the report. It is interesting because I think these tensions and tradeoffs, if we were to have these conversations

internally with among city staff and city leadership and then also like outside of the city with residents, I think those conversations would be really different actually. So, I think that we should explore that number one, but are you saying explored in community conversations? I am going to do three. I think the first one for sure is very important. I think as the facilitators of the meetings I think you should be prepared to have this conversation about public safety versus measurable safety improvements. I think a big topic of conversation will be around safety and I think it is important for us to continue to have those conversations about what does that really mean when you strip it down? What does it really mean that people of how they want to feel safer? For some people it is pedestrian safety, right? For some people it is burglary. For some people it could be very different so I think that you should be prepared for these conversations to arise anyway and to be able to provide these measurable safety improvement opportunities for people to think about. Then the last one I will say is community expectations versus/organizational capacity and not just capacity but like organizational authority even if I think about the previous one. Like the city has no role or authority on how long someone stays in jail for example. That is just one tiny example while I do think it is important to talk about or like the bowling alley. What is the city’s ultimate role responsibility and authority? And I think those are really important and exciting conversations to have with people as we think about the next few years.

Councilor Harris said I also want to know more or at least have the conversation about perception versus measurable improvements and when it comes to public safety, when it comes to traffic, when it comes to transit, those were all areas that were in the report that kind of stood out to me that it is clear that perception did not match the reality on the ground and we can say that perception doesn’t match the reality on the ground but and all of us would say it but that also doesn’t necessarily change people’s perception and so it feels dismissive and so trying to break that down and figure out where that lies and as far as what the city’s role in that is when there is a strong argument to be made that the main role that this city has is in the built environment like that is the main thing we control so what can we do to improve perceptions with that. I noticed in there like a huge percentage of people said that traffic was awful, and a very small percentage said that it was not bad. That’s again kind of an example thing. I can say, well have you driven anywhere else? But that also feels kind of dismissive. There is actual complaints and desires that are behind those things so we should suss those out. I think the incentive based economic attraction versus local development. That seems to me as more of a technical discussion and I don’t know that is a thing that will people care too much? Is it a productive conversation I guess to have in a public meeting of like should we do X tax incentives or permitting a reform like I don’t know how productive that is. If we had meetings with business people, small business owners, large/medium business owners, something that would be very helpful is to get to the again the perception versus reality like a statement that I have heard repeatedly in my years is that the city is anti-business and if you look at our general fund which is funded entirely by gross receipts tax and think about that statement for five seconds like obviously that is not true. The city needs businesses to function at a very basic level and so obviously we are not, but that perceptions is there and so what are the actual blockers that put those perception there? Downtown vibrancy versus auto oriented development patterns, I think that is also a useful thing but not necessarily like downtown as a

destination. So if you live further away from downtown like it might be a more useful conversation to ask like what amenities would you like in your neighborhood or nearby your neighborhood that would make your life better and then we can use those as strategy for master plans and some things like that versus saying what should we add downtown so that you would drive downtown more often? So that is kind of where I see that conversation going. We also have to face the reality that we live in New

Mexico, and things are very far apart, and every household has at least one car and that is an important way to get around and so this isn’t a war on cars type scenario. It should be easier to get around with less driving. The community expectation versus organizational capacity I think exploring what things people need out of the city and again touching on our actual capacity to do things. The city can maybe make it faster to get a permit for bowling alley, but the city can’t decide that there should be a bowling alley here and thus there is a bowling alley.

Councilor Mattiace said the tensions are not really there between departments as much as it is sometimes as where the money comes from. When you look at a city you have to maybe concentrate on housing because there is so much federal money.

