By Jessica Rath

​​These days, smartphones come with powerful cameras. The more expensive ones come with up to 50 megapixels, separate zoom, wide-angle, and main cameras, and one phone even has a Leica lens. Plus, the built-in software does a lot of adjustments on the fly, so you’ll get a decent photo quite easily. Maybe that’s why the opinion persists that it doesn’t take much to come up with a great photo – I bet, even Ansel Adams heard this.
 
Well, Greg Lewandowski, Mario Manzo, and Matt Schulze, well known to readers of the Abiquiú News, have a different story to tell. They were kind enough to talk to me, and I learned an awful lot! They will be exhibiting their work at the Abiquiú Inn, with an Opening Reception on September 7, from 4 to 6 pm. Mark your calendars.
 
Isn’t it interesting? Greg is from Detroit, Mario is from Dayton, and Matt is from Hamburg/Germany, but all three met here in northern New Mexico, became friends, and quite often join up to explore the beautiful area surrounding us.
 
Here is some interesting background about the three artists and their work. They’re listed alphabetically.

“A lot of the images I do come out as if they were black and white images, which I always liked. Sometimes there's some color in the image, and that depends a lot on what's going on with the light and the atmosphere”, Greg explained. “Depending on the time of day, you can get some color. There are some wonderful photography programs, it’s like a digital dark room, where I can make all kinds of adjustments to contrast, brightness, color adjustment, and so on. So I like doing that, it's part of the whole process”. 
​
“My camera has a 720 nanometer filter. There are three or four different infrared filters you can put on your camera, and I lean more towards one that doesn't have a lot of color but has really sparkling black and white”.
 
There are a few of Greg’s infrared photos at the exhibition, but without a more detailed explanation people might think they’re too weird, he fears.
“Once people know that this is indeed an infrared photograph, they would see it differently. Then it will look interesting.  I thought, well, I just put them up and see what happens. There are very few infrared photographers that I know, and I don't know anybody else in this area”. ​

​Mario, who is 76,  originally  came from Dayton, Ohio, and moved to New Mexico in 1997 to work at Los Alamos Labs. He retired in 2012 and currently lives near Ojo Caliente, where he built his home. His passion for photography already started during his high school years and has become an important part of his retired life. He jokes that his cameras take him for a walk and guide him to wildlife, wildflowers, birds, butterflies, and other creatures.
​
But he has another interesting hobby: he flies paragliders. Just listening to him made me dizzy!  He told me about an astounding flight last Friday, in the Taos area. He was  about 14,000 feet up in the air!  And he takes pictures while way up there.

​“The next step is to illuminate the foreground. For that I use a flashlight”, Matt continues, “The foreground needs its own exposure settings. I never shine the light onto my foreground from the same position as the camera. I walk around my subject, taking several photos of the light shining from different angles to bring out the texture in my subject. I trigger my camera with a remote. And when I put them into Photoshop, I can blend them together perfectly because the camera never moved”.

Well, I’m impressed: for one final picture, Matt can spend hours, maybe days on a location, shoot lots of pictures, and then spend a couple of hours with Photoshop to put it all together. This must take a lot of patience, I guess. The many layers definitely give a sense of luminous depth that regular photos don’t have.

Matt told me more about this process: “Often, I see things like an old dilapidated car or some old farming equipment or an old ruin somewhere, and I go in the daytime to take a scouting shot of it. Next, I photograph it at night and when I start to light it out. It takes on a whole different quality”.
​
“I do a lot of daytime pictures, but certain objects look pretty ordinary and boring in the day. But you take them at night, and you start putting lights on them, and they start looking very, very interesting”.

“Last year we saw  an old farm, we drove by there on the way from somewhere else, and there was snow on the ground. We took some scouting shots in the daytime. There was an old barn, and there was some old farm equipment.
We went back there in  June, found out who owned the property and got permission to enter. I created a few fabulous shots at that old farm. There was one shot which is my favorite, it's of an old seed spreader. It almost looks like a musical instrument, farmers tow it behind a tractor, and it rolls out seeds.  It was really old”.
Look at the gorgeous shot above!

“These night images are really about the objects in the foreground and it is my intention to convey the feeling of mystery I get at night. The stars participate to fill out the black void that would otherwise occupy the top of the image”.
 
If you want to see more of his work, please visit Matt's Flickr Photo Album: there are luminous night skies, old buildings, cars, and train stations, hoodoos at Bisti Wilderness, and other gorgeous photos.
 
