artdirector@sfreporter.com
Morning Word
Midtown moves forward
Tonight’s 5 pm City of Santa Fe Finance Committee meeting will include a presentation on the financial status of the Midtown campus as the latest step toward an expected City Council vote next month to approve the redevelopment plan for the 64-acre campus. The financial plan includes significant infrastructure costs—water, sewer, cable—phased over time as development occurs, but likely to start in the 2023/2024 fiscal years. The city estimates approximately $4.2 million in costs for the 2022 fiscal year, with around $1.6 million for its ongoing bond payments, but could see about $1.2 million in revenue from film production and building lease revenues. Planners anticipate implementing the master plan for the Midtown site could take 10 to 15 years. However, City Director of Community and Economic Development Rich Brown said in an op-ed last month he anticipates the Garson theater, production studios and new library “will be bringing the site back to public life” within one to two years, followed shortly thereafter by “affordable and market-price housing development, open space, and public programming with community arts groups.” The visual and performing arts center “will come online within three-to-five years,” he writes and, by the “10-year mark, we should all be experiencing and enjoying a vibrant new city center in the geographic heart of Santa Fe.” View plans for the campus on the Midtown website.
SFPS looks at redistricting
Santa Fe Public Schools Board of Education will hold a town hall on redistricting from 5 to 7 pm tonight in its board room (610 Alta Vista) in advance of adopting new board districts by the end of next month. According to redistricting plans, under the current district composition, District 3 is too large and needs to lose population. The board will consider three concepts to address the issue. Concept A’s goal is “to minimally change the boundaries of current districts to equalize the population and retain two Hispanic-majority districts.” Concept B would also strive to minimally change the boundaries while “keeping more neighborhoods together and keeping boundaries between districts along major thoroughfares and features wherever possible.” Concept C’s objective would be to “align board member districts with the schools they are assigned to represent.” Watch a presentation from Research & Polling, Inc on the proposed redistricting here (you can review the proposal here). The public can submit comments to Public_forum@sfps.k12.nm.us. Also on the redistricting beat, the state Supreme Court on Friday agreed to take on a case involving a Republican challenge to the redrawn map for the 2nd Congressional District in the southern part of the state. The court plans to hear oral arguments in January.
PRC reports upcoming milestones for community solar
The state Public Regulation Commission reports progress on the state’s journey toward implementing its community solar plan, an outgrowth of the 2021 Community Solar Act. Last week, PRC commissioners heard an update (right around the 35-minute mark of the meeting) from InClime, a private company that has a $1 million contract to administer the state’s community solar program. InClime, according to a news release, will be conducting the request-for-proposal process for community solar projects; evaluating the RFPs; and recommending finalists to the PRC. The company also will facilitate “participation of low-income customers; ensure that solar power developers comply with all rules and procedures; manage utility contracting and relations with solar power developers; and administer dispute resolution processes, if needed.” PRC Vice Chairman Joseph M. Maestas said he wants to ensure the public is aware of upcoming “key milestones” in the process. For instance: next month’s plans include the launch of the project website; publishing the program guidebook; and roll-out of the RFP process, among other activities. “Community solar, by nature, is a complicated product with many participants and stakeholders with varying and vast levels of familiarity with projects and policies,” Miana Campbell, InClime’s community solar lead, said in a statement. “We want to put ourselves in a consumer advocacy role and ensure that not only is capacity utilized but utilized in an ethical way.”
COVID-19 by the numbers
Reported Oct. 14: New cases: 348; 622,170 total cases; Deaths: two; Santa Fe County has had 353 total deaths; there have been 8,601 fatalities statewide. Statewide hospitalizations: 86. Patients on ventilators: four. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s most recent Oct. 13 “community levels” map, which uses a combination of hospital and case rate metrics to calculate COVID-19 risk for the prior seven-day period, all of New Mexico is once again green, aka has low levels. Corresponding recommendations for each level can be found here.
Resources: CDC interactive booster eligibility tool; NM DOH vaccine & booster registration; CDC isolation and exposure interactive tool; Self-report a positive COVID-19 test result; Curative testing sites; COVID-19 treatment info; NMDOH immunocompromised tool kit. People seeking treatment who do not have a medical provider can call NMDOH’s COVID-19 hotline at 1-855-600-3453.
