DAYS, CLAYTOONZ AND

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But incomplete journalistic treatments of aspirational community projects only reinforce the perceived intractability of our affordability problems and serves to make future projects harder. It tacitly emboldens the NIMBYs’ and naysayers’ counterfactual claims and the political apathy that accepts the inevitability of gentrification.

Unrelenting, ungrounded, and perfectionist criticism of community development work is one of Santa Fe’s ugliest pastimes, and it’s not unique to housing. We don’t seem to know the difference between good growth or bad, altruistic developers or the dubious, it’s all change, and the people that bring it should be suspect. But the only solutions to our converging climate and housing crisis will be proactive, so we badly need to become more articulate in the housing space.

Done right, journalism should create a platform to objectively assess what did and didn’t work in a project with so many firsts (city-donated land, community-designed, net-zero energy, affordable live-work) and we encourage that. It could also inform what redevelopment at Midtown might look like and lead to more constructive housing discussions. But that can’t happen if we don’t move beyond anecdote, outrage and outdated tropes. DANIEL WERWATH EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR, SANTA FE INTER-FAITH HOUSING

CLARIFICATION:

The story “Housing in the Balance” quoted Daniel Werwath as saying the situation was “actually very deeply disappointing.” He requested SFR clarify that his disappointment stems from residents’ complaints about living conditions, not the project as a whole.

REMEMBER HIM AND PEACE

It’s been 25 years since my brother Carlos Romero was killed on the Plaza in 1997. Twentyfive years since I remember walking past thousands of faces on that Plaza trying to find out if what I heard was true, that my brother had just been shot. Too many people to find him. I’ll regret that for the rest of my life.

I stare at a picture of him dressed up as Zozobra. It’s ironic. I think how our traditions changed after his shooting. Zozobra was moved to Thursdays and now it’s back to Friday—but on Labor Day weekend instead of Fiesta weekend. Makes it so hard to go home for both. After that year I could not attend Zozobra or Fiestas after that fateful weekend. I hated Fiestas, hated the word Fiestas, hated Santa Fe, hated the shouts of “¡Que viva!” How could I? My brother lay dead on San Francisco Street, tape around him, while the party continued. The music never stopped, the drinking never stopped, the dancing never stopped! Four people shot and that Plaza was never cleared out. Still don’t understand that to this day. But I couldn’t go back.

My girls missed out on our traditions for a decade. No Zozobra, no pet parade, no Fiesta parade, no Masses, no nothing. I tried to change that for his 10-year. We had a memorial on San Francisco Street in front of “his” tree. We will do that again this year and I will do what I’ve tried to do since the 10-year anniversary: Try to love the echoes of “¡Que viva la Fiesta!” throughout the city; try not to cry every time I hear the Fiesta song; try to celebrate him by decorating his tree and try to attend every Zozobra to “burn my gloom away.”

This year we celebrate his 25th with our cousin Doug Nava as Don Diego De Vargas. He ran prior to this year and never won. But he won this year! A time it’s truly meant to be and it’s emotional! So many years I’ve hated this tradition of ours and so many years I’ve heard the same from others. They say “I hate Fiestas, I don’t go to Zozobra.” That also breaks my heart. My family has been involved in the Fiesta for years and I know that it’s about peace and all the people coming together. I know bad things have happened, not just to my brother, but in Santa Fe history—but this 25th year I hope that we all can remember what the Fiestas was meant to represent: peace. I want my Santa Fe gente to also try and love our Fiestas and remember the true meaning of it all. ¡Que viva! FELICIA ROMERO PHOENIX

SFR will correct factual errors online and in print. Please let us know if we make a mistake: editor@sfreporter.com or 988-7530.

SANTA FE EAVESDROPPER

“My god! They are so BIG!!”

—Overheard woman discussing ravens in downtown tree

“It’s a lot of smells for him to process.”

—Overheard at the Barkin’ Ball

BY ANNABELLA FARMER annabella@sfreporter.com

The City of Santa Fe’s recent streetlight conversion project left some stargazers and night-drivers with more knowledge about kelvins and kilowatt hours than a layman might want to have. It brought up considerations of safety, energy efficiency and how best to preserve a dark night sky.

Last October, city officials began installing LED luminaires in streetlights. The $2.9 million project, part of the city’s effort to go carbon-neutral by 2040, has the added benefit of saving $556,000 annually in electricity bills, and 2 million kilowatt hours of energy per year (an electric dishwasher uses roughly 2 kilowatt hours per load). The city owns about 3,000 of the more than 5,000 streetlights in town; Public Service Company of New Mexico owns the rest, which have yet to be converted.

