Secrecy puts city in bind on campus

The city of Santa Fe finds itself in a can’t-win situation with the midtown campus. It wants to keep the process secret but also wants to bring the public into the process. The further along it gets, the harder reconciling those competing interests becomes.

We started off so well three years ago, when responsibility for the campus was handed off from consummate Santa Fe development pro Matthew O’Reilly, then head of the city’s Asset Development Office, to newly hired Economic Development Director Matthew Brown.

Brown, a gaming entrepreneur from the San Francisco Bay Area, brought a creative online public choice process that was long on crowd-gaming theory and short on actual Santa Fe talk-it-out theory. That process reinforced what was already known: The city wanted the campus to be many things for many people.

So far, so good, with just a few problems. The city’s wide net of wants made if difficult to find a “unicorn” developer (to borrow Mayor Alan Webber’s term for something incredibly unique) to move the project along. Also, there are land, infrastructure and engineering issues that pose a variety of unknowns.

Because of those uncertainties, it was impossible for the city to issue a standard request for proposals, something that’s done in our state every day and is ruled by the New Mexico Procurement Code. Instead, the city came up with a novel concept and issued what it called a request for expression of interest.

It didn’t want specifics; it wanted visions that matched the wish list. It wanted broad, sweeping plans and lists of partners who could tackle each facet of the diverse development. Oh yeah, it also wanted to know how deep the pockets were because the city wasn’t pledging anything to the deal.

The request for expressions of interest tickled seven groups that believed they could be the unicorn master developer and replied. Submissions ran to hundreds of pages

for most of the seven. Many sub-entities were included in multiple proposals. Three finalists were chosen to be interviewed by city staff. Eleven unnamed staffers then made a unanimous recommendation to the City Council.

Daniel Hernandez, under contract to lead the deciding process for the city, informed the two losing finalists and instructed them to keep their mouths shut and not reveal their proposals to the public if they wanted a chance at being reconsidered. All insiders know who the winner is. The city says it’s on schedule to announce the winner April 13 and then begin the real negotiations for whatever.

One finalist, Central Park Santa Fe, a group brought together by developer Allan Affeldt, has emerged somewhat as a hometown favorite because of the inclusion of so many local entities. Affeldt has talked about the group’s vision at standingroom-only public presentations, in The New Mexican and on my Green Building radio show.

Full disclosure: My name has been associated with the Affeldt team but with no specified role other than as a supporter, which I have been, nothing more. I also was associated with the Santa Fe Innovation Village proposal brought forward by John Rizzo and John Mahoney, for which I was paid for early consultations on sustainability and affordable housing issues. The Innovation Village proposal was not one of the three finalists; Affeldt’s team was.

So far, the city has let Affeldt’s public communication slide but said that if any of the six losers puts their plan out for public scrutiny, they will be banned from any future consideration if the first-choice team craps out. This means any strong ideas or strong subdevelopers from any losing teams will be unknown by the public.

The public is out of the discussion.

It cannot see any of the losers’ ideas until the city has a negotiated contract with the developer it has chosen to work with, which could be months away. City officials cite the state’s procurement code to justify the secrecy. But the procurement code has no rules on how a request for expression of interest should be conducted. The city is gaslighting.

The carefully designed process also has backed the City Council into a box with only three choices:

1. Accept the unanimous recommendation.

2. Deny it, but cite exactly where the process was not followed.

3. Come up with a new process. And what, waste another three years?