brigette-russellFor months now I’ve been reading letters to the editor in the Santa Fe New Mexican about whether we ought to have grass on Santa Fe’s historic plaza. 

For every letter in favor of keeping the grass, there are several arguing vigorously for doing away with it, mainly because the city spends $20,000 a year putting down new sod on the plaza.  The fiscal argument is often buttressed by the point that lush green lawns are not native Santa Fe flora, and our plaza should look more like it did in the olden days.

Okay, so Don Diego de Vargas and his men hitched their horses and burros in a dusty and lawnless plaza.   Manicured grass isn’t historically correct.  It isn’t xeriscape.   It may be green, but it isn’t green. But let’s face facts.  It is very, very tourist-friendly.

Every spring when that $20,000 load of sod gets planted, the plaza gets an amazing instant facelift.  It really is a beautiful public place in summer, and summer is when the tourists come to Santa Fe to stroll around our beautifully grassy plaza spend their money in our hotels, stores and restaurants.

But it costs twenty thousand dollars.  For grass.  Yes, it does. But what does the salary of even a single city employee cost? A lot more than $20,000. And how many city employees are there?

That $20,000 is also a microscopic fragment of the tax revenue that the city earns from the sales tax and lodgers tax paid by tourists who come here, in part, because it’s such a pretty and picturesque vacation spot.

I’m not saying Santa Fe wouldn’t be an appealing tourist destination even with a dirt plaza, or a fully paved plaza.  But would it be as appealing? Might it be, say, $20,000 less appealing?

Last December, the Santa Fe City Council voted to spend $1 million from a lodgers’ tax reserve fund to promote the city and its new convention center in hopes of attracting more visitors. 

A million dollars.

That is $20,000 times fifty. The city could put a fresh carpet of thick, lush grass in the plaza every spring for the next fifty years for the price of this one-time media blitz.

Tourism is Santa Fe’s bread and butter.  Not only does it create tax revenue to fund the city’s operating costs, it provides the livelihoods of a great many people who live here. 

Being penny wise and skimping on the things that make Santa Fe a desirable tourist location is simply foolish, even — or especially — when tourism is down because of a troubled economy.