Taos Arts and Airports

The Airport

Once again the County Commissioners will convene today at 9 am to hear the pros and cons of the airport saga, a saga that began in the sixties when the Town Council voted to condemn property and build an airport. Like many small towns throughout the west, the Babbits and the merchants then believed they could grow up and thrown down on an airport and become a real town. The FAA and Congress, i.e. a manifestation of today’s corporate America, are happy to provide the “pork-barrel” while local promoters can point toward the salutary effects of airborne fire fighters and the occasional arrival of a move star or rich person and opponents can argue that the real reason for expansion concerns the accelerating pace of militarization, which benefits the National Security State, not to mention the faux belief in the pot of gold at the end of the runway.

(It’s a bird, it’s a plane, it’s a movie star, it’s a billionaire, and it’s a waste of time.)

Course, all the studies show small town airports, which serve the 1% of the 1% of the 1%, to be a drag on local muni operating budgets. Indeed a Taos News study suggested the expanded runway would have a rather miniscule fiscal impact. Scheduled and chartered airlines as well as air-taxi services have started up and stopped over the decades in Taos. If you talk to the once-upon-a-time land-locked and now unlocked landowners out by the airport, you realize this controversy seems curiously antiquarian because this guerrilla war has been raging for 50 years. What’s another five hours of turmoil at the County Complex, followed by potentially endless court cases while Northern Constructors continues to lay down the infrastructure for the inevitable flyways?

For the superstitious boosters and conspiracy-oriented opponents the airport represents a symbolic metaphysical stew. Do you want to take a stand in favor of love and faith in the sacred landscape and in defense of the flora and fauna? Or would you rather express your idolatry for the profane world of mammon and justifiable concern for public health, safety, and welfare?

Arts and Culture

Wednesday the Town of Taos will consider approving the budget for an application to provide an Arts and Culture District (ACD) as well as a Mainstreet program in another act of faith in the future. These programs generally can be seen as ways of reviving moribund downtowns or supporting tourism and redevelopment. Typically, there’s a kind of focus on an abandoned main street wherein new traffic patterns, freeways or interstates, have created new business districts and diverted attention from the “old town.”

In Taos the whole ACD/Mainstreet project seems like hauling coals to Newcastle or taking prairie dogs to the West Mesa. We have a busy main street, see all the winter and summer traffic, and we have an arts and culture historic district that, despite the recessions, is the very epitome of what most communities aspire to, even if buying patterns have changed and many merchants have yet to adjust to consumer trends while living with potholes.

I’m not sure how one translates “arts and culture” into dollars except at restaurants and hotels or B&Bs. We continue to promote more events than one person or tourist can attend on a given night, thanks to a thriving private sector, stimulated by the good intentions of artists and producers and do-gooders. Despite our lack of resources, we have plenty of potholes and poorly maintained motel rooms to offer tourists.

What we don’t have is leadership at Town Hall. The Mayor and Council have shown little inclination to forge constituencies among themselves or in the community, the constituencies necessary to garner long-term support from merchants and landlords, who can actually affect change downtown. There are about ten or fifteen key people who need to be on board but they, for the most part, don’t seem to be part of the conversation. Landlords, veterans of the trade, could be persuaded by legitimate arguments and evidence of an “authentic” vision…if the Town leaders had one.

The committees or executives or elected officials involved in the promotion of the ACD have little power and less imagination. Appointing a new committee or a new layer of bureaucracy (ACD/Mainstreet) seems like a way for the Town Council to evade responsibility for “governing,” even as this council wastes time making half-baked and divisive decisions about ideas unrelated to the nuts and bolts of managing a town.

The Mayor, Manager, and Council have within their power the ability but not the will to clean up the town, tear down the plethora of visual obstructions, and make a start on the “vision thing” re: natural and human-made beauty. But given the condition of the streets, the plethora of signs and weeds, and general neglect of the community, one can only surmise that “they” have lost their “work gloves.” Maybe the community needs to appoint a “committee” to monitor the elected and appointed officials.