MAKING OUR TOWN A BETTER PLACE
TO RAISE A FAMILY, TO WORK, AND TO RETIRE.

 

As some of you know, I have been a regular columnist for the LA Daily Post, but the topics I have addressed have usually not been about my personal politics. As we start the general election phase of my campaign, I was encouraged to begin a series of essays specifically about my experiences on Council and my vision for the future of Los Alamos. I am sure Carol Clark, the publisher of the Daily Post, would have little patience if I started using her newspaper for raw politicking; however, this page seems like the right platform. Certainly any way that I can share my thoughts on Los Alamos with the community is helpful to voters.

 

The first topic of this series is what I think is the most pressing, long-term issue endangering the vitality of our community, that of demographics.

 

Los Alamos is and always will be a feeder community for LANL. It is absolutely true that if LANL were to close tomorrow, the town would also close, because structurally, and for the foreseeable future, there is no reason for our town to be here unless it is a bedroom community for the Lab. We have been described as a suburb without the adjacent big city; this is not true,  LANL is the big city adjacent to us, and Fairfax County in Virginia would disappear also if Washington DC were to magically disappear. Washington DC is not going to disappear, and just as certainly, LANL is not going to disappear either. It may increase or decrease some in staffing or mission, but I am certain, and I’m willing to bet my house on it, literally, that LANL is here to stay.

 

The existential question is not whether LANL will be here, but rather what kind of Lab will it be. To maintain its preeminence as a research institution, and to be able to develop expertise in new areas as they emerge, it needs to have top notch early and mid-career scientists and engineers who are recruited to work here. This recruitment is driven not by salary, but by the intellectual excitement of the available work and the quality of life available to them personally and to their families. The primary implication of this is that Los Alamos has to have an excellent public school system. The small population of Los Alamos cannot support, unlike Albuquerque, and to a lesser extent Santa Fe, an extensive private school economy. I am a big believer in the public school system, but regardless of this personal bias, there is no way that Los Alamos could survive without excellent public schools. 

 

Having an excellent school system in turn requires a lot of young families, especially in New Mexico. In many other states, we could self-fund our schools to the level that would provide such high quality, but in New Mexico we cannot tax ourselves to provide higher teacher salaries or other operational amenities that would give us a competitive advantage over other communities. 

 

The county government can, and does, provide some indirect help, such as the new effort to refurbish the Canyon School office complex, but this is not going to be sufficient. The best way to have our schools be better funded is to have more students, i.e., young families, since the state primarily provides funding on a per-student basis. We can provide more special classes and have a larger faculty if the fixed costs of the school buildings, administration,  and other such costs are a smaller percentage of the total cost. 

 

Can we attract more young families to Los Alamos? Already more than half of the staff at LANL commutes from outside the county. We certainly could have more young families if we improve the housing stock, provide employment opportunities for spouses, and improve quality of life, such as retail, so that a larger swath of the commuters move into town.

 

Every community goes through a cycle where neighborhoods get older and eventually, we hope, get revitalized by a new generation of young families. We see this in Los Alamos as well, in both the townsite and White Rock, although White Rock has lost proportionately five times more population over the last ten years, and thus has the greatest potential for new families to come in. We could just let the cycle go through its normal process, but this will be painful. Much better is to make strategic efforts at the government and community level to accelerate the revitalization.

 

I want to close this segment with the observation that the absolute need to attract new young families is a concern that affects all of us.  Home ownership is a pipeline, where those in starter homes sell them to buy higher valued homes, which in turn were sold to buy yet higher valued homes, and so on. When I am old enough to sell my home and finally realize the profit accumulated over the last thirty years, I will not be selling it to another seventy-year old. The value of my home, which is and will continue to be my most valuable financial asset, will be directly proportional to the quality of life that Los Alamos offers to my potential buyers. The same is the case for every homeowner in our town. Stay tuned for more!