Santa Fe City Council May Get New Seating, and Other Developments

-Councilors passed a resolution directing staff to come up with a renovation plan for city council chambers.

The main bone of contention is that the council’s seating arrangement forces three or four councilors to sit perpendicular to the audience.

Recently elected Councilors Chris Rivera and Bill Dimas, who sponsored the resolution, have said they’d like an audience-friendly configuration that lets them more easily make eye contact with the public.

The resolution requires that “at minimum” the renovation include a seating revamp that lets all councilors “have direct visibility and interaction with the public.”

Plans and a cost estimate will be presented to the City Council in two months.

-Per tradition, the City Council approved a resolution authorizing free public transportation on election day, Nov. 6.

People can ride at no cost on the Santa Fe Trails bus system and Santa Fe Ride program, which provides transportation to those with special needs.

The service is a “mechanism for increasing voter participation on election day,” the resolution said.

-Councilor Rebecca Wurzburger introduced a resolution requiring the city to put community workforce agreement projects on hold until the completion and analysis of Santa Fe’s first community workforce agreement project, expected to be a renovation of a condo at the Santa Fe Railyard.

The proposal offers a slightly amended version of a measure that was introduced by Wurzburger and Councilors Peter Ives and Chris Calvert at last night at the city’s Public Works Committee meeting. That measure simply directed the city to collect and analyze cwa-related information during the condo renovation.