Natalie does a good job of getting money from everywhere else, but the general fund has millions of dollars and then on economic attractions I think that has be a big city role. We need to make sure that the stewardship of the existing assets that the city keeps looking good and I don’t think we have done that real well. We are sorry about

El Paseo and some other things that have deteriorated in the city and that deterioration is over 10/12/15 years and so now we have to go and fix that. So there will be tradeoffs there, but you really have to do both. I don’t see it versus. I see everything here. It has to be both. It can’t be versus. It has to be equally both happening. The downtown vibrancy has to continue. But so does development have to continue as well with private enterprises and then public safety perception and again that is federal money that comes in on the public safety both the Fire

Department and the Police Department. So you have grants, you have federal money and then you have to put a lot of city money if you want to keep a very safe and clean city and have excellent fire departments and of course you want the ISO to be as low as possible and so that is good for the community and they don’t know that. There is a lot of good things that we do that save the public a lot of money. Both in the insurance part but they don’t know and so maybe they are part of the strategic plan too as we development a department and we put more money into that department we are just not building, we are just not creating jobs just for the sake of creating jobs. We are actually creating patterns that help the public pay a lower cost for their ISO for their insurance premium and the public needs to know that and the LIGHT Program and other programs, everything with public safety so I see public safety perception measurable safety improvements that has to be concurrent, that has to run together and then again back to the community expectations. We live by example. What the council does and how they act and how they behave is exactly what the city expects from us and so if we are good leaders believe it or not, I think community members will be good leaders both in the school systems and the neighborhoods.

Councilor McClure said truth be told I am a little all over in this one, so I will see how it goes. I guess the first one I will go with is the downtown vibrancy versus auto-oriented development. I don’t know if this is something that came up in our conversation, those were our one on ones but it was always interesting and piping down to perception is

the idea that you would talk to people especially in the Mesquite district where they would say oh my goodness I remember walking down to the Sunshine Bakery with my abuela and that is just a treasured memory that I have and then they say there is commercial lot going in just two doors down from me, how dare they. I understand the concern, but I think beyond Mesquite is doing pretty well. It is interesting to me that people have a since of where they want to go and what they love but they don’t understand what growth looks like in sort of meaningful ways. And when we talk about growth and expansion I think of how we can do that internally in the city. I very much worry about us growing and expanding the city into the desert. We can’t do it. It is not sustainable. It is not practical. I don’t feel like we have leadership on the development level on the private side to say what is it going to look like to have a walkable area that has the needs that meet you right there. I think Metro Verde you have to drive to get anywhere. So, if we are thinking about Mesa Grande expansion and we can’t incentivize that there is going to be a grocery store then North Main is going to be even more of a mess. Things like that where we are actually thinking about what this future will look like I think that goes back to what I said earlier is that idea of and that future is something that they can help control when they demand it. When they ask for it. When they say I didn’t want to move into this area, but I wanted to move into this area. That is starting to happen in the Mesquite District too. I do think that we have very powerful local eco system. I don’t know if Councilor Harris was kind of touching on that subject, but we have a lot of people who could be entrepreneurs if we gave them the chance to be that. What would that support look like? But we have no safety nets for people who want to take those risks. To a large degree that is our society’s fault but the idea that you want to take a chance when you want to build a restaurant, you want to build a bookstore, you want to build something that makes a community.

We don’t have the ability to give that safety net. We should maybe think about what that looks like for us. Housing production, I think we need to think in different ways. I am a tiny home person, I see what it could look like and I have to say that I went up to

Albuquerque and they had one of those there and I was just not down for it because it looks like a prison. That is not what it is supposed to be. It is supposed to be a community. It is supposed to be looked at in different ways for what your needs are. I was explaining to Ikani the other day, I have not found it again where it was a bunch of homes where the backyards were facing each other. I thought I would hate that so much, but you know what? Maybe when I am 80 and I want to stick my head out and say does anyone want to play Parcheesi? Maybe that would be more interesting to me. It is kind of about life stages and we don’t give a lot of examination to what that all looks like her so we all can’t be single family homes forever. So that is where I am at with that. Public safety and perception, I think it is real to say what does it look like to be safe in our area? How are we using public spaces? I think that is one thing we really didn’t talk about here but how is public spaces something that we need and that we value and I don’t necessarily just want to have all my conversations you know at the Walmart market with somebody but I want to be able to walk around somewhere and say hey Betty, I haven’t seen you in forever. Again, how do we make community in viable ways with our parks, with our community centers? Do you have to be 55 plus to actually gain that entrance? No, we are starting with some of our quality-of-life programs. We have ways for our youth to use these spaces, but what does that look like meaningfully?

