Easley: The chamber in Santa Fe is a traditional chamber of commerce in a sense of a traditional chambers of commerce in the United States are supported almost entirely by their membership, by the businesses within the community. They get very little assistance of any kind from any other source other than from their members. In New Mexico there are only three chambers of commerce that are the traditional chambers of commerce. One is in Albuquerque, the Albuquerque chamber, and they're the largest chamber of commerce in the state. The second is here in Santa Fe, we're the second largest, and then the third is in Las Cruces. And the difference is quite simply: in all other communities in New Mexico, the chambers of commerce receive a significant amount of money either from their city or from their county government to perform tourism functions, to act as the marketer for the community. And in Santa Fe, government has done that for themselves, as they do in Albuquerque and Las Cruces. So, it makes us dependent upon our members, which for chambers of commerce is really the best kind of organisation in this country. And the reason it's the best kind of organisation is it allows us to take exception with things that the city may do. And in Santa Fe this is a very difficult community in which to do business because there is so much anti-business sentiment. And that comes from a lot of different sources, but the primary source that we get it from is from city government, where there is not a business-friendly atmosphere at city government. They would just as soon make things more difficult for business as make it easy for business. So it allows us as a member-driven organisation to take exception. When they want to do things that are detrimental to business, we then take exception with those. That assists us in establishing our reputation and our standing with our membership. So, hopefully what happens is that all that energy makes it easier for us to get support from our members and we don't have to depend on money from any other source. Easley: Some of the examples of things that we are dealing with today . Right now, today there is a significant focus on water. And we have several city councillors in Santa Fe who desperately want to use the water situation, or the lack of water, to control growth. In their minds controlling growth is not really what we see as controlling growth, because we, too, think that growth needs to be controlled in Santa Fe, but in their minds it means stopping growth. And a community is either growing, or it's dying, there is no in-between. So, our sense is that there must be a healthy and sustained rate of growth in Santa Fe, and the only way you can do that is by allocating your resources properly and by making sure you have new resources. Santa Fe bought the water company from a private enterprise - the city did - six years ago. And in those six years they've not made one attempt to buy a new supply of water. They've only dealt with the supply of water that they've had, and for the six years that they've owned the company, that's been okay up until this year. And when we hit this year what they find is that the supplies of water are insufficient. And so we've had to cut back significantly. Santa Fe gets about forty percent of its water from snow melt in the winter, and last winter we had virtually no snow. So there was very little snow melt this spring, and very quickly we began to realise we were going to have a problem with water. And when that happened, several of our city councillors immediately said we must stop all growth immediately, we can't do anything further until we solve this water problem. Well, they've had six years of ownership to begin dealing with it, and they've not dealt with it. So, what we've said is that we agree that you need to control growth, this is after all a desert, it's a high desert, a mountain desert area, but it is still a desert area, and so we do need to control and use the water resource as carefully as possible. But there are many sources of new water out there, and Santa Fe actually has some new sources of water that they've owned the rights to for twenty-five years. And in those twenty-five years they've made no attempt to get the water into Santa Fe. Easley: And now, one of the things that we've managed to do in this water debate that's been going on is focus them on the need to go get that water. It's water that comes from snow melt in Colorado, and it's water that was allocated some twenty-five years ago. Santa Fe got a forty-year water right. And they are doing what we asked that they should do before the water right expires. We've asked them to go to the federal government and ask the federal government to give them that water right in perpetuity, so that there's no time limit on it. And it's called the San Juan-Chama water right. San Juan-Chama is the source of the water as it comes into the river. Actually the water is piped from the Colorado River over to the Rio Grande River and then allowed to flow down the Rio Grande River, and the communities along the river that have water rights are allowed to take a certain amount or take the amount that they have water rights to out. If Santa Fe had done this at any time in the past, they would have had enough water to sustain themselves throughout this water crisis. There would have been really no crisis. So we've said it's imperative that you get that water now, and they're working on that. They have also - and the thing that we're working on today and have been working on for the past six weeks - they've proposed a water budget. And the purpose of the budget, in the proposal, is again to stop growth. What we've said is that the budget consists of two different components. It consists of your income and your expenditure. And you must increase your income if you expect to be able