You can read all of SFR’s COVID-19 coverage here.
Listen up
From 8:30 am to 5 pm today, the Institute of American Indian Arts and the IAIA Museum of Contemporary Native Arts will celebrate their 60th and 50th anniversaries, respectively, with a “Making History” symposium. You can register to attend in person (limited seating), but you can also participate in panels and Q&A sessions via Zoom, or watch the day’s events online, with conversations and presentations by historians; celebrated alums; current and former IAIA team members; and staff from the IAIA Museum of Contemporary Native Arts (MoCNA), including IAIA President Robert Martin (Cherokee), and President and CEO of the American Indian Higher Education Consortium Carrie Billy (Navajo).
McCarthy’s new novels revel in complexity
Renowned author Cormac McCarthy, 89, keeps a low profile in Santa Fe, except perhaps at the Santa Fe Institute, where he serves as a trustee. “He’s a permanent fixture in our community,” SFI President David Krakauer tells the New York Times. “He’s been living exclusively with theorists for at least 25 years. That is his environment.” Indeed, the Times says, McCarthy’s preoccupations with the complexity issues SFI’s scientists study “are seeping” into his fiction: The Passenger, which Knopf will publish on Oct. 25 (here’s an excerpt), and Stella Maris, publishing Dec. 6, will be McCarthy’s first novels in 16 years, and “directly tackle the thorny ideas and theories that have long preoccupied him.” The novels concern siblings Bobby and Alicia Western “who are haunted by their physicist father’s role in the development of the atom bomb, and by their romantic longing for each other,” the NYT summarizes. The characters periodically “debate byzantine concepts like S-Matrix theory, string theory and the general relativistic theory of gravitation.” Krakauer, who read early versions of the novels, says of their author: “Even if he’s not practicing mathematics and physics, there’s something beautiful to him about the unyielding quality of a difficult thought. He’s drawn to the aesthetics of it.” While McCarthy has famously given few interviews himself over the last several decades, he was chattier earlier in his career, and spoke about his writing and life with small newspapers in Lexington, Kentucky and east Tennessee. The Cormac McCarthy Journal has now made those interviews, which took place between 1968 and 1980, available for free through late December. Read them here.
Trick or treat, NM
La Posada de Santa Fe makes Historic Hotels of America’s recently announced 2022 list for the top 25 most haunted hotels in the US. They reference, of course, the ghost of Julia Staab (wife of wealthy merchant Abraham Staab, who built the former mansion) first sighted, reportedly, in 1979. Julia Staab died at the age of 52 in 1896: “But while her body had expired, many who lived in the house over the years believed that her spirit had not,” Historic Hotels notes. “In one instance, she was spotted wandering the hallways by a security guard, who immediately took off running.” (FYI, we were at La Posada Friday night and did not see the ghost of Julia Staab; we did have a very delicious jalapeño cucumber margarita in her namesake bar). Thrillist also places a New Mexico hotel on its list of “the creepiest, most mysterious haunted hotels in every state,” but in this case it’s The Plaza Hotel in Las Vegas where, Thrillist writes, “the soul of former owner Byron T. Wells still lingers in his old office, which is now Room 310. He’s considered a friendly ghost, fond of cigars and card games.” Also: Lifehacker includes Carlsbad’s Waste Isolation Pilot Plant on its slideshow roundup of the “ten scariest places in the US” (along with Mar-a-Lago). Finally, The Weather Channel includes Glenrio in its list of 10 US ghost towns you can still visit. Glenrio, which lies partially in New Mexico and partially in Texas, saw its boom time end in the mid 1970s when Interstate 40 bypassed the town; it was listed in the National Register of Historic Places in 2007.
Brrr!
We may see some fog and/or rain this morning as we head into what the National Weather Service forecasts as another moisture-laden day, with a 70% chance for showers—and possibly thunderstorms—after noon. Otherwise, today will be cloudy with a high near 49 degrees and southwest wind 5 to 10 mph becoming north in the morning. If you’re not quite ready for cold and wet, worry not: The rest of the week looks warmer (and drier).
Thanks for reading! The Word is preparing for winter by watching Explore’s newly launched Polar Bear cam (and here’s the tundra buggy).
Editor’s note: An earlier version of this story had an incorrect figure for the number of reported new COVID cases and has been corrected.