Angie Poss, Single Space Strategies continued the overhead presentation.

Councilor Bencomo said I just want to add a couple of things. An opportunity for meetings to be bilingual, I think are really important and then the other piece I was going to say was that a great connector has been in our Community Schools. It connects the city, the schools. I know that I have pretty good turn out when I do my district meetings at Community Schools. So, I think that could be a really great opportunity to explore that we are going to people as opposed to asking them to come to City Hall or wherever.

Angie Poss said absolutely, and I believe that is the only one we are waiting on a date for, but we are doing one at a Community School.

Councilor Mattiace said Las Cruces loves pets, I mean everybody loves their pets.

Would you consider an outdoor one? Maybe at Young Park or one of the parks.

Maybe Steven can provide we can get a tent, and they can bring their pet you know they could bring their pets.

Angie Poss said yes, I don’t think that these are all baked but I don’t see why we couldn’t explore that with the folks that we are working with at the city to make the plan.

Councilor Corran said yes, I am here for us bringing the pets to all the things all the time. Let’s action that but I will probably be having a community microchip event that is like animal focused think at the end of June and so I say that if you all have some materials that are available before you start having the community meetings if you can get them to us if we have other potential avenues for distribution that would be a great place for me to at least have a QR code for people so as soon as you have that material that would be really useful and there will be dogs there and if you want to bring your pug you can.

Angie Poss said we would love to get everybody collateral that they can take to any meetings outside of the ones that are a part of the process that you are hosting in your districts or where you just want to have a stack of business cards in your purse to take out in your life. We want as many people as we can possibly get to take part in this survey that will be part of the public engagement.

Angie Poss continued the overhead presentation.

Councilor Harris said I just had one other thing to add which I think we mentioned several other people mentioned working closely with the schools and including when I said what amenities would you like in your neighborhood, I think including schools in that. City of Las Cruces and Las Cruces Public Schools are separate governing bodies but the school district has to build schools in the city on land that the city kind of decides how it is going to be developed and part of our strategy I think going forward should definitely involve the schools and how do these schools fit into their local communities, into their neighborhoods, how do kids get there safely and so I would just like to see some collaboration with LCPS. 1.2 VACANT & ABANDONED PROPERTY ORDINANCE.

Chris Faivre, Community Development Director gave the overhead presentation.

Councilor Corran said this is really exciting. This has been a thing that I have been bugging you about I feel like forever so I really appreciate your really work, this is very detailed and takes a lot of effort and so I appreciate the work that you have put into thinking about this and considering it and all of the different issues related to it so I have a few specific questions and then also a more general kind of hope that you can guide us through what kind of timeline would that look like the end but my more specific questions are related directly to the fair market value. In particular I am thinking about commercial properties where I think fair market value or the rent, I think is pretty hard for folks to determine that and I expect that this might cause a slight calibration in that might market over time like if this conversation is happening and folks are starting to feel like they need to actually get their spaces filled it might change where fair market rent is. I guess my question related to that is one, I would like to see that percentage go down a little bit. I would say 120% and that is in part because I don’t know but I am curious of what the market is right now. I do think that having many empty commercial spaces some of which have been neglected, have led to an inflated market. I would argue that commercial folks are struggling through but that is not a requirement, but I do wonder, do you have folks that are assessing this?

How is this done? And also I acknowledge that all of these things take money and time but it sounds like you have already invested a lot of money and time into, this seems like an extra layer of expertise and time that might be required of city staff so I am curious if the expected fees are going to go back into the nuisance abatement program or how we are going to up staff to make sure that we can be doing these. It seems like very labor-intensive work, all of these things together and this seems like a type of work that I don’t know if we are necessarily doing actively now so I am curious if you can talk about that? What made you decide on this and what that will mean for staff who are working in these areas like in terms of extra labor and inputs that you might need as a department?

