Work Session Meeting February 12, 2024 MINUTES Work Session Monday, February 12, 2024 @ 1:00 PM City Council Chambers, City Hall PRESENT: Councilor Johana Bencomo, Councilor Yvonne Flores, Councilor Becki Graham, Councilor Becky Corran, Mayor Eric Enriquez, Councilor Cassie McClure, and Councilor William Mattiace ABSENT: 1. PETS OF THE WEEK 1.1 Amy Defelix, ASCMV presented Pets of the Week. 2. JOBS OF THE WEEK 2.1 Sarah Raney, Workforce Connection presented Jobs of the Week. 3. AGENDA ITEM 3.1 AN UPDATE FROM THE NEW MEXICO DEPARTMENT OF TRANSPORTATION REGARDING THE US 70 NORTH MAIN STREET CONSTRUCTION PROJECT. Chris Faivre, Deputy Director Economic Development introduced the topic. Aaron Chavarria, District 1 Engineer NMDOT gave overhead presentation. Ryan Tafoya, Project Manager NMDOT continued overhead presentation. Earl Franks, District 1 Construction Engineer NMDOT continued overhead Page 1 of 9 presentation. Councilor McClure said I have a question about the trail. Was there a detour planned or any alternate route that was given for that? Earl Franks we do not have a detour for the trail. Councilor McClure asked is that typical? Earl Franks said I think that it’s just kind of circumstance here, there’s really no good way to route pedestrians around that area safely. Councilor McClure said I am just saying for the future if we could consider the trails as a part of our transportation system, that it’s not just about motorists. I would like to kind of put that out there, that we would like to have a detour. I think specifically the neighborhood behind it could be used for that. Councilor Flores said with all due respect, I think that is very disingenuous of you to say that there hasn’t been a change in the traffic jam, since this started. I don’t take that route very frequently and now I’m avoiding it completely. The time I did it usually takes me 15 minutes to get home, it took me 45 minutes to get home. Councilor McClure asked a very good question about having accommodations for other things that are being impacted such as the trails so why did you say there really hasn’t been any change in the traffic? I mean highway 70 is very poorly designed in my humble opinion, I not an engineer. But I am a user of that road and I think it’s very horrible for the bike lane, there’s no pedestrian walkways. Is that all being looked into? Earl Franks said Councilor Flores I apologize. I was basing that on a discussion that Aaron and I had just earlier today. We both passed through the work zone near peak hours and at peak hours. I was comparing it to prior, when traffic control was implemented, in fact the day we had the first public meeting I had to pick up my daughter at ballet. She has ballet at Las Cruces School of Dance right on Main street and the traffic was backed up, mind you this is before any traffic control was implemented. It was backed up close to Madrid and I kind of had to work my way around just to make it to the meeting on time. This speaks to what Aaron mentioned earlier, the problem with this segment of highway is it’s functional obsolescence. The City has expanded and outgrown the facility that was originally designed, and increased as far as capacity goes in the 50’s, we obviously see the need for additional capacity and that is what this project will provide. That statement was simply based on my experience of traveling through there. I expected it to be a lot worse. I know obviously if there was a congestion problem pre-construction, during construction there’s going to be a congestion problem. All we can hope for is that people find their way around and seek alternate routes. Councilor Flores asked does the City in any way share the expense or the work or is it exclusively a State project? Earl Franks said this is exclusively State funded and Federally funded. Page 2 of 9 Councilor Flores said because we do have bike lanes and regulations and all that in that regard, so would it be consistent with what we have. Earl Franks said yes I believe so. Pre-construction of this segment of highway there were no pedestrian sidewalks or anything that. This project will build that facility for pedestrian use. Councilor Bencomo said I do just also want to note that we all wish there was a magic wand for construction because everyone hates it in the meantime, but it’s good at the nine months we’ll all be thanking you. Right now everyone will be mad at you so I’m sorry for that. These cones generally mean progress right so we have to be patient. Around pedestrian safety I’m wondering if you can talk a little bit more about what those will look like. I don’t think you included pictures but I’m curious because right now I live on that side of town, and I travel that area often. You’re right there’s nothing for pedestrians right now on, that pocket. I’m curious if you could talk a little more about the protections for pedestrians and cyclists that you know make room between them and the vehicles. Aaron Chavarria said yes, so our standard is to build five foot sidewalks. We are going to construct five foot sidewalks from Solano to the Elks/Triviz intersection on both sides, over the bridge will have five foot sidewalks, which don’t exist right now. We do have a bike lane that we are constructing. There is no buffer between traffic and the bike lane. We are limited on space, but it only goes roughly from Solano to the Temple intersection and then from there it terminates. Councilor Bencomo said I was wondering if you all could provide some sort of signage on the zipper method. I think what I’ve seen is that people get really frustrated, everyone tries to get in one lane. Then people that are in this other lane, then people get like you can’t cut me off, which generally it’s actually the positive way to make traffic flow. Do you have any kind of signage that could do some education around this or is there any education we could