Columns

Former state Tourism Department Secretary Michael Cerletti was known to the public for his 10 years heading the department and two years at Expo New Mexico.
But that wasn’t what made the recently deceased Cerletti the legend he was.
Cerletti had a talent for taking aging hotels that had lost some of their charm and returning them to their former grandeur.
In New Mexico, he began with La Posada de Santa Fe.
Then he moved on to the old downtown Albuquerque Hilton and made it La Posada de Albuquerque.
Then he took on the De Vargas Hotel near the state capitol and made it the stately St. Francis Hotel.
Then it was the Sprawling Rancho Encantado guest ranch north of Santa Fe.

I have been reading letters to the editor and guest editorials about the wisdom of entering into an agreement with North American Development Group to develop the Trinity Site with Smith’s as the anchor tenant.  
I served on the committee that extended an RFP for this project to more than 80 developers.  
We chose the best five proposals on which to conduct due diligence and interview.  
The committee was a diverse group of citizens who represented Los Alamos and White Rock with varied ages, family structures and backgrounds.  
Our main objective was to maximize income for the Los Alamos Public Schools and select the best project presented to achieve this goal.  

 It’s all go for Spaceport America. According to Christine Armstrong, executive director of the Spaceport Authority, 500 people already are signed up to fly into space with Virgin Galactic, at a ticket price of $200,000 apiece. A grand visitor center is scheduled to open in 2013.  
Since the spaceport is several miles from I-25, two welcome centers will be constructed convenient to the highway, and shuttle buses will take visitors from those centers to the spaceport itself. After the current bond issues expire, the facility has a plan to be self-supporting.

It is good to read in the Los Alamos Monitor (Nov.  22-23) that environmental remediation at the Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) is starting to shift its emphasis.  
A bias for action is starting to replace the New Mexico Environment Department’s (NMED) need to study things to death.
In the first six years of the compliance order on consent, studies NMED required LANL to perform cost about $900 million and consumed more than 90 percent of the total budget for those years.   
LANL already had 35 years of study and research before the order. NMED Secretary F. David Martin and the Martinez administration have a real challenge to reverse the NMED “bring me another rock” syndrome.