Matt and Greg often go on photography trips together. They met at the Community College in Santa Fe, when they both took a class there – about photography, of course. Mario sometimes joins as well.

I was so impressed when I talked to them, each one with a unique and unusual technique. Infrared photography. Taking pictures while paragliding. Astrophotography.  Once again, Abuquiú unites stellar artists from different parts of the U,S., even from a different continent. A warm Thank You to Greg, Mario, and Matt for granting me these interesting interviews. Don’t miss your chance to meet them in person at the Abiquiú Inn on September 7!

Cultivating Growth over Expansion
My thoughts about the Tres Semillas Land Sale
By Andrew Furse

“‘To always be doing something, to move, to change—this is what enjoys prestige, as against stability, which is often synonymous with inaction.’”
Luc Boltanski and Eve Chaipello

If the land is sold without any safeguards, our new-town square would be lost. 
Any money obtained from the sale, no matter how large a sum, would be trivial. 
 
Any reinvestment with that money may draw a veil over the missing piece but a hole will have opened up and that veil won’t support us for very long.
 
Most will remember what used to be and what was lost
and any reinvestment that takes control over what has grown slowly and collectively over all these years, will be rushed.
 
Busine$$ is notorious for that. 
 
And in whatever enterprise takes over, whatever new enterprise forms…
you may find poems, but no poetry. 
 
If the land is sold and safeguards aren’t in place to curb the impulses of capital investment, never mind the spiritual vacancy caused by the sale, you can expect the worst. 
 
The Northern Youth Project, Abiquiu Farmers Market, and the Frosty Cow have been on this land for years, chosen because they align with the mission of Tres Semillas. Which is to provide economic opportunity in the Abiquiu, New Mexico area.

• Tres Semillas have relied on NYP and the Farmers Market to qualify as a tax-exempt entity and claim a property tax exemption.
• Tres Semillas have relied on the Farmers Market and NYP to tend the land and maintain or improve its market value. 
• Tres Semillas have relied on these organizations to raise their own funds and create a successful charitable profile.

 
The Northern Youth Project and the Farmers Market have legitimized this organization, maintained their water rights, cleaned the acequia, policed their parking lot for the post office, pruned trees and mowed the lawn to provide a space that is welcoming and safe for all. 
 
They have relied on these entities to create the fiction that Tres Semillas is a functioning charity.
 
”Over time we realized that we were running a public park or an industrial park without the money or staff to do that.  And we had taken our eye off the ball.  It was time to reboot….” 
 
-Bernadette Gallegos. 
 
Since the creation of Tres Semillas Foundation seventeen years ago, Bernadette and Steve Gallegos have been in leadership positions on the board the entire time. 
 
Should they continue to serve on the board?
And what new direction will Tres Semillas “reboot” toward?

“Those who have written letters want us to give away our primary asset which we would otherwise use to pursue Tres Semillas’s goals.  We see no reason to give away a corporate asset.”   
 
-Peter Solmssen, Tres Semillas director

Peter has described the land as a “primary asset,” “a corporate asset.” Peter sees this as a corporate matter. The land is a pot of money for Tres Semillas.
 
The Tres Semillas Foundation has had seventeen years to pursue their charter.  That's seventeen years of reports, minutes and meetings, elections, project proposals, reports and experiments. Seventeen years in which they took their “eye off the ball” according to Bernadette Gallegos.  & four years in which they raised zero dollars.   ZERO.
 
And if the land is sold, what will they use that money for?
Something they have not yet decided or disclosed.
 
If after 17 years and in light of their recent admission that “eyes had been taken off of the ball”, what qualifies ANY of these individuals to continue with Tres Semillas?

“I’m not sure what adding new directors would accomplish.  Richard and Joseph resigned, leaving the four of us directors, which is plenty of directors for this tiny corporation.” 
-Peter Solmssen
 
Why should Tres Semillas elect more board members?

One reason would be to diversify perspectives which will help steer the organization away from making bad decisions.

Another reason to elect more board members would be to annul the optics of the current membership of Tres Semillas. 
 
It's well known that the board is made up of 2 married couples.  4 director’s in total.

To some, this is concerning.
 
But this isn’t against any law, and this information is disclosed on the registration statement filed with the attorney general.  But to always talk of, "what's in the best interest of Tres Semillas" or "we need to do what's in the best interest of Tres Semillas" makes some think that a genuine attempt at that is being made. 
 
Yearly elections, and minutes made available for the public encourages transparency and disclosure.  Elections are to be had yearly at the annual meeting “held the first Saturday of December.”
 
