Minding Your Business; 385; Ryan Gleason, USDA-Rural Development Going Green

K-R-W-G-T-V presents Mining Your Business, a look at the people, places, events and issues that impact the business and economy of Southwest New Mexico, with your host, Charles Comer. Hello and welcome to Mining Your Business to show where we explore business, economic development, community resources and events, and issues that impact our region. This week on Mining Your Business, we've got another visit from our friend, Ryan Gleason, the New Mexico Director of the U.S. Department of Agriculture, Rural Development, to talk about the greener side of the USDA, RD. So what, right? Good to see you again. Thanks. Thanks for having me back. As always, pleasure, pleasure. So we are here where Earth Day has come and gone, April 22nd that was, and so, but you guys do have a green side, you do have programs that are working to make the world a little more green.

Certainly, New Mexico and rural areas, let's talk about that. Tell us how rural development's work relates to Earth Day. Well, Earth Day is clearly a celebration of the work that we can do to make the environment, healthier place, sustainable for future generations, and while our programs weren't designed necessarily for that effect that we're going to talk about today, we do have some that have that as a very significant ancillary effect. We have some programs that are helping to address water and wastewater needs of communities less than 10,000 people. By addressing those needs, we are reducing the need to use septic tanks and to drill wells, and as you know, septic tanks oftentimes leak and end up leaching into the groundwater, which makes for a much less safe environment. Right. Now, does that mean equal like and actually get in maybe a small community's water supply or certainly in the soil?

You can see these things if they're leaking and the leaks are significant enough that it get into the groundwater and then into the rivers as they run off and the like, and it can present some real health hazards to communities. Now, and obviously, you're not a septic tank expert, but in general, they're designed so that they don't do that if they're working properly, right? They will not pollute a water system. That's certainly the hope, but the more septic tanks you put into the system, the more chance you have of something going wrong. And the longer they've been down there, that indicates that they were older technology, and so things happen. They weren't designed as well, perhaps as they were in the past, and it's just not as efficient and it's not as safe a way to do it. Yeah, and we're talking in this case, we deal with a lot of definitions of what is rural in this case, sometimes 20,000, sometimes 50, this case 10,000, you've been paying attention. I've tried to, you know, this makes show number eight for us.

So I've picked up a few things along the way, but aren't those communities that are more likely to not have the kind of capital to build good wastewater systems? The smaller they are. The smaller they are. The more likely they are to have difficulties funding these things, certainly. Absolutely. And when we're talking about dealing with communities at 10,000, that's the maximum size. We don't have a minimum size. Yeah. And a lot of times. It could be Malgemar, which is, you know, like 15 people out there on the highway 249. We do a lot of projects with really small groups that are designed only to provide those services. 15, 20, 25, 50, those kinds of numbers. Wow. You bet. Now, that's, you know, USDA development works in rural communities to provide clean water. Is this the only thing you do, wastewater projects? There's other things that we're going to talk about, right?

Oh, we do, we do a lot of other things in our infrastructure type program. Okay. A lot of the things besides water and wastewater, we're doing all kinds of infrastructure, broadband and helping with the digital TV conversion, all those kinds of things. We're doing a lot in the world of business. We're doing a lot in the world of housing and those kinds of things. And that's going to come in in a later show next month's show is going to be about home owner's month, but this clean water, USDA, RG, what, tell us a little bit about community programs and some of the communities you guys have been doing stuff at? Well, community programs and compasses is even a broader range than just our water and wastewater as well. Really? Yes. And this allows us to work with a lot of the stuff. But the real focus on what we need people to understand at a today's show is that there are a number of different kinds of entities that we can work with to help them get their water needs met.

Communities like your municipalities, I mean, that's a typical sort of understandable type of community that we might assist. The county might act on behalf of some unincorporated areas within there. But there are also special purpose districts that we can work with. Indian tribes are eligible to participate in these programs and we have provided grants and given loans to them. And specifically for wastewater because on a previous show, we talked about broadband and business incubation by better worldwide communication technology, setting them up. What about up in the four corners area as far as water and wastewater? We are doing a lot of work with several of the chapters of the Navajo Nation. We're also working with several of the Pueblos that run up and down the I-25 corridor between Albuquerque and Santa Fe. And they're, in fact, as a community up there that the closest source of water for them was 75 miles.