Chris Faivre said it is going to be labor intensive for sure especially to get this off the ground. Some of this was just kind of looking at what other communities have done and sort of coming up with something that we thought would be fair. I think certainly going from 130 to 120 would be a reasonable amount. We do have resources through the Land Management Department in Economic Development. We do work closely with a commercial broker so we do have access to some of this data and so a lot of this would sort of be a determination of what the local market based on what we are seeing already out there is sort of what we are seeing for an example a vacant commercial property that is listed for $1 million and another one comes on board and it is very similar and they are trying to list it for $2 million there is comparables out there to say okay based on what we are seeing this is probably not a fair amount so we could definitely look at making that adjustment. Off the top of my head and I will put Henry on the spot because he looks like he is really diving in on this. I think we propose the money to go back into NAT. I don’t know that it is specifically in the ordinance, but the idea is that over a period of time that potentially NAT and this or through these funds it could become self-sufficient. I don’t know if it will ever pay for the staff and all that side of things but maybe some the other ancillary cost that go along with it that ultimately offset those but I think that would be the recommendation

that those funds in theory that amount could sort of be the budget for NAT moving forward. You know we have money coming out of the Telshor Fund this year, my hope is that as we ramp up efforts on this the amount of money we actually need will go down over a period of time and so that as we get a handle on it it’s not such a huge amount. Right now, we have been doing a lot of boarding and securing properties. We have been doing some actual property clean up that has really been needed but again over time we are hoping that the amount of money that the city has to put into that would be going down instead of staying at this same level or increasing.

Councilor Corran said thank you, that is part of why I am very excited about this because the reality is these vacant properties are taxing us, right? Like we are being depleted as a community for a myriad of reasons that these properties are sitting empty creating hazards, not productively contributing to our GRT or our housing needs or our economic development, our neighborhood vibrancy that we just spent a bunch of time talking to and so we are as a city we have been steadily working harder and harder to try and address that kind of blight in the way that many of the these represent or just in terms of securing properties that might otherwise not require securing or visiting or sort of input from the city so I think I am really excited about this because I do want this to be something that we have the staff and the resources to be working on and that we are investing in this as a we understand it to be and if that means investing the money that is coming in back to that to support it I want to make sure it is well supported and not something that we are adding to the plates of a bunch of folks without some amount of kind of thinking about the staff and income and recognizing that the reason that we are doing this is because on the balance sheets these are debits to city’s coffers if we think about it in a holistic way so I really appreciate this model for shifting that to a credit to our coffers or potentially doing that.

So then the last part of on my question is I imagine that there is kind of a like all of these there is a year of hey just so you know you property will be listed as this and I think this sounds like something that you guys have already been doing so I am wondering if you could just give a timeline of if we pass this at a certain time the assessments it sounds like in May is when those would go out, what would that look like in terms of time when we are actually seeing change roughly again in how landlords of vacant spaces are viewing that if they have to account for the carrying cost or if they have to change and have something happening in their space?

Chris Faivre said if we move forward from here I would like to bring this forward for adoption this summer with the idea that we could spend a good portion of this year building out that online infrastructure and have that in place before we go live and then doing all that outreach to all of the actual property owners. It is similar to the short-term rental. There is going to be a heavy lift up front. A lot of them we are still struggling to identify who that legal property owner is so there is going to be a portion of that that we have to deal with but I would guess that once we get stuff built out so that the website is ready to go so that we have those tools that people can start registering or applying for exemptions with you know it is going to take a good part of the rest of this counter year and probably, well let’s just say fiscal year to get all that notification out there and that education. The good thing that I have been really impressed with the staff that has been out there doing this is that I didn’t think that when we came to this Work Session that we were going to have a handle on exactly

how many properties we were having. I figured from here forward we would really start digging into it, but we have identified a lot of that. So, we know exactly similar to the short-term rental we have that early database now that we can reach out to them and start that engagement, so we are not having to do so much research just to identify someone and then send them a letter. Again, there is going to be a lot of work there but I feel like we have done a lot more than I thought we were going to have accomplished at this point in time but it is probably going to take several months until we can reach everybody and there is going to be a time where they don’t respond and then we have to kind of follow up with them and make sure they are aware of what is going on and some of that public education. So, it is going to take time for sure, but I think it is important for us to get this ordinance passed so that we can get this process started sooner rather than later so that within a couple of years we have a firm sense of accountability for all these properties.

