By RICK NEBEL

The county council has asked for input as to what the county priorities should be. Most of the suggestions have been along the lines of how to spend county/state revenues to improve the quality of life in Los Alamos. My suggestion is a little different, and I thought it would be best to put it in writing.

We do a lot of things for a lot of different people in this town. We have facilities for the swimmers, the skaters, the skiers, the tennis players, the golfers. We have many programs and facilities for children, like sports groups and Boy Scouts. The list goes on and on. Ironically, there is one group of people that we don’t do anything for. That’s the scientists.

As everyone knows, Los Alamos is a one-horse town. We have one major employer, and everything revolves around the health of LANL. Heaven help us if peace breaks out. The West has a long history of ghost towns that fell apart when the mines ran out. Right now, that’s what we are looking at if LANL gets in trouble.

This has been the “elephant in the room” for so long that people have ignored it for the last 75 years. Eventually, we will suffer the same fate as all one-horse towns once the horse dies.  However, it doesn’t have to be that way.

Roughly one in 5 families in Los Alamos have assets over $1,000,000. I suspect that most of that is concentrated in the retirees. There is plenty of equity here in Los Alamos. Another asset is that LANL hires hundreds of post-docs every year. Only about 1/3 of them get converted to staff. If we could keep the other 2/3 in the community to found startups, we could grow out of the over-reliance on LANL that we now have. This town probably hemorrhages more talent than any city in the world. Both the talent and the equity are here.

What I am suggesting is that we need to form partnerships primarily between retired people and young post-docs. The retirees can provide the equity and do some mentoring. The post-docs can run the companies, and also provide mentoring to the retirees.

So what do we need to do? First of all, we need to accept the fact that we have a problem. Secondly, we need to realize that we have the resources to fix it. All we need is some leadership.

We have a number of retirees on the county council. My suggestion is that that they need to reach down in their pockets and pull out some cash. They need to use this cash to buy up as much of the derelict property in town as they can. Then they need to offer that property rent free to startup companies. They will trade the facilities for some equity in the company. The free rent will also keep these companies in Los Alamos.

Everyone who has run a small business in Los Alamos knows that the key to resilience is to own your own property. We have done this at Tibbar Plasma Technologies, UbiQD has done it, I suspect that Dave Fox has done it. Owning the building eliminates the rent, which is one of the major fixed costs of any small company. That’s huge. If we aren’t paying salaries, we can get by with less than $1,000/month expenditures at our facility.

It is time for the County Council and other senior city fathers to step forward and show some leadership. We don’t need county money to do this. What we need is the will to do it.