Create Jobs Meow

Santa Fe officials say The House of Eternal Return is worth the investment. The interactive art exhibit—which starts with a Victorian-style home laced with wormholes that lead into all manner of strange realities—is expected to provide an estimated 80 short-term jobs while under construction and another the 30 full-time and 35 part-time "retainable jobs." The skills built among those employees, the stimulus of activity brought to the economically distressed neighborhood surrounding the Rufina Circle location and the entertainment provided to families are other benefits cited in city documents. 

The cash is aimed to support employment and skill development for 40 individuals, high-tech training on digital fabrication tools and 20 internship opportunities for students from the Santa Fe University of Art and Design and other students. Meow Wolf will also create an online gift shop for local products, exporting and selling 28 products outside Santa Fe and filing at least six patent applications, on top of the opening the interactive family-oriented attraction.

The organization claims it has access to technology and machinery not yet widely available in Santa Fe, including 3-D printers, a computer-controlled router for cutting and fabricating a number of materials and a laser cutter; training workers in how to use them will “enhance the skills available in the local workforce,” according to the Sole Source Request and Determination Form.

There's at least at hint that the city's involvement is key to the $1.5 million project moving along: Without the city spending, according to the Fiscal Impact Report completed by Kate Noble, acting director of housing and community development, the facility opening would likely be delayed and “there would be a reduced capacity for product development."

The resolution to authorize the contract that runs through June 30, 2016, arrived at council with approval from the Economic Development Review Sub-Committee, the Business and Quality of Life Committee and the Finance Committee.

“There’s this movement to not just think about these resources as pieces to the exhibition but as pieces to a company,” Vince Kadlubek tells SFR during a tour of the Meow Wolf workshop just hours before the City Council meeting. 

Councilor Christopher Rivera, co-sponsor of the resolution with Councilor Signe Lindell to issue what's known in city lingo as a "professional services contract," says the spending addresses some of the budget concerns that clearly loom large for the city’s governing body.

“This creates jobs, it provides training for people who are at the [Santa Fe] University of Art and Design and maybe some time at the community college as well,” Rivera said during the council meeting. “It also does something that we’re all passionate about here and that’s provide another opportunity for our young people for something to do.”

“I will say what is unique about this project is that it involves highly skilled young artists in our community working to create an experience for the young people of our community. We can’t say we want to be a community of artists and not support economic development opportunities for artists to thrive,” Mayor Javier Gonzales said.

Councilors unanimously approved the resolution, with only Councilor Bill Dimas abstaining, for reasons he did not volunteer.

The city’s contract with the privately owned, for-profit company comes with, as Noble told Councilor Patti Bushee in response to her questions on enforcement mechanisms, “a fairly rich deliverable pie.” Money will be doled out in $5,000 and $10,000 chunks based on reports to show specific benchmarks have been achieved. Reporting to assess attaining those benchmarks is as detailed as evaluating skills on a scale of 1 to 10 for individual employees. 

The bar is higher than what many other organizations receiving public funding have been held to, Gonzales pointed out.

Despite a 30-day delay prompted by a request by Councilor Joseph Maestas during the Finance Committee review of the resolution to allow for advertising the contract for public comment, and in case other organizations wanted to bid for it, and needing to move forward with hiring employees, Kadlubek says they’ve never missed payroll since taking on 65 employees in April. While $60,000 doesn’t sound like a huge sum compared to the need to raise an estimated $1.5 million, Kadlubek says it’s significant both for the sum, and for the recognition as a jobs creator.

“We’re doing this one bit at a time,” he says. The city's investment is equal to more than two of the investor shares they’ve been selling, which go for $25,000 each.

Several employees commute from out of town or have relocated to Santa Fe specifically for the opportunities to work at Meow Wolf. Sheldon Bess, a digital fabricator from Albuquerque, says the work allows him to blend art with his computer-assisted drafting skills, describing it as a “playground to be ambitious and to try all these new skill sets in a way that’s unique.”

“We’re the only people we know doing what we’re doing. It’s extremely creative work that’s also highly technical,” says Corvas Brinkerhoff, technical director for Meow Wolf and one of the project’s original founders. 

They's already hired most of the people he knows of in town who tinker with these new technologies, Brinkerhoff says. While they may not all still have a job when the exhibition opens, the training could open other doors, he says, like to teaching these kinds of technologies to other aspiring new media artists or in schools. The business plan to create art in a way that makes for paychecks for the artists involved is what’s been behind this notion since the early stages of the idea in 2012, he says.

With an anticipated 100,000 visitors per year, the artists who are working on the Meow Wolf project will get the kind of exposure few see in a lifetime, unless they join the film industry, says Chadney Everett, a fabricator working on construction of the house and a member of the narrative team, which has assembled enough storytelling to make for a feature-length film. As to the work required to get the exhibit opened on schedule, which may see many of them working six days a week, Everett says, “I believe it will open on time because we’re all devoted to making it open on time, and there’s a lot of different elements that encourage us to open on time, from investors to the public just getting tired of hearing about it.”

“The city is joining hundreds of Santa Feans who believe in the Meow Wolf experience and wish you all the best of luck,” Gonzales said in closing, adding, “When are you going to be open?”

The answer to that has yet to be firmly set, but they’re aiming for early 2016.