Now that the city has completed its portion, members of the Santa Fe Conservation Trust believe the switch has increased sky glow, but they don’t know for sure because there’s no baseline against which to compare the new lights. Now, they’re looking to change that by installing light-monitoring equipment on Santa Fe County buildings, including fire stations, which would collect light pollution data every five minutes throughout the night.

At its inception, Mayor Alan Webber and other city officials touted the project as reducing light pollution—but not everyone agreed. The nonprofit working to protect culturally and environmentally significant landscapes was concerned the new lights would be too far on the blue spectrum, “which creates more light pollution and has more impact on all living beings,” says Executive Director Sarah Noss. The group lauded the city for its efforts to save energy, but advocated for the new LEDs to be more amber in hue.

The new streetlights are “the warmest and dimmest design you could do,” within certain parameters, city Public Works Division Director Regina Wheeler tells SFR, citing a 10-year warranty, a tier-one manufacturer and lights that meet national safety standards.

Retired astrophysicist Sam Finn introduced the group to the monitoring equipment, and the nonprofit will be part of a long-term light pollution study with the Flagstaff Dark Skies Coalition.

Replicating that work will help “keep an eye on the light pollution,” Noss says. “If we had that kind of information in our quiver, we could more forcefully understand if we needed to improve our laws protecting the night skies.”

Finn says the only data available now are from weather satellites, “but that data is crude and you have to make a number of assumptions in order to use it to make statements about changes in the light level,” he adds.

The trust is working with Santa Fe County Commissioner Hank Hughes to finalize the equipment’s placement. Hughes supports the project.

“I’ve lived here 30-plus years, and we’ve already seen the sky get brighter from the lights in Santa Fe,” Hughes tells SFR. “There’s already some degradation, so that’s why I think it’s important not to let it get any worse and hopefully, maybe even make it a little bit better.”

Noss says the group plans to gather 10 years’ worth of data with three monitoring stations—one to the north of the city, one to the south and one to the southeast—to track light pollution in northern Santa Fe County, including within city limits.

The nonprofit will download the data every couple weeks and both study it locally and send it to the group in Flagstaff for analysis.

“It’s kind of a big deal, but it’s something that we feel like we can do and that we’re committed to because we really want to protect the night sky as much as we can,” Noss says. Noss estimates the startup cost at $7,000, with an annual cost of roughly $1,000 for data downloads and equipment maintenance—all paid through donations.

The dark sky protections on the books “don’t really have teeth,” Noss says. “Our hope is that if we can show that things are changing fairly quickly in terms of our ability to see the night sky, it would help us strengthen the statutes that are already in existence.”

Santa Fe’s light pollution ordinances haven’t been updated since 2011, though the city did pass specifications for smart street lighting design in 2021 that will be be incorporated into the code when it’s updated.

Wheeler, too, would like to see more stringent ordinances, though she believes the city streetlight conversion has improved light pollution.“Through this whole streetlight process, we realized that we would really like to be a dark-sky community,” she says. “One of the phases of that would be really starting to talk to the private sector about how they can do better, and then making our ordinances stricter.”

The city is rewriting the land use code, which Wheeler calls a “golden opportunity” for this type of work. But because the jobs of Engineering Division director, engineering supervisors and other staff are vacant, she says it’ll be a slow process.

The city’s next step is converting the PNM-owned lights. Wheeler expects to see a quote from PNM within the next couple months.

“My guess would be, we’ll probably be in business with a new conversion in January,” Wheeler says.

For the Conservation Trust, the stakes are high.

“To me, what’s important about preserving night skies is that it’s a natural resource that has been there forever,” Noss says. “If we can preserve the night sky, we look at the same stars that our ancestors looked at and revered and built their lives around.”

Further, lighting impacts melatonin levels in humans, she says: The lighter the night sky, the worse sleep quality will be. And those are just the human impacts— she says it affects animals’ mating patterns, how blooming plants open at night, feeding insects and more.

The good news, she says, is that dark skies are “totally recoverable” by reducing certain kinds of lighting (like light that bounces off sidewalks from streetlights).

“It’s not the hardest thing in the world to do if everybody’s aware of the reasons to do it,” Noss says.

Advocacy group works to measure the brightness of Santa Fe night skies

ERIC SALTMARSH

The central portion of the Milky Way, rising before dawn in March 2022, as seen from Eldorado.