partner on for folks traveling this area? Aaron Chavarria said yeah we actually have a DOT pamphlet who talks about the zipper merge you know how to do it, how to go about it. We can actually post that on our website to help and then we can probably talk a little bit more about it, just to promote it. We were talking earlier and the whole fact that people aren’t rushing, typically they rush at that taper and try to get in. Everybody is in one lane just you know they’re expecting it. That is kind of where that comment about congestion came from. We’ve seen a lot of respectful drivers since this project started which is not typical for a roadway construction project, but on this one for some reason we’re happy about it, we’re not complaining. Definitely we can add that pamphlet to our website. Councilor Bencomo said I know this is mostly an NMDOT project, is there any way our PIO could work with you on putting out some information about that? How to be safe while traveling this road on our social media and those kinds of things. I think that would be really helpful for the public. Page 3 of 9 Aaron Chavarria said I think to let you guys know it is a DOT project, but the City staff has been involved from day 1. They’ve been around, they know exactly what our purpose was. We have a good working relationship with the City staff, I mean you know we share a lot with traffic. We share the same complaints the City has, we have as well. Councilor Flores said apropos of letting people know what’s going on I mean you can get PSA’s you know, people turn on the radio on the way home generally and you can just have PSA’s and they don’t cost anything. Then it would be great to provide people with alternate routes that maybe even shorter time wise, than it would be to even though that’s a straight line. It might be good going off Solano and down Lohman if you have to get to the east side or the west side you know get another arterial mode. Is that possible? Aaron Chavarria said that’s a great idea to do the PSA’s. We do radio announcements every once in a while. We do stay away from designating an alternate route because it would have to be City streets. We try not to detour through City streets you know the impacts to the neighborhoods there’s some other factors we may not know about, so we stay away from that. Councilor Mattiace said just on a positive note you did a hell of a job with the University overpass, so this is quite a project and a good improvement for that area. Thank you. Aaron Chavarria said thank you very much, Ryan was our project manager for that as well. Mayor Enriquez said just wanted to say thank you, for the presentation and 9 months seems like a long time, but it will be well worth it. The future flow going east do you anticipate any problems with the third lane? You’re going from Three Crosses to Elks, then from Elks up to the east. Do we see any future demands or needs for the flow or how does that look for the future? Aaron Chavarria said this is way, way into the future, but we anticipate US 70 becoming a three lane facility. I just don’t know when, you know capacity needs we’re getting close to that already. There’s a lot of bridge structures that we would have to expand to be able to do that, but it’s going to be in the future, probably in the near future. 3.2 A MID-YEAR MARKETING AND INDUSTRY TRENDS UPDATE FROM THE MESILLA VALLEY ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT ALLIANCE. Davin Lopez, President and CEO of MVEDA introduced subject. Carlos Parra, Director of Marketing of MVEDA gave an overhead presentation. Councilor Flores said yes Davin I think it was at the November meeting you mentioned you had been to Taiwan with the Governor. Was there any positive Page 4 of 9 outcome for Las Cruces on that? I know that you have other clients, and you work closely with Jerry Pacheco and the Borderplex and all that. I believe Mr. Carlos Parra he showed a picture of the industrial park of our City the western part, but said that it wasn’t ready in terms of having the infrastructure that’s necessary, so what gives? How do you balance that and by the way my understanding is that yes it’s true, there aren’t any utilities lines in there in portions of that industrial park. However there is infrastructure I believe Mr. Sedillo could maybe speak to that more correctly or definitively. My understanding is that it could be ready because there’s places where all of that can be installed and connected. What was the outcome and what have been the outcomes of your travels insofar as benefiting Las Cruces? Davin Lopez said I’ll start with the trip to Taiwan with the Governor’s office. We have been making a big push on foreign direct investment over the last two years and attracting foreign direct investment, that is the acronym FDI that Carlos was referring to. Here is the reason why, it’s because probably for the first time ever we are now seeing a push for companies to want to what they call repurpose their production moving it out of Asia primarily and into North America. The term has been called near- shoring if you’re moving near like into Mexico or near the United States. The term for moving to the United States has been called onshoring. It’s a trend that we’re seeing millions, hundreds of millions of dollars in investment by these firms coming to the United States. We’re seeing Mexico so far as the biggest beneficiary because of course cost margins of doing operations in Mexico. They all have something one common denominator are all these companies are repurposing production is because they want to be closer to a US consumer. That’s the primary reason why they’re doing that. There is a lot of motivation because of supply chain challenges that have taken place post pandemic, to move production over, have more secure supply chains, and have greater access to that US consumer. That is what we’re leaning upon in terms