Their members were having to get in their truck, drive 75 miles, fill up the big 50 gallon drums with water. So they didn't even have a tanker that could supply energy? They had no way to have water in this community except that they were going to go home. We were able to lay up pipeline to the center of the community so that they had to drive 75 yards instead of 75 miles. We didn't get it to the point where it went to the houses because it just became so expensive. We ended up taking a phased approach. First phase is get the water line to the center of the community. Second phase, as we start to figure out how to do the financing on that, is going to be to extend it out to the other homes. So that's the next step that you've got going, but amazing, a 75 mile pipeline that can't be cheap. No, no. It's not. And it wasn't all us. It's a community effort. It's a statewide effort. There's lots of other entities that were involved. So you were banning the whole project? No, but we certainly played a role in it. The state plays a role in doing these a lot of times. Capital outlay through the legislature will partner with us in this as well.

EPA, in a lot of cases, will put some money into projects like this, after all they're the ones that are telling us where all the problems are with the water system. No, no, I'm curious, has a USDA rural development grant, has that ever been there in place and consequently other funding followed? Because usually projects of that kind of magnitude, a 75 mile water pipeline, usually as you're saying, money has to come from the state, maybe the county, maybe municipalities and other grant issuing entities, has a USDA grant ever helped lock down other funding and then other funding resources started coming in? Certainly, and it's even better than that. Down here along the border we have a lot of the colonias, these communities that have been designated as such because they're lacking almost all of the basic infrastructure needs.

And we have a set aside in New Mexico of grant money that's available just for those colonias. It's in the neighborhood of $8 million. Because we have that pot of money that's available, Governor Richardson and the state legislature a couple of years ago developed a state pot of money to serve to match our money. So it ended up not just leveraging on an individual project, but it ended up leveraging another funding source altogether and they put in another $6 or $7 million and we ended up with each year now $15 million in grant money that can go down to these colonias. And we also have some really low interest and long-term loans that we can put into supplement that even further. That's an important point that we probably ought to talk about that. That there are really three ways that we can provide the assistance for these kinds of projects. We can provide it as grants. Straight up. No repayment required. That's just a free check and then let me jump in with sometimes you act as the co-signer. That's right.

So I have been paying attention. Very good. That's another way. Way number three. The way number three is that we make the loan directly. We don't have another entity make the loan that we guarantee. We instead take the money and we loan it out and then it's repaid to us as the government. So three different funding sources. We are definitely moving as a government in general towards the direct loan and more importantly the guaranteed loan that you described there. But there is still significant grant money available for these kinds of projects that affect quality of life and affect the environment. Now we had talked about counties, municipalities, multi-channel funding for projects and the number 10,000 for a rural community has come up but are there any other eligibility requirements for these kind of funds who can get them? Is it just a colonial under 10,000 or anyone else? Well for that particular set aside of grant money does have to be a colonial and it has to be in an eligible county which is defined in our regulations and it's fairly complicated

but it's counties that are within 150 miles of the border is the short version. And this community has to be designated by the county commission as a colonia so there is some self-determination of that designation. And then the governing authority of that colonia if there is one or the county acting on their behalf has to be eligible to take on loans you know they have to be legally authorized to do that. There are also groups called mutual domestic water users associations or mutual domestic water consumers associations. These are organizations that are organized under the Sanitary Protection Act and so they have to be legally constituted under our state law in order to borrow money from us. It can't be all that hard to do because there's hundreds of them around here and I think we'll talk a little bit about some of the resources that are available to help people if they're interested in forming that.

Now can you tell us about some of the funding that rural development has made in the last year for water and waste water projects and then we're going to find out something that's happened in Aztec. That's right. That's right. Last year we did in the neighborhood of $26 million in water and wastewater projects around the state and that represents our contribution to these projects. We are trying to get something like a 30% contribution from other organizations as our leveraging goal each year. We were a little short of that last year but if we can get there that brings in another $9 or $10 million into these kinds of projects and so we'll end up with hopefully $40 or $50 million in the year going forward. Now tell us a little bit about this video we're going to see about Aztec. First remind us where Aztec is. Northern New Mexico right up in the mountains. For Corners area it's about 10 or 15 miles east of Farmington. There's actually three little communities up there that formed their own little triangle