to spend more. And they've not done that. So we're saying: Yes, pass the water budget, but make sure you recognise that you need more water in the future! And hopefully we've got them on track to doing that. Easley: Another is an issue of a living wage. In Santa Fe we have a number of people who make low wages and can't afford to live in Santa Fe. Santa Fe is an expensive place to live, as you've probably picked up on. But what city government wants to do is artificially raise the minimum wage in Santa Fe, so that everyone is required to pay a higher wage. Well, our sense is that will only drive costs up. It will drive the cost of living up, along with everything else. And the people they're trying to help really won't be helped. They'll probably be hurt, because many of them will probably lose their jobs. Employers will look more carefully if they're good employees, and the ones that have limited language skills and are just starting out probably will be fired, and they'll not have a job. So, our sense is that government should not be sticking its nose into the private sector and trying to regulate the wages in the private sector. The private sector should regulate that itself. I know my experience is, when I started to work many years ago, my first couple of jobs were minimum wage. Well, that made me realise very quickly that I didn't want to stay at minimum wage very long, and if I wanted to get out of minimum wage, I had to increase my skills, increase my education, and improve my job skills so that I could move up on the ladder and get out of the minimum wage situation as quickly as possible. Easley: The economy in Santa Fe is very much dependent on tourism. Santa Fe is a community with very little industry beyond tourism and beyond state government, of course we're the state capital. State government is the largest employer in Santa Fe. The second largest employer, if you look at it collectively, is the tourism industry - that's all of the hotels, the restaurants, the museums, the things that help with the tourism industry. And so, as much as forty percent of the city's budget comes directly from tourism. It makes it a little bit difficult because we don't have a mixture of jobs. We have high-paying jobs where people own businesses, and then we have people who work for the businesses that feed tourism, which are primarily service industry: they're retail, they're restaurants, they're hotels, and typically the wages aren't as high there. We have a very high drop-out rate in our school system, and we've recently begun to address the drop-out rate and say that we need to diversify our economy and get some minimal manufacturing jobs into the economy, so that there are jobs in the mid-range of paying. What we see is that students in high school today in Santa Fe have two choices: they're either going to go on to college, and once they graduate from college they'll likely end up somewhere else, working in a larger city. Or they're going to go into the tourism industry. And it doesn't take many of them long to figure out that in order to get into the tourism industry they can start at the bottom and work their way up to something in the middle, and they're never going to do very well. But why finish school? Why take the time to finish school? So we've a very high drop-out rate here. It's said that it's as much as thirty-eight percent of the students in Santa Fe actually drop out before they leave school. And that's difficult to deal with. Easley: The public education system in the United States is not what it used to be. Compared to many other industrialised countries, we are way down the list. And that's an issue that has to be dealt with, not just in Santa Fe, but throughout the United States, I think, in the next few years, or we're going to fall further behind. And this that used to be one of the leading industrialised economies in the world is suddenly not as strong as it once was, particularly when you compare us to many of the Western European countries as well as some of the Scandinavian countries and Oriental countries. The area that we see as an area of potential growth is the area of technology. One of the nice things about having the high quality of living that we have in Santa Fe is that many of the people involved in technology who can do their business from almost anywhere prefer to do their business from an area that has a very high quality of life, which we have here. One of the things that tourism the growth of the tourism industry has given Santa Fe is a much sharper focus on the arts and entertainment and so on. So, many of the things that make the quality of life very high are here. We think those things are things that would then attract more of the technology-based companies. Easley: Many of the things that we do are quite fun. We have coming up on Monday a golf outing which we make a significant amount of money on. We also make a significant amount of money on legislator receptions; since this is the state capital, when the legislature goes into session in January, we do a reception for all the legislators, and we'll have eight-, nine-hundred people at the reception, along with most of the other business organisations in the state. And when all is said and done, we make sixteen-, eighteen-thousand dollars a year off of that and about the same amount off of our golf outing. We do monthly networking events. Networking is something that's very big in American business - business people getting together and exchanging business cards, making new contacts. And we do a Business After Hours which is not All chambers of commerce do them, but ours are quite successful. We have them the fourth Thursday of every month, they are at a different place every month, and we'll have anywhere from a hundred and twenty to three hundred and fifty people attend one of those. And they're