Councilor Corran said like the timeline starts now, right? Folks are hearing that we are paying attention that you all have done this work to identify those places. I am hopeful even that initiation of the timeline and I would urge us to move forward as quickly as we can in passing this and keeping moving, I hope and so I will say next January of

2028 maybe we will start to see some movement. So, I am going to put that in my mind to come back and sort of have this conversation again so I hope that we can plan a future conversation to see where this is going, what folks are hearing, what kinds of things are coming out.

Henry Becker, Deputy City Attorney said I think I wanted to make sure I answered a couple of your questions. One you asked whether or not the funding comes out of this for the registration fees would go back into the program. If Chris is correct they would.

I thought that what was in the ordinance but apparently went unstated so that we can add that to make it explicit. So, we will do that. That is the first thing I wanted to respond to about. The second thing I wanted to respond to about was about how fast we can move on this program and so I want to reset the view. Remember that property doesn’t get in anyway adversely affected by this ordinance until it has already been vacant for two years and you can determine that based on information available on day one that this is effective but for many properties it will be difficult to assess until over time you have collected evidence so I don’t expect necessarily that this will be something like pell-mell all the city all the time type of thing. We are going to slowly be looking at all the buildings in city to see which ones need the most help first and I just want to echo Chris and say that staff has been really exemplary in taking a lead and trying to identify the right properties.

Councilor Bencomo said I am very excited for us to be here. I feel like last time we talked I was like June, that was so very far away and now it is June. Sometimes time moves very fast and sometimes it doesn’t because I have deeply cared about this issue since 2021 when then Codes Officer who is here in the back now works in

Community Development, had just been recently elected and took me around the neighborhood, around District 4. We walked into a house that I probably should not have walked into. I feel like I have asbestos up my nose for a week and so sometimes good things take a long time, but I really am glad that we are here and I feel like since we started having public conversation about this I have already seen movement from the community like people kind of really stepping up to the plate and figuring things

out before it gets enacted. So, I have already started seeing signs Chris, and I really just want to commend you and your team for getting us here and all the work in the past few months. I am curious, I am just going to go down in the order in which I took notes. I am not trying to be pessimistic or not trust the process but I am curious, what is going to prevent someone just putting up a For Sale sign and saying see I am doing it and not actually answering the phone if somebody is interested or cleaning up the property in order to make it actually ready for sale or make it where somebody wants to buy the property? I am curious if you have given thought to that and how we will navigate that?

Chris Faivre said that is a great question and again that is something that is going to be the responsibility of staff to stay on it so in your example let’s just say it is not an nuisance property it is just a property that has been vacant and could potentially become a nuisance if it continues to go that route and they do just put a For Sale sign in the yard for the sake of it. They would need to and again it would be on staff to make sure we are following up but they would need to apply for the exemption portion of it. If they don’t apply it is up to us to make sure that it is a property that has been identified, that we go out and say hey we noticed that you are not on our registry but your house is vacant and you are saying that it is for sale and you can apply for this exemption, get them through that process then it is going to be up to staff to follow up and after twelve months if nothing has happened we go back out and find out what is going on. If we get a sense that is what they are doing, we don’t have to honor that exemption anymore and so again we are creating a lot of processes that do put a lot of work on city staff, but I do believe that is what we are here to do. So, it is just a matter of keeping all this documentation in line and being proactive when we go out there and take care of it. I am sure that there will be times when stuff like that happens and there will probably be times where it slips through the cracks but until we get a handle on it and it will take time because as you saw there is so many properties right now it is going to be a lot of work for staff. That is how we try and make sure that things like that are not happening frequently.

Councilor Bencomo said I am glad to hear you say that there is a process for all of that and I think maybe just that first it will feel like a lot but once I think you all get in the groove, I think it will all be good. Can you walk me through how you landed on 24 months I think it was of commercial properties from certificate of occupancy?

