By BRADY BURKELos Alamos
Here are my take aways from the June 15 Los Alamos County Wayfinder presentation.
Attendance at the 95 percent design phase – two Project people (County rep and Merje consultant), one County Councilor (David Izraelevitz) as a citizen, one stakeholder and two citizens, me and another woman.
Wayfinder: Wayfinding encompasses all of the ways in which people (and animals) orient themselves in physical space and navigate from place to place, according to Wikipedia. According to the project folks, the idea was floated around earlier in the year. It was run past stakeholders. A proposal was put out for bid and a company from Pennsylvania, Merje, was awarded the design contract.
The attendees were not given all the information about the project, just the high level stuff and the three proposed sign designs, which could be ‘Merjed’ 😮 into a fourth.
According to the project folks, it is more than just signs. Although it involves replacing all existing feature signs with ones conforming to the new design. The County’s visitor website would change to be in line with the new signage. There is an option for an Android and Apple App that would lead folks around the town, but not planned at this time.
The first step is to start putting names on things that the rest of us know, such as 20th Street parking lot. Then signs are built for these locations as identifiers, then distant road and pedestrian signs reference the locations.
When asked when public input was to be solicited about the project and the sign selection, it was stated that this was the meeting and the public would not be involved in the selection.
I asked if we could post the three proposed solutions on Facebook to Los Alamos groups. I was thinking The Good, The Bad and The Ugly of Los Alamos, just to let people know what was being proposed. The response was no. The rationale was that no good comments come from Facebook posts and that the County would post it on its website. My response was that although I had seen the posting for this meeting in yesterday’s paper, I had seen it much earlier on Facebook.
Regarding this project, I like the idea of the naming and the signs. If you don’t know where where the Sears Catalog Store or TA-31 was or where De Colores was in the 90’s, then good luck with local directions.
But how we got here is where I thought some clarification needed to be made. So, I spoke up …
First, the citizens of Los Alamos County ARE the stakeholders, not just the various committees and select, private groups that the County wants to talk to. It’s fine that the Mainstreet Futures Committee and the Historical Society are participating, but they are not the only ones impacted by the County’s decisions. And these are committees populated by the County’s selection.
I saw the same thing with the County’s Open Spaces meeting and the Flow Trail / ‘Gravity-driven bicycle-specific trail’ plan. An idea was proposed, a mountain bike enthusiast on the team happens to be in charge of it, all the meetings get announced to the mountain bike Facebook groups and the sales pitch is that everyone likes it. Oh, they, too, had their select and privately invited groups to discuss that plan as well.
And speaking to the Bicycle Transportation Plan’s graphs and charts … I struggled through Probability and Statistics, but I’m pretty sure that building those charts on a sampling of 239 participants out of a population of 18,000 is not a good foundation for any funding model.
As long as the County continues to make decisions in the vacuum of its closed sessions and private government offices and then strong-arms the public with its decisions, there will continue to be distrust in its motives and clarity of whom it serves.
The lack of transparency in our County government coupled with the lack of accountability in fiscal management should bring scrutiny upon all of their meetings and decisions. If you don’t think we should know about it, you shouldn’t be doing it. Plan on seeing me attend the public meetings, commenting and reporting.
Did we really elect this crew? Was there no one better to choose from?
To those who think I should stand up if I think I could do a better job … hey, I’m standing here.