of messaging and are marketing to an audience. The trip to Taiwan was really reinforcing what we have here in this region as how you can reach a 200 million population within a two day drive time. How you can take advantage of both parts of the border on the south side and north side in terms of manufacturing, doing it all in one location. Now the benefit that Las Cruces specifically received from that trip is all the collateral we were putting out there we translated into Taiwanese and Mandarin utilize these images of the Las Cruces Innovation and Industrial Park specifically. I will be the first to say I think the State has done a great job of reaching out to a foreign audience. I think the challenge that I have seen is there has been too much reliance on only talking about Santa Teresa. Part of my engagement was trying to bring that pitch that it’s not just Santa Teresa, we also have some valuable land assets in Las Cruces that provide opportunity for these companies here in North America. That was one of the biggest things is just the exposure that’s come out of it, and we are working the leads. I can tell you that in this past fiscal year, so we’re 7 months into the fiscal year we’ve had three site visits from foreign companies to the Las Cruces Innovation and Industrial Park, two have been Taiwanese and one have been from South Korea. We think this is going to be a big portion of our business to come our way for the reasons I just mentioned. Getting to your second question on infrastructure and the Industrial Park specifically. I would say up until about maybe not post pandemic, right after the pandemic, with all the supply chain issues and repurposing and reshoring of production we were in a good position with infrastructure at the Innovation Park. The challenge has been that over the past two years we’ve seen a phenomenal growth in Page 5 of 9 terms of automated processes that companies are putting into their facilities. We are also seeing that this leads to more advanced manufacturing types of processes that all industries are now putting in place, which are requiring a lot more infrastructure than they did two, three, four, five years ago. In fact I was on a phone call with a client this morning if we would have heard in terms of power about a 5 megawatt project five years ago that was a big project. Now we’re seeing minimum talks of 50 megawatts, 100 megawatt projects. These are projects the size and scope we haven’t seen and quite frankly most of the United States hasn’t seen either. I’m not saying we’re behind the eight ball, but we are in maybe an opportune position infrastructure wise to be competitive with other parts of the country where we may in the past may not have been but that requires having a plan. That requires having a plan to get infrastructure in place, water, wastewater, and power that can accommodate the size of these projects, if we’re going to land them. When we talk about site readiness there’s nothing wrong with that. But we’re talking site readiness in terms of 10 acre parcel, 12 acre parcels that we have primarily ready at the Las Cruces Innovation and Industrial Park. Councilor Flores said what if we build it and they don’t come? You’re saying they’re not coming because we haven’t built if we, because we don’t have the adequate infrastructure given the increase in yada, yada. What do we do? I think that we’re between a rock and a hard place right now in that regard, if that’s the scenario, so what do we do? Do we get that infrastructure going and then sit and wait see if something comes along and then what if that something doesn’t come along? I don’t know it that’s something you’ve spoken to the City Manager about or with Mr. Sedillo in Public Works Department to get that. Davin Lopez said we’re not talking about a build it and they will come scenario, we’re talking about a readiness scenario. What I would describe a readiness scenario is what we’re seeing on these major projects, if they’re building 500,000 to a million square feet of space that is going to take them two to three years to build that. For this advanced equipment that they’re ordering now days because it’s all new, to have it custom made its going to take about two to three years as well. What we’re talking is a readiness plan to say ok while you’re building this we can get infrastructure in at the same time. You should be able to within that two to three years, what we have heard from most of the utilities. The challenge is we’re not really prepared to have a budget, we don’t have a budget ready for this. I don’t think the City does and I don’t think the State does and as soon as you start talking about we can build in two to three years. Then you start saying well we have to find the budget first, we all know how long that could take. You start putting it on your priority list, maybe you go to Santa Fe three, four, five times maybe you get some grants from the Federal Government. By that time maybe a mega site in Memphis or Michigan they are already along the way. In fact the past few years or a couple of years we’ve seen states like Michigan, Georgia, some communities they are now not only investing in spec infrastructure, but in having at least funding ready to build it when the need comes. I said this to the State, I’ve said this in conversations that I’ve had to other legislators. We need to start thinking about maybe having some type of funding mechanism that’s ready to go, on hold you don’t spend it you make interest off it in the meantime but ready to go when the times comes. That avoids that building and hoping they’ll come or not, it’s just have the readiness for it. That doesn't take away from those 10 to 12 acres sites I Page 6 of 9 mentioned, I do think we have a lot of capacity to service the distribution industries that are looking our way. Interstate 10 connection to the seaport of LA and Long Beach, connection