Enter the Elephant

Organizers mount campaign to pressure Santa Fe city councilors to discuss equity alongside budget cuts

City councilors moving forward with talks on how to rein in the budget shortfall will have to face "the elephant in the room" at this week's meeting, when local organizers launch a campaign calling for bringing talks about equity in Santa Fe to the forefront. The agenda for the Wednesday evening meeting includes consideration of bills that would increase the gross receipts tax and allow the governing body to transfer money from enterprise funds to the general fund, as they did this year with a surplus from the water fund.

"Every couple years or so, we hear that there's a budget crisis, and a lot of the solutions don't take equity as seriously as we think they should," says Chainbreaker Collective's Tomás Rivera. "There's some serious equity problems not only on the short-term budget scale but it's really manifesting as a wider gap between the haves and have-nots. A lot of times, we see policymakers and city staff knowing that that's a problem, at least on some level, but still not acting on it or talking about it openly."

"Operation Elephant" is about highlighting those equity concerns in Santa Fe that have seen neighborhoods increasingly segregated in terms of median income and race, Rivera says, and the plan is to show up with a prop (built with the help of Wise Fool) that should provoke a conversation on the issues. They're particularly concerned that city bus service will once again head toward the chopping block.

"Any cut to bus service would result in some serious hardship for some people," Rivera says. "I think that when we look at cuts to any jobs in Santa Fe, to city workers, it's going to trickle out to the rest of the economy. Those kinds of cuts are going to hit working people hard."

That concern is exacerbated by the recent departure of Jon Bulthuis, the city's transportation director, and talks of consolidating Santa Fe Trails into the North Central Regional Transit District, a multijurisdiction group that includes the city and several others, along with area counties and Pueblos.

"The transit merger with RTD is very much just a big shell game," says Miles Conway, communications director for American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME) Council 18, which represents New Mexico's public service employees. Conway will join Chainbreaker for an appearance at the Wednesday, March 30, meeting, and they're calling for others to come along.

Conway argues that the merger would only cost jobs and not save the city money: "Some of [the councilors] seem to think it's going to unburden them, but you still have to pay. It just means turning over a check to RTD."

ASFCME members have spoken at recent City Council meetings about their concerns that the city is considering cutting positions, such as leaving unfilled positions vacant (one of the measures that's been proposed as the city looks to cut millions in expenses and scrutinizes payroll, the biggest line item in the budget), and that those will correspond to decreases in city services, like trash pick-up. Conway estimates it takes 20 vacancies to save $1 million, and leaning exclusively on refinancing the city debt instead of raising taxes leaves cuts to services, and jobs, on the table. He calls that move "disappointing," adding, "We seem to have this conversation every few years, and they never address the revenue side."

Talks have also included ideas like closing the Southside library on Sundays.

"I think people would be hit really hard. Some people don't have access to the Internet; a lot of students are only able to get their work done because Southside library is open on Sunday," Rivera says. "It's not just numbers. It's about people."

"We want to make sure that folks know, first of all we always welcome public input, the budget process has been a very open process,  multiple events specifically designed to get public input, and all of this process has been very open," says Matt Ross, public information officer for the City of Santa Fe. He pointed to a financial best practices resolution passed late in 2015 that commits the city to equitability, consistency, sustainability, competitiveness, and full community participation. "We certainly appreciate that AFSCME and Chainbreaker share those values and are bringing attention to it, and emphasizing it, and we want to folks to know that we feel the same way."

Chainbreaker will continue to push for conversations about equitable resource distribution, which would see money funneled not just downtown to the tourism centers, and the need for progressive policies to make the city affordable for low-income families, Rivera says, past the budget cycle, and "until we see some of the trends in the city start to be corrected and healed."

"It's not one Santa Fe," Conway says. "There's definitely a huge gulf, as I think there is across the country, but I think in Santa Fe you can see it right in front of your face."

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