Dear County Councilors: With respect and sympathy for the needs of other applicants for new facilities, CB Fox wants to go on record as a supporter of the PEEC Nature Center.
Of all the prospective CIP candidates, the Nature Center, placed on Canyon Road, fits Los Alamos’s new Creative District, imparting to the District the non-stop thrum of life that PEEC has already abundantly demonstrated it not only can, but does in fact, deliver every week of the year, year after year.
PEEC’s vitality, transported to the Creative District, adjacent as it is to the west end of Downtown, will predictably support increased shopping and restaurant activity.
Placed as is planned on Canyon Road, the Nature Center (1) becomes a strategic catalyst for development of the Creative District* to an extent that cannot be otherwise matched and (2) becomes a development-momentum builder for all elements of the district.
What’s more, the vitality of the district, as it grows, becomes the primary builder of the presence of more and more people on the west end of downtown, an area that more and more needs development attention before the Trinity Project end of the downtown barbell over-weights the distribution of downtown vibrancy in but one direction.
Under-pinning the Los Alamos County Vision Statement, the very idea of a vibrant downtown is to create a virtuous cycle of commercial productivity for the sake of increased gross receipts tax production from sources other than the laboratory’s future, without regard to its decrease or increase.
And now, suddenly, it has not ever been so appropriate for Los Alamos to focus like the laser on maximizing gross receipts taxes produced by properties on the Downtown side of Los Alamos Canyon.
The PEEC Center, we posit, once placed on Canyon Road, becomes in fact strategic, and as such it is transformed from “oddly located organization” to “new strategic asset” in a thus enhanced economic system.
Please think of the entire community as a single economic system, in which choices need to be made first for the location of strategic assets, followed by location of community service assets that the strategic assets so obviously help pay for and support.
We need a system made stronger, so enhanced by closely located clusters of the largest numbers of people. These living, moving, talking, kibitzing clusters are the vibrancy sought. PEEC has the proven ability to deliver all year long, in any year, lots and lots of people to its locus.
*Note: for those not yet familiar with the district: it includes Fuller Lodge, Fuller Lodge Art Center, Los Alamos Historical Society, Bath Tub Row and all other adjacent historic and museum attractions.