to the Mexican port of entry, US/Mexico port of entry in Santa Teresa. I think it puts us in a great proximity to take advantage of supply chain disruptions as companies are now looking to find better routes to service their trade along the I-10 corridor. In that respect I think we’re ready but for the manufacturing projects that’s where we need to figure out the readiness program. Councilor Flores said apropos of bringing all this transnational traffic, I-10 it’s perfect for that. How much does that traffic rely on an airport do you know? I mean how does some of this stuff, do they ship it like from Asia to California and then they load trucks or whatever or do they use airplanes? Davin Lopez said worldwide logistics has become such a complicated mathematical model, I think. I heard this a few years ago, when our pecans were shipped out of here in bulk to China, only for it to be recooked into a frozen pie and sent back here to sit in the shelves of the US markets. It is really interesting and complicated on how they do things. I have heard and I understand that airports are going to be more for high valued goods, you know you want to get it from A to B in a quick amount of time because these are very high valuable products. I think along the interstate 10 corridor, along with the rail Union Pacific that comes through, as well as BNSF has class one rails. I think it is how do we tie into those types of goods that are coming through our region is really following the supply chain how products get to ports, like the seaports of LA, Long Beach and how they get to the US consumer. Our I-10 corridor along with I-40 corridor up in the Albuquerque area we in New Mexico, I think we have the opportunity that I haven’t seen in my lifetime, to be a solution to the supply chain challenges. Because cost in California are going up. Why should you have too many goods still located there when you can ship them internally and reach a broader US market from our location. At least that’s my belief in terms of our opportunity. Renee Short, Member of the Public said I want to say two things very quickly. One I agree with you in a sense of if we build it will they come approach to this because one of the biggest issues we have is water. If we go to manufacturing you’re going to have enough water in order to accommodate manufacturing. The second thing is education one of the reasons why we don’t attract as many companies, is because we don’t have the educated population in order to do the jobs that are required for a lot of companies who may want to come here, or else they would already be here. Having said those two points, I think we should be looking at industries that perhaps aren’t as water dependent and we can provide more training a bit quicker so that we can accomplish our goal. Our goal I think is if I’m not mistaken, is that we’re trying to provide jobs for the people who live here so we don’t have the major brain drain that we already have. The last thing I want to say which is to address your question which wasn’t answered. I used to be in the industry. Yes, high valued items are transported by air for various reasons. But most of the products that would have to come in if they’re using products that are made somewhere else, to be brought here in order to build infrastructure for the future manufacturing. They would have to come by ocean, size, and cost. Page 7 of 9 Davin Lopez said I would agree, yes skill sets are everything and the changing of the skill sets to tackle the new automation that’s coming within manufacturing, that’s coming with advanced manufacturing and with AI as well. It’s going to change things. We need to start training on jobs for the future. Our automation up program that we’ve started is meant to do that it’s looking at trying to identify industries certifications that can support skill set development amongst existing resident here in a quick amount of time. The same thing with the ARPA dollars that we are working with your staff on it’s for the same thing. It’s a little bit expanded for the City, we’re looking for industry certification for coding, for aerospace related activity, for telemedicine, things that can promote the workforce that’s growing here in Las Cruces. I will say with water, we’ve always been and have had a concern for water. We are in the southwest and we do not necessarily go after in the first place, very heavy water dependent industries. Let me give you an example. In terms of semiconductor manufacturing, I’m kind of amazed we’ve seen, like Phoenix attract companies, like Taiwanese semiconductor. Because those companies utilize a ton of water. We look for maybe a downstream type of production process, like what’s called chips packaging. It takes a semiconductor, but it puts it into this circuit board, the skill set is going to be a little more welding and understanding those symmetries of those circuit boards, which does not take nearly that kind of water as the actual semiconductor manufacturing. We are very cautious, and we try to be in terms of the industries we approach and go after, we try to really understand what their water usage, you know what their carbon footprint looks like. 3.3 SISTER CITIES/URBAN X-CHANGE NETWORK TRIP TO BERLIN. Dr. Tim Chappell, President of Las Cruces Sister Cities Foundation gave overhead presentation. Mayor Enriquez said if you get me that information I would be happy to reach out to Laredo so we can establish something or start to rebuild. 4. ADJOURNMENT 4.1 Councilor Johana Bencomo moved, seconded by Councilor Yvonne Flores, to Adjourn 2:46 p.m. RESULT: Carried MOVER: Councilor Johana Bencomo SECONDER: Councilor Yvonne Flores AYES: Councilor Johana Bencomo, Councilor Yvonne Flores, Councilor Becki Graham, Councilor Becky Corran, Mayor Eric Enriquez, Councilor Cassie McClure, and Councilor William Mattiace Mayor Page 8 of 9 City Clerk Page 9 of 9