This issue—SFR's last of 2010—is all about looking back at the year's big news. But while the news is our business, it's not always yours—so SFR asked a variety of Santa Feans what mattered to them in 2010—and what will matter in 2011. And, of course, we asked them to share their favorite conspiracy theories.
Questions:
1. What was the coolest thing you did in 2010?
2. What was the best conspiracy theory you heard this year?
3. What's your main hope for 2011?
4. If you had to choose a Santa Fe city mascot, who or what would it be?
Vicki Pozzebon
Executive director of the Santa Fe Alliance
1. Successfully employed a staff of seven and launched our Farm to Restaurant delivery project after five years of it being just a promotional campaign. I cried a little.
2. That my neighbor’s iPhone might kill me in my sleep. I sleep with mine next to the bed and I’m not dead—yet.
3. That our political dust clouds will finally settle down and we get some real work done locally and nationally.
4. The prairie dog. It’s kinda the thing you know you love to hate, or hate to love.
William Harrison and Kenneth Kent
Laundromat employee; home remodeler
1. WH: Working at the Indian Market. That’s about the coolest thing I did.
KK: Yeah. We both worked at the Indian Market.
2. WH: They conspire to make everybody drive cars, and they make them fast and expensive so you need big insurance plans. All they do is make more laws against people who walk. It’s not a theory; it’s a conspiracy to keep the people without, without.
3: WH: I adopted a little girl 22 years ago, and she’s got kids. My hope is that they get what they need.
KK: That St. Vincent hospital gets turned into a resort.
WH: They should turn it into a homeless shelter!
4: WH: A weasel.
KK: They’ve had a lot of cougar sightings this year…and there’s a lot of cougars around town, looking for men. So the cougar.
David Coss
Mayor of Santa Fe
1. Get an honorary Ph.D. from the College of Santa Fe and address the students there in the spring.
2. Gosh darn. I hear them all the time, and they don’t stick…The worst I heard was when Rep. [Brian] Egolf was going door to door [during his re-election campaign] and, at one house, they asked him if he was there to collect the bribe for the mayor. The other was, last year, in the Buy Local Bowl, Rep. Egolf accused me of giving him a parking ticket so he’d lose. He beat me!
3. That the programs we’ve been working on come to fruition and create more jobs—the post-production facility at the Railyard; the Caterpillar plant expansion for clean air technology; new students coming to the Santa Fe University of Art and Design.
4. St. Francis.
Red Cell
Founder and director of The Process
1. See The Legendary Pink Dots perform for my group, The Process, at Corazón.
2. Hands down, the anti-Wi-Fi people who are suing their neighbors for leaving their Wi-Fi on and who constructed giant ‘tin hat’ structures to block radio station signals they think send mind-controlling electronic signals through the air.
3. My main hope for 2011 is to get rid of everything I own and become a technomad in preparation for my move to Tangier, Morocco, where I am starting an international experimental music and art festival called Interzone, Inc.
4. I think Santa Fe’s mascot should be Wes Studi, just because he is awesome!
Dorothy Massey
Co-owner of Collected Works Bookstore
1. Spend time with my [grandson], Jackson Bramley Wolf, who celebrated his first birthday two weeks ago by putting together his first sentence: ‘Good book.’
2. I don’t watch television, nor do I read yellow journalism; therefore, my knowledge of conspiracy theories is woefully lacking.
3. To participate in and to celebrate the city of Santa Fe’s economic recovery, which can only be healthy with support at the local level.
4. The raven, for hundreds of years, New Mexico’s symbol of good health.
Sevastián Gurulé
Director of the Office of Constituent Services and interim parking director for the City of Santa Fe
1. I took my daughter to college. She’s going to the University of Colorado at Boulder to study aerospace engineering. It’s the coolest and the saddest, so it’s bittersweet.
2. I don’t get much into that. I’m a workhorse.
3. That we stay continually blessed with health and life and family unity. I wish the best for all my staff members, that the new year brings prosperity and that, as a leader, I can provide the best leadership and guidance.
4. An eagle. I just think the city of Santa Fe is amazing—we’re faithful, hardworking and we put our minds to objectives.
Fred Nathan
Executive director of Think New Mexico
1. With the help of thousands of our fellow Santa Feans—and New Mexicans across the state—Think New Mexico successfully prevented the food tax from being reimposed on sales of groceries.
2. That the Santa Fe school board and administration is planning to consolidate all 30 of Santa Fe’s public schools and move its 13,000-plus students into one gigantic K-12 mega-school housed in the new Walmart Supercenter, after which they will focus on their main passion: becoming a real estate management company that sells and leases vacant school buildings.
3. Enacting Think New Mexico’s legislation to 1. improve the graduation rate by incentivizing the creation of smaller schools (already pre-filed as Senate Bill 2), and 2. effectively address ‘pay to play’ corruption by banning political contributions from lobbyists and special interests.
4. Wile E Coyote, always pursuing the elusive roadrunner of government ethics, and never quite getting there.
Priscilla Hoback
Owner of The Pink Adobe
1. We got possession of The Pink Adobe and reinstated the classic Pink Adobe menu.
2. I heard that some of the stores downtown around the Plaza were condensing and joining together and surviving.
3. My hope for 2011 is that Santa Fe retains its magic and its enchantment spell, and that we all continue to live and thrive here.
4. The burro at Burro Alley.