Bloomfield being the other one and it is a community that is bordering on the mountain areas up there not far from Durango and it's a community that's growing and so they have some issues not only in the age of their water system and the inevitable decay there but they've got some growth issues that they've got to try and address to provide the infrastructure for the reasonable growth that we expect to take place there. So I say let's take a look at the video. I say let's go. Sounds good. The original residents of Aztec were Native Americans who built the Pueblo along a terrace overlooking the Animus River. Missionaries who arrived in the late 1700s discovered the ruins of this Pueblo and believed that members of the Aztec Empire in Mexico were responsible for building it. That's the name. Since its formal founding in the late 1800s Aztec has had relatively steady growth even with the boom and bust nature of the gas and oil economy. While this town of 6300 is still considered a small town by many Aztec is bustling with

commerce. The downtown area is full of activity and new homes and subdivisions are being built. With this economic development comes some inevitable growing pains. The basic infrastructure needs to be remodeled and expanded. This is especially true for the wastewater treatment plant which is near capacity. Without the expansion of the wastewater treatment plant the community's economic development could slow down and residents could be left without this basic service. To solve this problem the city of Aztec is applied for a multi-million dollar financial package from USDA rule development. By taking this action now the citizens of Aztec will be in a good position to meet whatever challenges and opportunities they are faced with in the future. Well as the city is growing in population slowly and it's putting more of a load on our existing plant and the existing plant was built in 1983 and it's not designed for, I think it's designed for a million gallons a day according to the engineers but we're putting

out about 800,000 gallons a day and we're having some overloading problems and our biological oxygen demand on the influence is a lot higher than what we anticipated it to be and so we're having trouble treating it all. Alright amazing example and so Tostas USDA rule development team up with other agencies when it comes to working with a community to develop good water or wastewater systems we've touched on that but to maybe isolate the answer a little bit. Yeah we absolutely do and in fact we recognize that putting together a water or a wastewater project for a community of 15 or 20 or 50 that we talked about a little bit earlier can be a daunting task to say the least. If you and I happened to live down the road from each other and we didn't have water but knew that we needed to we don't have the first clue. Yeah we would know what to do we wouldn't know what kind of money it takes.

We would now know to call rule development because we've been watching minding your business but other than that we wouldn't know how to handle this. So we have provided some funding to a couple of nonprofit organizations who have sort of as their mission going out and helping people figure these things out. The New Mexico Rule Water Association is an organization that can help us with the how do we organize ourselves how do we govern this thing how do we how do we operate a system once it's up and running they they know the answer is to a lot of wise that's right. But they they don't really work with you on the how do we get this thing funded they get it with the how do we actually just exactly well good news is that the rural community assistance corporation RCAQ is what we always call them is out there to help us get the applications and figure out what the funding sources are meet the conditions that we have to satisfy before we can actually receive the water things like securing water rights making sure that we have the rights of way secured to lay the lines.

See and that that can be huge just and what we're talking about is is you know little chunks of of property some sometimes an offset from from a road or or in between a road on a property some sometimes in between properties those kind of things and and sometimes that can get pretty sticky to to litigate all that it can and it can certainly eat up a lot of time and and these boards tend to be you know volunteer boards these folks aren't getting paid I mean we're not a page other to put our own water and we're going to volunteer and we're going to go get it done but we got to do our day jobs as well and so this this group RCAQ is fantastic about going and helping walk people through the process help of fill out the paperwork help them get to the point where they can apply to an organization like rural development for the assistance that they need to put the project in the ground. So no need to sit there in in your chair and wonder that's right there's there's folks out there now what we talked about other funding sources a little bit can this money be

used in conjunction with the with with another to fund another project we we actually have that as something that we're really trying to do we want to have as many people putting their money into these projects as possible the more people we have in the better chance of success because we've now gotten more vested parties with an interest in seeing it succeed so we really do want to see more people bring their money to the game yeah because sometimes projects are separate projects with separate funding but but sometimes they're very symbiotic and in that you know clean water and then clean water treat or you know dirty water treatment that kind of thing so we've got another video what what are we going to see here this is a little closer to home shaperow down in South Indiana County just down the road this is a project where we did in fact have to bring a lot of different funding sources together we were able to provide a pretty significant amount of grant to this