Diversify your board, stop the sale and if you don’t have the energy to continue, transfer the land to an organization that can.
 
Since moving toward this sale a crisis has been created, but in that wake is opportunity.   We have people from the pueblo that want to join the board.  People that have led organizations in fundraising that want to join the board.  We have people with imagination and vision and a stake in "the best interest of Tres Semillas" that want to join the board.

Dear Peter, Sarah, Berna and Steve:
 
We come together as a community to address you in your capacity as members of the board of Tres Semillas. We write to express our thoughts about the impact of your decisions on the Abiquiú community. We call upon you to reverse the sale of 4 County Road 187, to appoint new board members to Tres Semillas and to step down as board members.

• The current occupants of this land play a key role in the life of our community. The Farmer’s Market is our place to get local fruits and veggies, our de facto supermarket that lets us stay local and shop local. The Market provides access to healthy and fresh nutrition for economically marginalized members of the community by participating in the USDA SNAP Program, formally known as Food Stamps. The Market is also the central marketplace that supports local growers on their journey toward economic development. It is an incubator of innovation, a place that launches small business market vendors, a place for people to try their hand in local market economics. Market vendors see what works by engaging with a dynamic public. The vendor community gets and gives mentoring for members, as seasoned vendors that provide guidance to young vendors just starting out. The Market also serves as the central square of the town, creating a very important sense of community, a gathering place for neighbors and fellow community members to meet in a central place and connect as a collective group.

• The Northern Youth Project has provided economic development and leadership opportunities to young people in Abiquiu for 15 years! For many teens, NYP is their first job application, first interview, and first stepping stone to future jobs or college opportunities. NYP offers paid internships to teens to learn more about art and agriculture as potential career options. NYP is a truly grassroots organization, relying on the support of hundreds of volunteers, including Karl Bode, the original owner of this land. NYP teens have improved the land to benefit Tres Semillas and boost the value of the land–they have participated in the annual limpia, cleaning the Acequia del Pueblo de Abiquiu with other parciantes. They have installed irrigation systems, and planted seeds and trees. Like the Farmers Market, they have also created a sense of community, a sanctuary space for youth to learn and thrive in a safe environment.

• The Frosty Cow is a long-standing tradition, an institution in our community that sits at the center of Abiquiú. Like NYP, this business promotes the economic development of our young people, paying for their training to get a food handler’s permit and showing them how to run a business. Like the Farmer’s Market, the Frosty Cow is part of the town square, serving as the place that refreshes us and keeps us cool.

• The land at 4 County Road 187 is uniquely well-situated for the Northern Youth Project and Farmer’s Market. NYP needs irrigated land and land that gives teens and their families easy access. The Farmer’s Market needs enough space for vendors to show their produce and adequate parking for a significant fraction of the community to be able to attend. While these non-profit organizations and the Frosty Cow have succeeded and are part of the heart of our community, neither are in a position to purchase the land at a cost of $610,000. These organizations will not be able to replicate their role as part of the beating heart of the community in other less central and less ideal locations.

• Tres Semillas’ chief legacy has been to be a key player in the emergence of these organizations as part of Tres Semillas' economic development mission. In this regard, Tres Semillas has succeeded at the mission that it set for itself in its application to the IRS: supporting economic development by developing markets, supplying skills training and creating the “cohesion” that will “entice others to become part of the communal process.” Although Tres Semillas has considered or tried many different other types of programming relating to economic development, none of those have succeeded as well as the activities that Tres Semillas has undertaken to support the organizations that are currently on the land.

• The community stands ready to take the reins of this community legacy to usher the land into its next chapter. We are thankful to you, the current board, even as your connection to the community has changed. Two of you are cherished former neighbors who have recently moved away from our community. The remaining board members are in the process of leaving the community. For all four members, your connection to the long-term future of the community, to its youth and  its sense of community, to its long-term economic well-being, is not as strong as it once was. The time has come to pass the reins of the organization to others who remain invested in the community’s long-term future. As recent events on the national stage have made clear, sometimes the most important decision leaders can make is knowing when the time has come to step down.

• Acknowledging the important legacy of Tres Semillas activities to date, and with deepest respect and gratitude for the role that current board members have played, in strongest terms, we call on Tres Semillas to allow current members of the community who are deeply invested in the area’s future to take the reins from here, to decide the future of 4 County Road 187.  We call on Tres Semillas to reverse the decision to sell and to appoint all new board members for the Tres Semillas board.

