I am writing today to announce the closure of the New Mexico Independent. After three and a half years of operation in New Mexico, the board of the American Independent News Network, has decided to shift publication of its news…
While environmental activists played their part yesterday during demonstrations at the capitol building, going so far as to dress up as solar panels and to sing the tune of “You Are My Sunshine,” their counterparts, the anti-cap-and-trade contingency who has…
Roughly one quarter of University of New Mexico students are unimpressed with the state’s flagship public school, according to a survey that questioned college students about their higher education experiences.
Republican Jon Barela, vying to unseat Freshman Democratic Rep. Martin Heinrich, has often said that government spending isn’t a solution to stimulating the economy and that if elected he’d end “wasteful government spending.” In yesterday’s Albuquerque Journal, he was quoted saying it’s risk-takers that lead to economic growth, not government incentives. Yet Barela’s own company—Cerelink—has benefited significantly from taxpayer cash assistance, through New Mexico’s film tax rebate program and from high speed computing infrastructure owned by the public.
A cornerstone of Gov. Bill Richardson’s economic development agenda, the film rebate program provides direct cash payments to cover up to 25 percent of film production costs in New Mexico.
Dreamworks, a film production company based in Los Angeles, contracted with Cerelink this year to do rendering on movies including Shrek Forever After and How to Train Your Dragon.
Cerelink is able to provide services to Dreamworks through a partnership with the University of New Mexico, the New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology, New Mexico State University, New Mexico Council for Higher Education Computing Communication Services and the New Mexico State Agency of IT. And the state’s rebates and incentives are an important part of that, Dreamworks Chief Technology Officer Ed Leonard said during a recent trip to Albuquerque:
“We like this as a cost effective way of rendering,” Leonard said. “There’s a lot of benefit for bringing it into New Mexico. Cost of power is a lot cheaper here. The state rebates and incentives, all of that adds up to Cerelink being able to offer something that is quite a valuable proposition to us.”
Cerelink would like more film business to come to the state, recently promoting the state’s cash assistance program in a press release.
“…New Mexico film production rebates and incentives offer a cost effective solution to the growing demand of CGI production for motion pictures,” the Cerelink press release stated.
The company also noted the high speed computing capability it is able to deliver to private industry due to its partnerships with taxpayer-funded institutions.
“… Cerelink can provide its customers with on-demand access to high performance computing (HPC) services on world class supercomputing infrastructure, thanks to our collaboration with the New Mexico Computing Applications Center and other technology partners,” the company stated.
Ultimately, the company hopes such work with the film industry will lead to growth.
“We forecast growing our technical capacity by 20 times by the end of 2011 – this will create one of the largest cloud computing arrays for motion picture production in the world,” said James Ellington, CEO of Cerelink, in the press release.
Ellington also told the New Mexico Business Weekly, in an article about the Dreamworks collaboration, that the company of 10 employees plans to grow to 100 by 2013.
Screen capture of Cerelink webpage describing film rebate program.
Barela is silent on how state’s cash assistance to his company differs from other government spending
Cerelink was started by Barela and other former Intel Managers in 2005. While the company website doesn’t list Barela as a manager, he confirmed to The Independent that he is a founder and owner of the company. Despite his own stated positions about government spending, Barela would not comment on the film rebate program that benefits Cerelink, or whether it should be reduced in light of New Mexico’s ongoing state budget deficit.
Barela did not respond to The Independent’s questions about the program, including how it’s different, in theory, from the federal economic development spending he criticizes.
Here are the questions we asked Barela last Thursday, which haven’t been answered despite multiple follow-up phone calls:
1. Does Jon think the film rebate program is beneficial to New Mexico? Does he think the size of the rebate program should be reduced?2. In his comments to me, he said it’s entrepreneurs and businesses that are going to lead the country out of the recession, not government, and he’s taken aim at government spending that has as a goal the stimulation of the economy. This seems at odds with his company’s benefit from the state’s cash film rebates and projected growth at least in part due to those rebates as well as partnership with public institutions like the NMCAC. How would he respond? Is it at odds?