Chris Faivre said I think the 24 months we were probably, well commercial, I think it would apply to both really and what we were trying to do is make sure that we didn’t put something in place that was going to make say a new home in Metro Verde become a problem or have to be on this registry and that is why we were looking at some of the data to see how quickly real estate property sells. There is a lot more of that information specific to residential, so we felt comfortable with the 24 months when it comes to residential. I will be honest on the commercial that is going to be a challenge because I frequently talk with property owners or the responsible brokers for the commercial properties and a lot of them have stayed on the market for a lot longer than that. Some of those are factors that are out of their control and that is where we are going to have to kind of work with them to find out if there are circumstances really beyond what they can do. It just felt like a good place to start for both commercial and residential and giving us the flexibility of every 12 months of

applying for an exemption if they are in good faith trying to sell it or if there is other reasons why they can’t, that seem like a good opportunity for us. There is a particular commercial property that I have been a little passionate about seeing it get redeveloped and I am constantly emailing the owner and the contractor to make sure in this example I would say your exemption is up because I know that you are just not kind of operating in good faith so I think just having those communications and I have been trying to stay personally on a lot of the commercial stuff just because it ties so close to the MRAs and it is so important and anything that we can do from the NAT side that is going to help Elizabeth’s team doing the MRA stuff, I feel like that is a good place for us to work together but a lot of it is just going to be knowing those properties and knowing the circumstances on which they are still vacant.

Councilor Bencomo said that actually helps address another question because I saw that you had an appeal every 12 months. Then you had also said that for example residential homes are selling, it is about 6 to 9 months but that is helpful.

Chris Faivre said some of the data and even through the local brokers it is that is actually on the high end. Houses are kind of moving a little quicker than that but we felt quite honestly if things start getting to where if they are sitting on the market for over a year there is larger systemic issues that are at play there but by and large it looks like houses are tuning over pretty quickly so I put that 60 to 90 day window is kind of what the far end of what we are seeing currently which still gives you two full years to move that house.

Councilor Bencomo said I think genuinely I feel this is so well thought out. Like this is so intentional and well thought out and I am also wondering if it does lean a lot more on the leniency side and the only reason I have, I want to be able to be good actors in this. I also feel like there are some neighborhoods who quite frankly have wanted resolution on some of these properties for much longer, for a long time. A year or two years more than that and in some neighborhoods around MacArthur, much longer than that and so I think for me you know, I don’t know Chris, again I feel like this is so well thought out I also just keep thinking okay we have to wait two more years now for folks in the MacArthur neighborhood even though they have been waiting for 5/10 years for resolutions so I am curious if you have any thoughts around that?

Chris Faivre said I do and this is one that I kind of struggled with from when we sort of first discussed it probably almost two years ago. What I was trying to guard against doing was unintentionally creating a poor tax, I didn’t want to create a situation where somebody knows they have a vacant property but they don’t have the resources to actually deal with it so trying to balance of those situations from those where we just know the property owner is just not being responsible. So in that context I probably did lean a little bit more towards the leniency side of things to make sure that we are not creating conditions where one of the first phone calls I made last summer just going through some of early NAT properties there was a lady who I called and they had a house that her grandfather had owned and doesn’t have a roof or any windows and I think she actually ended up calling the City Manager’s Office because she thought I was threatening to come take her home and I don’t want those situations out there where somebody wants to do something but they legitimately don’t have the

resources to do it. So, erring on the side where we are giving as much flexibility in those situations while still holding property owners responsible. That is kind of my thought process. That was sort of what went into the amounts we recommended. I would be open to if you thought those were fair amounts.

Councilor Bencomo said it is not the amounts Chris. I think the amounts are super fair for both of these. For me it was more about timing and the clock.

Chris Faivre said one of the things that is interesting is that we do have really good data. So, while we wouldn’t have to go out right awau and say the clock starts two years from now, we can go back in and find data if they have had utilities on in that place anytime in the last few years. So if we find out that you haven’t had any active utilities for three years technically you are in violation of this ordinance and so you would have time to sort of get that property up to speed so we can start holding property owners accountable as soon as this ordinance is in place which is one of the reasons why I didn’t do similar to the short term rentals where it goes in effect in

January but you have six months to kind of sort it out. We have the data to go in and say your property has been vacant for a long time. It would be incumbent on that owner to come back and prove to us that information isn’t accurate. I don’t think we really have to wait the two years. I think we can start moving the needle rather quickly.

