The clock and the calculator are ticking on Mid-City campus
Just how important it is to come up with a plan for redevelopment of the cityowned college campus off St. Michael’s Drive has been brought into focus, again, by some of the numbers floating around City Hall.
A $961,000 budget adjustment was needed just to maintain the 64-acre campus, most recently the home of the defunct Santa Fe University of Art and Design, through the end of the fiscal year on June 30.
A city finance officer says maintaining the campus for all of next fiscal year is expected to cost $2 million, “at least.” The money is needed for building upkeep, security and other costs.
That’s on top of the $2.2 million of annual debt service on the campus, which was purchased and improved by city government with a $29.6 million loan from the New Mexico Finance Authority in 2009 after the old College of Santa Fe folded.
That means the campus, without a college tenant, costs more than $4 million annually.
The campus has been largely vacant since the for-profit SFUAD decamped at the end of the 2018 spring semester. The school was paying rent that covered the debt service.
(The Garson Studios film studio is still running on the campus and The Screen arthouse cinema was commendably re-opened last year, under terms where rent was covered by the value of the filmic services provided by the operator, the Center for Contemporary Arts.)
Meanwhile, City Hall has been fussing over an $8.2 million software upgrade whose benefit has been described, more or less, as changing life as we know it in Santa Fe — via accountability, transparency, streamlining and speed of process. All the hype may be true. But only seasoned translators of various acronymladen dialects — those used in the worlds of big bureaucracies, and high-tech and management gurus — can know for sure.
The upgrade was seen as so important that $400,000 in raises were deemed warranted for city employees working on the project, until the raises were withdrawn amid controversy, and consultants proclaimed last fall that the upgrade was at risk of failure. A $2.7 million budget adjustment was approved recently to bring more of the project management in-house.
Last week, a City Council committee OK’d a $1.1 million increase to the budget to upgrade the city’s natural gas fueling station, which now will cost about $5 million.
These recently discussed expenses are noted here to put the cost of the Mid-City campus lying fallow in context. We’re coming toward the end of one year of a vacant campus. Two years of nothing on the property apparently would come to something $8.4 million in expenses — more than the budget for the big software project.
There’s no reason to think city leaders don’t see the urgency of finding new uses for the campus, although the issue has gone silent for a few months.
A lot of energy was generated last year with solicitation of (often fanciful) ideas for the site and paring down the wish list to things like apartments, an educational institution and expanding on film production with Garson Studios as a centerpiece. George R.R. Martin, our friendly go-to cultural benefactor, apparently has some ideas for the campus’ Greer Garson Theatre, an absolutely professional facility for plays and other performing arts.
None of this will be easy, and it’s fair to assume that negotiations or discussions are going on outside the public eye. But with the clock ticking and the costs mounting, it would be nice to see some progress reports, or the establishment of a board or other governing structure for the campus development, which is something Mayor Webber mentioned last July.
Getting redevelopment of the campus right is priority number one. But the public cost of the empty property means time should also be of the essence.