Cyber Fe; Can Santa Fe Conquer Its Digital Growing Pains Before It's Too Late?
Santa Fe Reporter › August 04, 2009
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Summary
It's not in Stan Valdez's budget either. Valdez is director of Information, Telecommunications and Technology for the City of Santa Fe. "We did request some funding from the Legislature," Valdez says, "but we didn't get out of committee." The $800,000, sponsored by State Sen. Nancy Rodriquez, D-Santa Fe, would have been in addition to the department's freshly approved fiscal 2006 budget of $3 million. Although the new budget looks impressive, Valdez says it's an 11 percent drop from 2005 and contains zero funds for capital outlay or new service initiatives. Only "mission critical" efforts--like Valdez and his team of more than 20 programmers, analysts and technicians working around the clock to support and maintain the City of Santa Fe's mainframe, networks, servers, telephone system and radios--are covered in the basic budget.
That's typical telecom talk according to [David Brownlow], who looks forward to a day when there's more competition for New Mexico's high-speed needs. "I think poor Qwest is involved in their own survival at such a fundamental level that we can't expect much," Brownlow says. "Aside from the wire they own, they aren't worth anything." One step Valdez is taking, and can wrangle into his budget because of the obvious savings, is to switch the City's entire phone system to an Internet-based telephone system. Once the system is in place telephone service will operate through the City's own broadband account without the additional cost of traditional phone service.Santa Fe is already behind but, according to [Alex Traube], it's on the right track. "The economic development department in Santa Fe is pushing hard in all the right directions," he says. Unlike [Martin Chavez], Traube sees technology as a tool that equalizes economic opportunities, not one that creates competition. "Look around," he says. "Digital isn't a culture, it's a reality. It's just the way we do things."See the full content of this document
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Cyber Fe; Can Santa Fe Conquer Its Digital Growing Pains Before It's Too Late?
When the sun rises in Santa Fe, it saturates adobe and stucco walls, hand-worked stone cathedrals, the imperfect wobble of a mud town with old bones. In other cities, such as nearby Albuquerque, sunlight arcs from glass and steel towers, buildings are angular and purposeful, busy footfalls and elevator chimes provide tempo for wide-awake commerce. Santa Fe prefers to simmer out of its slumber, to lazily count tourism dollars that pour in from appreciators of lazy places.
But that's a lie. That's a vacation brochure promising nine holes of golf and a flamenco show. Sleepy, romantic Santa Fe is an economic strategy--and one that's not pulling in the premiums it once did. Santa Fe's market share of the destination tourism business has declined by nearly one third since the mid-1990s. Now historic Santa Fe ...See the full content of this document
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