Councilor Bencomo said for me this was never about profit. This was never about revenue stream. This was never about punishing people. It was about accountability and ensuring people are taking some initiative in their situation, right? Whether they are trying to and they don’t have the resources or they are not trying at all. Creating some incentive and some initiative for resolution in the neighborhood that all neighborhoods deserve it and also trying to prevent future properties from becoming nuisances so I appreciate that, thank you. The last thing I will say I do think it is important. I think on 10 Chris I think you had what is not covered government owned properties. I do feel like there is a little bit of rules for thee but not for me situation. I am curious about at least for us and then obviously other governments unities like the county owns properties property in the city or the schools that we also have a very clear plan for any properties we may own that are old, dilapidated or lots. Have you had conversations about this with the team or internal folks?

Chris Faivre said I had this conversation with David Sedillo right before this meeting started about our properties that would qualify as a NAT property and so I would say similarly to what we did in Realize regarding Historic Preservation and properties that the city owns now having to follow that process I would have no problem saying that as far as city properties go we should lead. I don’t know about the rest of those. I will leave that to Henry if county and federal properties and state properties how that would work but in terms of city owned properties like I said we did it with historic preservation. We could certainly make that change for city owned property.

Councilor Bencomo said I just don’t necessarily agree that our not covered government owned properties, Henry I think maybe we should try to think about how we should approach our other partners in the government sector on being good leaders on this.

Councilor Harris said I also think that this is great. I am also very excited to see it.

There is a lot of vacant commercial properties, especially in District 3 that have been vacant for a long time, and I think you can probably hit the ground running on those. I also agree that government buildings we need to do something about, there is a certain government building in close proximity to this one which is a NAT problem and also for the for-sale amount, the market rates, I would also be in favor of dropping it to

120% or even lower than that. I have personal experience looking at the commercial market and some landlords are like we want X and we will accept no less and landlords whose spaces were actually full we were like we will take 50% of that. So instead of determining the market rate I think that is a harder thing that I acknowledge that is a harder thing to get data on in commercial and I hope that by doing this and the city actually being serious and finding those rates that we do see a recalibration and 130%, I also don’t want it to become like inflationary thing. Like well in order to not have this fee I am just going to post it for the market rate plus 130% and then everyone does that and then that has its inflationary cycle. I would be happy to see that be lower.

Councilor Mattiace said this ordinance is a long time coming. I have seen the abandoned buildings and the blight has grown over the last 15/17 years and so when you build a new city like Northrise. I call that the other city because what happens in the older part of the city this happens, businesses go out of business and then they just leave an abandoned building and the weeds grow. I have seen that on El Paseo so with that said I think you ought to remove the exemption for government buildings.

I think you are too lenient. Just put the government buildings back in there because there are some buildings that our gracious county owns that they need some wake up calls on taking care of it and the grounds and the weeds and the way it looks. I would just remove that exemption for government buildings. I think the market value, I think that is a good point. Maybe it should be 110%/120% I don’t think you want to go too low but maybe a little bit lower. Have you and Henry worked with the County Assessor at all? Have you met with them and sat with the County Assessor?

Chris Faivre said no, other than we rely on their data for everything that we do but in terms of actually sitting down with them to this point we have not but again their data is kind of the backbone to all the stuff that we do so we are very familiar with all the information that they make available to us.

Councilor Mattiace said I spent some time talking to Karen and they have their professional appraisers and private appraises as well. I think what might be happening too is that when you, maybe you could work with them. I don’t know if you have any authority or we can suggest that a lot of property owners and I sometimes was guilty of this if you don’t take care of your property the value goes down and therefore your property tax goes down and so we have a lot of that because if you can only pay $3,000 a year on a piece of property instead of 4 or 5 it really helps to let it depreciate. Maybe we could work with the County Assessor and collaborate with our fines and maybe they need to do something as well that these properties need to be kept up. We have businesses come in whether it is a chicken place or a big franchise and you know that Chris when they leave, they don’t care. I mean that building just becomes, along with the depreciation they just let it fall apart. They let the weeds

grow and maybe we could do something at the beginning. It is good to get a child when they are in first and second grade and vocabulary and train them well and teach them well, same thing with these business owners coming in. Maybe we need to get them in the beginning. Maybe we need to tell them that if you are in business for 5 years, 10 years, 15 that when you sell the business maybe somehow link this ordinance with the sale of this business so that they take care of it when they abandon it. Maybe that would be less work for you and staff and then you don’t have because they will know right from the beginning. Ya we are going to build a business here, but we want to bring back that landscaping and that property the original way that it was when we built this building. Your numbers just shocked me. There is quite a number of buildings that you have to handle and address so thank you for your effort and thank you for bringing this ordinance up. It is well needed.

