A good idea is only as valuable as its execution
The residents of Taos said it before we had to: The rollout of these new public infrastructure fees by the Town of Taos administration was very poorly handled, part of a pattern of missed opportunities for our mayor and town manager to be transparent with the public. Not all of our readers will share our next thought, though, which is that their decision to impose a fee to use public infrastructure in Taos is a reasonable thing to do — so long as that fee is realistic, the groups required to pay it have ample notice, and we know exactly where the money is going.
As Geoffrey Plant reported in last week’s edition, the town isn’t reinventing the wheel by charging fees for use of Kit Carson Park — they’re looking for ways to generate revenue for the town by charging to use public spaces, which is a good idea. The town does this for other town-owned facilities, such as the aquatic center and ice rink. In charging for use of the park, they’re following a model set out by other municipalities in New Mexico, like Los Alamos, and we’re pretty sure our parks are in much greater need of repair than those of our comparatively wealthy neighbors to the southwest.
Los Alamos County charges its little league $28.54 per hour to use townowned baseball fields, a cost that is likely being passed to local families, who earn, on average, $123,677 a year. Despite the fact that Taos County families earn nearly 60 percent less than that on average, the Town of Taos is planning to charge 23 percent more for field use than Los Alamos does. If we, as journalists, can do the math on this, then surely our mayor and our town manager can put their business backgrounds to good use and do the same. Hopefully, they would reach the same conclusion: $35 per hour is too much.
Such short notice to Taos Little League to prepare for an estimated $42,000 in additional season costs indicates poor planning. Period. In fact, all of the groups that the town plans to charge, including the Paseo Project and Taos Plaza Live, deserve a year to find the space in their budgets to cover this added cost. Our town manager’s apology for the lack of notice rings hollow when he follows it by saying the town is going forward with imposing the fees this season anyway. We also have to wonder why the town didn’t reveal its fee proposal last summer, when it first began to push to move the Farmers Market and Taos Plaza Live off the plaza and into Kit Carson Park. They also didn’t say at that time that the northward shift of the Paseo’s construction entered into their reasoning. Instead, the construction issue — while a legitimate reason to move the events temporarily — appears to be more of a matter of convenience to suit other motives.
Whenever the town does impose these new fees, Taos residents deserve to know precisely how the money they generate will be used. So far, Gonzales has said they plan to use it to purchase infrastructure items and equipment and to offer more competitive wages to parks employees, but this all remains too vague for such a large added expense. Plus, we find it hard to believe that the government is making maximally efficient use of the funds it already has to tend to our parks, given how many of them are all but unusable due to broken walkways and basketball courts covered in weeds and trash. If money is the issue, then illustrate this by being transparent with the public. Hold a public meeting and tell us: By how much are we short, and what is the game plan? Good government ensures that conversations about important issues like this take place in the light of day and make use of the collective knowledge and input of the entire community.
What we continue to see in our new mayor and town manager are two ambitious individuals who want to have a positive impact on the community, but doing so is going to require that they slow down, plan more carefully, communicate clearly and show they are capable of correcting course when they make what is widely deemed by their constituents to be a poor decision.