project because it's it's a designated colonial but it wasn't enough to do the whole thing so we had to bring some more partners into this and this is going to provide them money to get this infrastructure to not only the the homes in the community but the school that has been built down there this is a growing community this is a growing community when I say that it's one of those census data can't keep up with it's growing so fast and the faster it grows the greater the demand there is for this kind of infrastructure and so you know the video as always tells a story much better than I do so here we go let's roll shaperow to Mexico a colonial that sits on the Mexico Texas border is about 45 minutes southeast of lost cruises many of the residents work in El Paso or lost cruises or can be found working the crops on farms along the Rio Grande and although shaperow is described as a dusty out of the way place east of the Franklin mountains it's growing the 2000

census counted over 6,000 inhabitants living in this desert community because of the size of the population there is a major need for a lot of community services for example there are three elementary schools a middle school a new high school and a new wastewater treatment plant being built there in October of last year I traveled to shaperow and presented a 3.8 million dollar check to doniana county to help pay for the construction of a portion of the wastewater treatment plant and collection system which will serve a significant portion of this growing community it's a betterment project for that community it's an up and growing community they continue to increase the population there they finally got their high school so their kids aren't community anymore to senator as I believe is where they were all going and then it's just it's a project to bring everybody together they want to do better in their community they want to become a viable community and that's what we're here to help them do do they see in the future economic development because of this they

really do they they are pushing towards that for their face to of the project to get the economic development in there to be able to have laundromats and car washers and just restaurant facilities that are able to meet the requirements of the environment department we knew that we had to have real development as a partner to get this project to move forward without them we wouldn't be where we are today the high school would be still struggling we're right now we're transporting their waste and that's costly to the school but we're right behind it we're there working with this real development all of our funding agents to try to get this project complete we're on schedule we're on time and we'll get everybody connected well another great example and like I say a little closer to home for us folks down here in the southern part of the state Ryan I don't know else to say but thank you so much and let's talk yeah real real quick we've we've got some contact

information that they can bring up and remind us what the phone number is well in albuquerque it's 505 7 6 1 4 9 5 0 or 4 9 5 5 for our community programs directly and you guys have a great website and another great way to find out information on all kinds of programs you best have up there or Ryan thanks great to see you we'll see you next month appreciate you take care well now it's time for a segment here on my near business that's spotlight some of the hardworking entrepreneurs and business people in our area we call it the Greater Los Cruces Chamber of Commerce local business future I found out about this training called Kinder Music and I fell in love with it my kids fell in love with it

and they became my guinea pigs so when we moved to Los Cruces I opened up a studio right away in an old music piano place here in town that no longer exists but they were gracious enough to have us and we started with kiddos who were two and three years old those kids are now graduating this year and so it's very exciting to see them over at Almo de Arte and the choir program over there and theater and also over at Los Cruces high school graduating this year so that's exciting and we've just little by little grown the program it's gotten bigger and bigger we now have we serve a hundred and ninety families babies all the way through age seven in our Kinder Music program and now we've added a choir for seven to nine year olds and these kids aren't a choir called trouble makers with lots of fun so they get to sing and dance and play and most recently we're going to add another program for children to eighth grade and they are then be called in harmony so that's a very exciting part of our business but I'd say 1994 here in Los Cruces we've been

here that long. Up and up and down in my little red wagon, won't you be my darling? Oh no, the wheels on! If you're coming to Betts as a parent with a young baby we send you home with a kit that's going to have your CDs, musical instrument, generally for that age group we are really trying to affect all the senses of the baby so we even have something for them visually to put over their changing table or the crib. We always have a theme so it might be centered around flowers or animals. Can you say it with me? Chippity, chippity, too. And as the kids get older they get a few more things. The pieces get smaller and smaller just like they do with Legos. We're really working the brain, we're working the entire brain when the children are with us early on and we make them lifelong singers too, there are so many people that can't even sing Happy Birthday at a party because they haven't learned really to match pitch when

they're really young so we start with just very simple matching pitch, simple rhythms. Everybody always tells me that they think that the skills that have come through this group music class that we've done have just extended into all parts of their lives. We make musicians and we make them early, make them lifelong lovers of music. That just about does it for this week. If you have a question or comment about the show, you can call the money in your business hotline at 646-730 or email me at charlescomeratjahu.com. Again, I'd like to thank my guest New Mexico director of USDA Rural Development Ryan Gleason for coming on the show and thank you so much for watching. I'm Charles Comer. He's hoping you have a great one. Thank you very much.

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