Chris Faivre said I would just add that I do agree that this information could be a relevant data point for the county as they move forward and do property tax assessment. That could be something that is factored in so once this is up and running, we can certainly meet with them and find out a way that we can share this information with them for their ongoing efforts.

Mayor Enriquez said we are looking at cleaning up the city. We are looking at revitalization, and this is a step forward. I know it is a long time coming because the

NAT I believe originated maybe under a different name but still the same acronym back in 2018, so what I can say we were great at identifying but now it is time and I thank you and the team for taking the action and the process to get through and I am sure there is going to be some other things that come up and probably some funding requirements. Maybe we can look at some incentives to help individuals due to hardships and cases like that. I also agree that government owned property, we need to lead by example and so I would say that if we are going to call out our residents we had better call out ourselves as well and I guess the other thing is I am glad there is due process and there is an uphill process. That is very important when we are dealing with people’s properties and there is a lot of exceptions. Who makes the call on the exceptions?

Chris Faivre said that is probably going to be collaboration between Kevin Doyle, who is the building official for the NAT and myself. We would probably evaluate all of those. Some of them will probably be pretty simple to determine but there may be some that are going to require a little bit more evaluation, so I think at least initially.

Ultimately it will probably be something that we bring up at our weekly NAT meeting and have those conversations, but I think ultimately it will be our decision as to what really truly qualifies as an exemption and what does not. That is how I envision it to start anyway.

Mayor Enriquez said a recommendation, just a thought. Something that you could think about would if it comes to those appeals on the process or the fees and before it gets to any courts is maybe utilizing the Planning and Zoning Commission as maybe an option for property owners to go before them and plead their case in the event that you can’t come to an agreement with them at first. You would be the first line but then that could be another if they want to continue to appeal you have got that commission

as maybe that is something that you can utilize and the other thing is because of time is there a fast-track process? Like a property that may be damaged due to fire and then becomes an unsafe property in the city that is ruined and delapidated that we don’t have to go through the whole process and it be deemed unsafe and go through what I would call a fast-track process?

Chris Faivre said ya and we have had a few of those that Fire Department has, the

Fire Chief has red tagged and used the facility or the processes under the fire code to help us condemn and move those processes, so we work together on some of those.

Unfortunately, most of the fires we have seen recently have been NAT properties. So, we definitely see the issue there between the properties that are identified as public safety and the need to get them dealt with expeditiously so definitely. That is the process that I would rely on if we had to go through sort of an emergency expedited route for a situation like that we would use those tools that are in some of the code already.

Mayor Enriquez said I would think that would be something in the ordinance, that language could be there so it is all combined and all together in the event that something like that happened it is part of the NAT program and you already have a system and process in place that if a situation like that comes up that is a facility that it is not only damaging by fire but deemed ruined and dilapidated that could be unsafe to the community we would want to address that as soon as possible. Again, I just want to say thank you. This is a long time coming and this is where we get started.

We will see where the momentum goes but I can guarantee you that there is going to be some funding and there is going to be some incentives and there is going to be some other things that are going to come in the future if we really want to do this and be effective and efficient with where we are headed.

2. ADJOURNMENT 2.1 City Councilor Michael Harris moved, seconded by City Councilor William

Mattiace, to adjourned at 3:39 p.m.

RESULT: Carried

MOVER: City Councilor Michael Harris

SECONDER: City Councilor William Mattiace

AYES: City Councilor Johana Bencomo, City Councilor Becky Corran, Mayor Eric

Enriquez, City Councilor Cassie McClure, City Councilor William Mattiace, and

City Councilor Michael Harris

ABSENT: Mayor Pro Tem John Munoz

Mayor

City Clerk