very just very social, from five thirty till seven thirty in the evening. We do, every month, a morning a breakfast on the first Friday of each month where we get our members together, have breakfast and then we give them thirty seconds to stand up and tell us who they are and what they do. And you can say quite a bit in thirty seconds. A lot of people say 'Well, you're not giving us much time,' and then they get up and sit down in twenty seconds, and realise they haven't used their full allocation of time. But that's another opportunity for our members to get together to meet other business people. We also offer we have a number of committees. We do most of our work in defining policies for the chamber through committees. That's a very big thing in this country. And the committees typically will take a problem or take an issue and look at it, and then give our board of directors guidance as to how they think that we should be dealing with that particular problem or issue. And that begins that then becomes with the board approval our policy on whatever issue it is that they're pursuing. Easley: We have a number of organisations in Santa Fe. One is called SCORE, S-C-O-R-E, that stands for the Service Corps of Retired Executives. And they're successful business people who have retired, but they're donating their time to help other business people. And we do a series of seminars using their resources, and we do them here in our office, we have space to do that. And so we will invite our members in very low cost seminars on proper bookkeeping, on human resources issues, just various things that business people are going to face in their day-to-day business. Easley: There are three primary reasons for belonging to an organisation like ours, which is entirely voluntary. The first reason is the ability to network, the ability to meet other business people and to interact with them to gain new business contacts, to either sell something or buy something to the people that you meet. And that's the primary reason that people get involved in an organisation like ours. The secondary reason is exposure for their business. And we provide that through the personal contacts but also through our website. Our website is one of the most Because we are a high tourism area, our website receives a tremendous amount of traffic. And so it's very important for our members to have the presence on the website. And all of our members are listed on our website. If they would like to link their website to our website, we have a small additional charge, and with that charge then, someone can click onto their business and go directly to their website. So that's the exposure side of it. The third area is advocacy, being the staff and the board, having policies that are advocating growth and good business practices. And that's what we do at the staff level in order to build the foundation for the organisation. Easley: We develop a legislative package every year. By legislative package I mean we look at what we think is going to happen at the state legislature and then we develop positions on what we would like to see happen or what we don't want to happen at the legislature. And then when the legislature comes into session, as soon as issues come up, I visit the legislature, typically on a daily basis throughout the legislative session and talk with legislators. And in order to be able to do that properly, I have to register as a lobbyist with the state of New Mexico. And I then become, of course, the chamber's official voice at the legislature. We pay a small fee to register with the state that we are going to be lobbying the legislature. And then we have to turn in reports if we make any donations to a legislator. We turn in a report if we take a legislator to lunch or to dinner. We have to report that. And typically the reporting aspect of it keeps things or it's supposed to keep things honest, so that you're not bribing public officials with your money. And being a lobbyist - either at the local, state or national level - is pretty much the same, except that the lobbyists at the national level typically do a lot more throwing around of money than we do at this level. I typically will spend go through the entire legislative session, and other than my time, I'll spend probably less than five hundred dollars on meals and things like that with legislators. So we keep it a very low-budget operation. Easley: About fifty percent, or forty-six percent, in Santa Fe speak Spanish. Now, most of them speak both Spanish and English. Those that are immigrants and there're a few there's a growing immigrant community in New Mexico and they speak only Spanish. But most of the Hispanic population that have been here for many generations, dating back four hundred and two, four hundred and three years, speak both English and Spanish. And they will be speaking Spanish when they're with one another, but when you come when someone who speaks English comes in, they'll generally change to English. It's not much of a problem, it only becomes a problem in the schools, where students coming from immigrant families are then really the ones that their families depend on to help them learn to speak English, and that gets very difficult. And that's a growing population. Probably eight to ten percent of the population here are immigrants, mostly from Mexico, speak only Spanish until they enter the public schools. And many of the teachers are bilingual. They speak both English and Spanish. So, that's helpful but it slows down the rest of the students, because those students have to be taught in a special way both in their native language and in English. So it's a little bit of a problem, it's probably one of the things that also contributes to our high drop-out rate here in our public schools. % % 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. %