Shadow Economy

Eight years ago, Santa Fe’s economic development plan was supposed to change the game. What happened?

It’s late afternoon in March, and spring is blooming. Roughly 50 of Santa Fe’s movers and shakers are gathered in a small building that resembles a slick, revamped old church, with bright white walls culminating into a triangular point in the center of the ceiling. Creative Santa Fe, the arts and culture nonprofit whose broad mission is to improve the city’s “creative economy,” is announcing a new direction after seven years of inaction, mostly on the city’s dime.

How to Fund an American Police State

Local police forces are arming themselves - with your money

At the height of the Occupy Wall Street evictions, it seemed as though some diminutive version of “shock and awe” had stumbled from Baghdad, Iraq, to Oakland, Calif. American police forces had been “militarized,” many commentators worried, as though the firepower and callous tactics on display were anomalies, surprises bursting upon us from nowhere.

Party's Over

With its budget slashed and a proposed nuclear facility dead in the water, Los Alamos National Laboratory and local activists look for new direction

On the morning of Feb. 13, Joni Arends, executive director of Concerned Citizens for Nuclear Safety, was sitting in her downtown Santa Fe office when a flurry of emails suddenly flooded her inbox. President Barack Obama had just released his fiscal year 2013 budget, and it dealt a serious blow to a project against which Arends and others have been campaigning for years. The budget recommended that not a single penny go to construction of the Chemistry and Metallurgy Research Replacement nuclear facility, a proposed plutonium pit manufacturing plant at Los Alamos National Laboratory.

Rescue Me

Atalaya Search and Rescue, one of only two technical teams in the state, is up for recertification next month; Will Taylor goes along for the ride

 Wispy, cotton-candy clouds move briskly across the mid-February sky. My girlfriend, Thea Hutchinson, and I take turns climbing the mottled brown basaltic rocks of the cliff band just outside of White Rock. Thea gives me a hanging belay—making sure that, if I fall, she can catch me with the other end of the rope from her position 25 feet off the ground—as I climb. The sky doesn’t seem to be falling, but that changes in an instant.

VOTE!

SFR’s picks for the March 6 City Council election

Instead of a City Council that produces radical, outside-the-box ideas—the types of ideas that are beginning to turn a crumbling Detroit into an urban-planning mecca, for instance—Santa Fe’s leaders turn repeatedly to the same government and tourism industries. Instead of stopping to think carefully about where we want our city to go, elected officials often seem complacent, quietly biding their time until “the economy gets better.”

What if it doesn’t? What if Santa Fe won’t improve unless we take action?

Roundhouse Cowboy

In New Mexico’s shifting political landscape, Andy Nuñez’ brand of rugged individualism has made him an unlikely star

On Jan. 17, the opening day of New Mexico’s 2012 legislative session, longtime state House of Representatives Speaker Ben Luján, D-Santa Fe, stood before a hushed chamber. Luján, a diminutive man in his 70s who for years had controlled much of what happened at the capitol, had just announced that he had lung cancer and planned to retire from politics. The 2012 session would be his last. It was the end of an era.

Who Killed Richard Burick?

A simmering mystery raises questions about LANL’s past

On a clear day in January 2003, Richard James Burick, the retired deputy director of operations at Los Alamos National Laboratory, drove his silver Dodge pickup into the Pajarito Mountain Ski Area parking lot, waved at two workers, circled around and parked the truck. The next time anyone saw him, he was dead from a gunshot wound to the head.

No Page Unturned

Five essential books for understanding New Mexico

There are a lot of things Edward Abbey didn’t like: dams, fences, billboards—and cars in national parks. Writing of his time working at Arches National Park, in Desert Solitaire, he railed against visitors who never stepped from their vehicles: “Let the people walk. Or ride horses, bicycles, mules, wild pigs—anything—but keep the automobiles and the motorcycles and all their motorized relatives out.”

Homeless in Santa Fe

Two women - one homeless, one not - on what it means to live on the streets of the City Different

This fall, a series of community meetings revealed what many Railyard residents considered a serious problem: the rising homeless population in Santa Fe, and a perceived parallel uptick in crime. With the departure of the Occupy Santa Fe encampment and the opening of Santa Fe’s new Interfaith Community Shelter on Cerrillos Road, the complaints have abated—but the problem hasn’t.

One Year of Susana

On a sunny Saturday in March 2010, Republican candidates and supporters thronged the halls of the Albuquerque Hilton. That morning, New Mexico’s Republican gubernatorial field seemed every bit as wide-open as the GOP’s current presidential field.