Description: David Pfeffer is one of eight city councillors of the community of Santa Fe (New Mexico, US). He explains how the city council works and gives some examples of the public and economic issues he deals with.

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Our city

Pfeffer: Well, they ... the city council ... First of all we have a town of about 65,000 people. Santa Fe is a very old community for this part of the world. It was the sixteen hundreds when it was founded. And, we ... the kind of ... it's been under many flags. It was first of all Spanish, then it was Mexican, then it was part of Texas, part of the United States, the 1840s, and then the Confederate flag for a brief time. Confederacy was out here. So it's been under five different flags. Statehood - New Mexico became a state in 1912 - about, now what is that, ninety years ago, eighty, ninety years ago? My math is horrible. And Santa Fe is the capital of this state.
[ video ] [ exercises for this topic ] Word count: 126 Duration: 1m14

Our responsibilities

Pfeffer: We have a representative form of city government. It's called a City Manager form. The mayor is city manager. The city council is eight people. There are four districts in the community that are ... it's divided geographically. And there are two councillors per district, and the mayor is elected at-large. Then we also have a judge who is elected at-large. So there are only ten people who are elected as representatives of the community directly by the people. And the council has pretty extensive powers. Health, safety, welfare. We have the financial, the fiscal authority for the community. The city budget is our responsibility. The services the city provides are typical: police, fire, there are recreational services, there are facilities that the city has built for recreation, there's an ice rink here, believe it or not, basketball courts, swimming pools, gymnasiums, parks, running tracks skateboard parks etc. That sort of thing. And the streets are the responsibility of the city. The water company is the responsibility of the city. So, the government has considerable power. To run a business one has to be licensed by the city. So that's an other authority that the city has. So there's quite a bit that the city has control over.
[ video ] [ exercises for this topic ] Word count: 207 Duration: 1m59

Elections and office routines

Pfeffer: And the elections are every two years, where half the city council stands for election. And the mayor is elected for a four year term, I serve a four year term. We meet twice a month. It's regularly the second and last Wednesday evening of the month. We're paid, but we're paid minimally. It's a little bit above minimum wage. So it's just a basic kind of salary. We're considered city employees, so whatever benefits, such as insurance or health benefits, we have those through the city government. And a lot of excitement happens at the council meetings. People are very angry or upset or happy or something in the extreme about one issue or another, and it all comes to the city council. And we get stacks of mail and stacks of letters, and the newspapers like to pretend they know what we're doing, so they write authoritative articles about the issues and about us that are, most of the time, wrong. This is the water issue right here, that's water. This is the next council meeting. Okay. This is the week's meetings. This is something I dropped on the floor. One of the happy sides of being a city councillor is we get invitations to different events. We're invited to receptions and grand openings and parties and so forth. And we're allowed to bring guests, and it's a happy kind of thing. So there are benefits from doing that. And everybody knows who we are, we're locally known people. So if we walk out on the street, somebody is going to say hello, or say what they need done, or they want done, or what we should do, or whatever it is. And it's our job to be quiet and listen. And we're responsible for the well-being of the community. /
[ video ] [ exercises for this topic ] Word count: 302 Duration: 2m08

Managing natural resources

Pfeffer: The amount of water that we consume as a community now is just about equal to the amount of water we can produce. Which means there's ... it's tight. And we rely for a considerable amount of our water on our reservoirs up in the watershed. And they are just about dry right now. This being summer, and it's a very dry summer. It's been a dry year, it was a dry winter. And the snow pack in the mountains would have created a run-off to fill the reservoirs. There was very little snow pack, there was very little run-off, there's very little water in the reservoirs. So we're in an emergency water situation. Which is actually fairly typical now of the whole state, of the whole region. This whole part of the United States right now is quite dry. It's a drought that is not just a local problem. So what we're doing is drilling new wells, looking for new water sources, trying to buy water rights. One can't just simply drill a well and take the water, there is a governmental process to go through by which that water is allocated. So, we have to buy rights to the water. And we're doing everything we can to increase supply, and we're also doing everything we can to reduce demand. One of the things we're doing is changing old plumbing fixtures, which waste a lot of water, and replacing them with new plumbing fixtures, which consume very little water. And if we can do that on a massive scale throughout the whole community - tens of thousands of toilets - we can save a considerable amount of water. We use anywhere between nine and sixteen million gallons of water a day. And in the emergency, we're reducing that amount to the low end of that. And if we can stay there we'll be all right. But we need to increase supply because our population is growing. And people have needs, so we need to increase the supply. /
[ video ] [ exercises for this topic ] Word count: 337 Duration: 2m27

