Ensuring Santa Fe’s Future

Aldea de Santa Fe continues to grow

I grew up in a small town in the hills of northwest Illinois. My uncle was an aide to President Johnson, so I was steeped in national politics as much as local baseball. It was natural for me, armed with degrees from Notre Dame and Virginia Tech, to head east to Washington in the mid-1970s

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That was a time when clean energy first held great promise. I had the great good fortune to serve on the staff of an energy subcommittee for Sen. Ted Kennedy. Many backyard inventors, professors and policy wonks streamed through the office with then-exotic ideas like offshore wind, concentrated solar, and passive solar buildings. Trips to places such as Colby, Kansas, to an ethanol training facility and Golden, Colorado, to the renewable energy lab, along with President Carter’s pronouncement in 1978 that the US should get 20 percent of its energy from renewables by 1990, gave me hope that the sun would play a major role in our energy future.

Like Rip Van Winkle, during the 1980s and ‘90s the country fell asleep to solar’s potential. Flash forward and once again our leaders are hearing from us that it’s time to learn from inventors, climate change experts, and most importantly, the awakened American people. We now know that devoting one quarter of a home’s rooftop can power all its heat, hot water and electric needs; that just 15 square miles of concentrated solar mirrors can provide enough electricity for all of New Mexico; and that enacting Gov. Bill Richardson’s 68 climate change proposals will allow us to make the transition to an energy efficient economy that emits 80 percent fewer greenhouse gases.

We now have Al Gore’s challenge to meet all our electricity needs from renewables by 2018. This seems impossible until it’s broken down to the local level. Indeed, along with continued increases in water efficiency and much smarter uses of land, putting our city on a solar-wind-geothermal energy budget is not only doable, it can literally ensure Santa Fe’s future.

Let’s start with focused redevelopment of our major corridors of Cerrillos, St. Francis, St. Michaels and Paseo de Peralta in front of DeVargas Mall. Transforming these run-of-the-mill, overly wide streets into scintillating boulevards worthy of Santa Fe means freeing acres of street and parking lot space exclusively devoted to motor vehicles. The space can be unleashed for hundreds of living units for folks of all societal levels, as well as for local- serving retail and office space for Human Services, Health, and Children, Youth and Families Departments now scattered all over the city. Public spaces from pocket parks to zocolos can create the chance encounters for conversations that can overcome stereotypes and help rebuild the social glue so sorely lacking.

We must also put in place a building code that asks all new homes and businesses to be twice as energy efficient as what’s being currently built, leading to buildings that use no more energy than they produce. Then, since five times as many homes are sold as built, require buyers of existing homes to bring the home up to an energy efficient standard within one year while offering them discounted green mortgages to add energy saving appliances and rooftop solar.