Plata studio featured: Silver City Daily Press: State solons talk tech, science at WNMU

Western New Mexico University played host to the Science, Technology and Telecommunications Interim Committee of the New Mexico state Legislature this week, where discussion focused on projects both on and including Silver City’s university itself.

On Thursday, the committee’s meeting served as a runway for the rollout of plans for a traveling makerspace laboratory for schools in Grant County. If that sounds simple, it’s just the first in a series of projects developed over several years in a collaboration between WNMU and the architecture schools at the University of New Mexico and Woodbury University to use architecture to stimulate rural economies.

UNM architecture professor and Grant County native Tim Castillo began the Plata Silver project in hopes of using his profession to help fill a need in his old stomping grounds. The project didn’t begin as a makerspace, however.

Beginning in 2015, UNM and Woodbury students descended on Silver City first, ultimately discovering that need that needed filling. They conducted video interviews, took in the sites themselves and met with local officials to find different possible projects. Eventually, they came up with a list. It included a mining museum to stimulate tourism and food truck hubs, among several others. But, Castillo said, his home county’s symptoms of New Mexico’s illness of exporting its youth gnawed at him.

“And, if we’re going to keep them here, we have to create opportunity,” he said. “If we’re talking opportunity, we have to talk STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) education.”

He and his team of students returned to Silver City the following year, when they initially targeted the town of Silver City’s building on Broadway that currently functions as the Silver City Museum Annex. They thought the old electric company office offered a perfect space to open up to the community for a makerspace — where people could use anything from three-dimensional printers and laser cutters to culinary appliances and music recording equipment to produce what they would.

But realizing that idea looked like it would cost too much.

So, the architecture students used their craft to design a trailer or truck that could fit all of the tools envisioned for the brick-and-mortar location in a mobile unit.

The project is still costly, but through partnering with private donors PNM and Freeport-McMoRan — the latter through that company’s grant to Silver Consolidated Schools and its director of technology, Ben Potts — they may be nearer their goal.

Committee member and District 57 Republican Rep. Jason Harper commended the pair — Potts and Castillo shared the presentation — for not stopping when a lack of funding blocked their initial vision. Potts thanked the representative, but said that by no means have their plans changed regarding a permanent location. He said the mobile unit would double as a billboard to advertise for their eventual goal.

From Grant County’s southeastern neighbor, Luna County Community Projects Director Jessica Etcheverry also shared news about a significant solar project the county recently completed.

The project, a 25-megawatt, 258-acre solar field, was actually one of Luna County’s smaller solar facility projects but, according to Etcheverry, is an example of how counties can benefit from these projects beyond just the energy they create — especially since most of that is sold out-of-county.

“That is something we have to explain to people, that this energy isn’t going necessarily to them,” she said. “What we get are GRT (gross receipts tax) and property tax. And we don’t do utilities, so we make money through projects like this. We came away with $1.5 million from just this, over 25 years.”

And, Etcheverry said, the projects were popular with all sorts of groups.

“Ranchers love these projects,” she said. “They might take 258 acres away from grazing or planting, but they’re making more off the lease to the investor than they would off the crops or head of cattle. That’s hardly more than a couple head of cattle on grazing. These projects help them keep their operations going.”

She said leases with companies like Tri-State Generation and Transmission, which is behind this particular solar installation, are usually for between 25 and 30 years. She said to get these projects, counties need to market themselves. She said Luna did that, in part, by promising PILT (federal payments in lieu of taxes) funds for property improvements.

Committee Chair and District 32 Democratic Rep. Candie Sweetser — who represents the southernmost tip of Grant County — said she thought the meeting at WNMU was a huge success, leaving legislators with a clear view of the projects needed and being pursued regionally.

“This committee, in particular, does a lot toward getting broadband and other technology to rural communities, that’s why it’s so appropriate that we have these meetings in places like here in Silver City,” she said.

Will there be any money available from the state for these or any projects, though? Sweetser was hesitant to say, as a freshman legislator. But she said that she and others were “cautiously optimistic.”

“The revenue is up, but how far and how true those numbers are is hard to tell,” she said. “When revenue is up, it becomes an issue of where are the priorities? Because there was no capital outlay this year and it has been decreasing for the last few sessions, it will be interesting to see. But the needs of New Mexico are great. First we have to look exactly what our dollars are and where are the greatest needs. But I can tell you that the feeling is, we have to keep young people in New Mexico, so whatever matches that. And technology is huge for that.”

This is the third meeting of an interim committee in Grant County since the legislative session closed in March. The next will be the Water and Natural Resources Committee meeting Sept. 5 and 6.