Natural resources and innovation

Pfeffer: What we're doing is thinking in fundamental terms about our population and about our needs and how we can use less water, and how we can recycle the water. Because you ... we have ... Water comes in at the top of the pipe on the system, and it relies on gravity to get to the bottom. And we use it en route. We use some of it outdoors, we use some of it indoors. It's about fifty-fifty, it's about half each. And we ... at the bottom of the pipe, before we are done with it, we treat it. We take the sewage, and we treat it in our wastewater treatment plant, and it comes out at the bottom of the pipe cleaner than when it started at the top. So it raises questions. About sixty percent of our water goes out at the bottom of the pipe. Now there are other communities that have rights to that water, but not all that sixty percent. Maybe half of it. So there's still a chunk there that we could be using a second time. And so we are using it for outdoor purposes - watering our parks, there are golf courses here, the water is being used for that. There are things we can do with that water, that creates less of a demand on fresh water at the top of the pipe. There's also ... there are also ways to collect water that we haven't exploited. Bermuda has no wells, no well water, no place to go. They get their water from precipitation. So every roof in Bermuda is a water collector, and it's piped down into tanks at each building. And we can do things like that. We can be looking after ourselves far better. We come from a place where there's so much of everything, it is so abundant that we think the horizon is endless. And we're now ... we have now grown to the point where the horizon is not endless anymore. And we have to look to how we do it. / People are learning not to waste, gradually. And we have a very active citizens' group here that is going into the schools, and ... with materials and teaching children about how to use less water.
[ video ] [ exercises for this topic ] Word count: 342 Duration: 2m37

How we operate

Pfeffer: One of the things about our local government here by the way is it's a citizen government. I have no qualifications to be a city councillor, other than I'm active in the community. And as we have a group of private citizens that is in the schools teaching children how to use less water, we have citizen groups in all kinds of areas. In recreation, there're soccer leagues, that's all volunteer, the groups that goes into the schools about water, that's all volunteer, there are groups that are interested in the library, that's volunteer. They support the library. There are groups that are interested in the environment, it's completely volunteer. All kinds of groups. In every ... Anything you can think of that is an issue on the table, whether it's peace or war, or prairie dogs, or the cleanliness of the streets, or recreation, or soccer, or baseball, or football, or the ice rink, or anything you can think of. Education itself. There is a citizens' group that's active in it and out there doing the real work of the community. So, in Santa Fe, in this country in general, there's much more that happens in the life of the community, in the well-being of the community than simply having a family and earning a living and going home, or turning on the TV and being entertained. The government comes out of those groups. Those groups are the groups which produce the representatives and do the heavy lifting for voting and for getting the government going. We all came out of those groups. I came out of those groups and my colleagues did, too. The mayor did, too. We're active in the community, and then we take on the responsibility of the government part. /
[ video ] [ exercises for this topic ] Word count: 328 Duration: 2m07

Protecting the local architecture

Kurt: We were quite fascinated by these adobe buildings. Could you talk about this? Is there something ... I mean, do you have laws or regulations?
Pfeffer: Yes. Most of what you see is fake. Most of what you see looks like adobe. Adobe is a mud-brick. It's about this big and that thick. And it's made out of mud, with straw in it to give it some tensile strength. It's dried in the sun. And it's heavy, very heavy. The old construction here, from the Spanish, from the Indians and the Spanish, was out of mud-brick. Very solid, very heavy. It has a fragrance to it. The roofs were made out of wood from the local forests. As things grew, it became too expensive to make everything by hand. So, what we have here are laws which protect the appearance of things, but not the substance of things. We don't have a law here that requires that everything be made out of adobe. We have a law here that requires it look like ... that everything look like it's made out of adobe. So the architecture is interesting, but it's stylised, it's quite stylised. There are places in the world - Jerusalem is one of them - where there is a law that requires everything be made out of a stone quarried out of a particular quarry. And so you have a real integrity of architecture. In Jerusalem you can build in any architectural style you want, the appearance will change, but it will be made out of that stone. So it's a fascinating phenomenon.
[ video ] [ exercises for this topic ] Word count: 260 Duration: 2m01

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Acknowledgements, availability and copyright

Acknowledgements: The project has been supported by the University of Tuebingen. The video interviews have been carried out and recorded by Sabine Braun, Stefanie Hahn, Petra Hoffstaedter and Kurt Kohn. The speakers have agreed to the use of the materials for non-commercial research and education purposes.

Availability of the ELISA corpus: The ELISA corpus is made available by the Department of Applied English Linguistics at the University of Tuebingen. It is freely available at this website for study, teaching and research purposes, and copies of the transcripts may be distributed, as long as this statement of availability appears in the text. However, if any portion of this material is to be used in educational presentations and publications, permission must be obtained in advance. Commercial use of any form is excluded. For further information about permissions, please contact Dr. Sabine Braun at s.braun(at)surrey.ac.uk.

Copyright of the ELISA corpus: Department of Applied English Linguistics, University of Tuebingen.