• Alternatively, we call on Tres Semillas to transfer the land to Luciente with guidance to Luciente about the precise nature of the economic development objectives that the board wishes to pursue. At the very least, we call on Tres Semillas to add new board members from existing members of the community, enabling them to participate in decisions that will affect the community long after you are gone.

Show your support for stopping the sale and keeping the land for the community by clicking the button below to sign the online petition.  

Note: If you signed the petition at the 08/27/24 farmers market, please do not sign the online petition.  Join the 98 others that have signed.
Thank You
 

Tenors in cowboy hats, y'all.
​By Zach Hively

Every now and again, you get the calming reassurance you need that, in this big ol’ world of ours, filled with billions of people, I really DO have main character energy.

Or, as I’ve decided those of us in the opera business will now call it, title role energy.

Because this is how it normally goes for us writers: we sit at home, and we jot down our little pieces, and sometimes one or both of our parents actually reads one of them. And then someone asks us why we even bother because AI will surely put us out of a job, and then we laugh, because THIS is when someone finally decides to call what we do a “job.”
​
But this is not how it goes for me.

For me, it goes like this: I write a piece about attending the Santa Fe Opera, which is the opera house with the most title role energy in Santa Fe. I send it into the world, and then I forget about it, because it does not do to dwell on past triumphs. But then, the Santa Fe Opera shows greater technical aptitude than your standard nonprofit organization, because they clearly know how to use Google or literally any other internet reading tool to find stories written about itself. (We’ve all Googled ourselves. Don’t pretend otherwise.)

The Opera’s representatives contacted me via my editor, which is the very sentence every aspiring writer dreams of saying to justify not going to business school. They lured me back to the Opera with press tickets and perhaps a whisp of a hint of a chance of a promise of another glass of prosecco, in exchange for contemplating another story for SEO optimization purposes.
The last time I went, I saw an unforgettable classic opera, Don something or other. This time, the opera was unforgettable because no one had yet had a chance to remember it. It doesn’t get any newer than a world-debut production, and I can now forever tell other people’s children that I was there when the operagoing public saw The Righteous for its sixth showing, by which time the cast and orchestra really seemed to have worked out any possible kinks but not yet grown complacent enough to improvise.

The opera in general, and the Santa Fe Opera in specific, is known for sparing no expense. Except this time, it spared some key expenses, likely to fund all these press tickets they’re dishing out.
​
At times, as in the opening scenes of The Righteous, the production did away with set design almost entirely. They opened up the back of the stage to reveal the stunning natural landscape outside Santa Fe, New Mexico, which stood in for the stunning natural landscape of the unspecified Southwestern state in which the opera takes place. This innovation reveals the creative savvy required in selecting these operas for production, because if this one had been set (as so many operas are) in Ohio, the crew would have blown most of its budget bulldozing the mountains behind the opera house.

Now I don’t know if other creative choices were based in any way on how many opera resources had to be earmarked for the prosecco for authors and their guests. Perhaps including non-stereotypical elements in the production saves dough at the opera warehouse. I don’t even know what a soprano is, or which of the Three Tenors I might have seen, let alone how staging decisions work.

But I do know that this opera subverted what I, now a professional opera writer, expect from an opera. For starters, I did not know that an opera’s chronology was allowed to overlap with my own lifetime. The Righteous is set from 1979 to 1991, following the career of an enthusiastic young preacher who gets pressured into running for governor; in the words I scribbled in my notebook in the dark, which I can barely read, it looks like one character remarks, “Like any good politician, he says he doesn’t want to run.”

David, the minister, would have been the title role if this opera had been named Righteous David, which it was not. Yet he still carries big-time title role energy.

He turns out to be like any other Typical Man; he breaks the heart of his best friend Jonathan, he cheats on his wife Michele with his parishioner Sheila, and he does, with these qualifications, become governor.

At a more typical opera, I would have relied on subtitles to decipher these plot points, as well as the emotions in the performers’ voices evoking the nuances of character development. But this—this opera was in English, which proved to me that anyone, with any lack of high culture in their background, can go to the opera and understand from the get-go that they can’t decipher opera singers no matter what language they use.

That’s not entirely fair. There were some times I could absolutely understand what the performers were singing, because in these times I could read the subtitles faster than they could sing. And they used words in ways I did not expect operas were allowed to use them. One line, as I wrote it in the dark, said: “He can’t tell his own ass from a manhole cover.”

If ever a teacher wishes to get high school students interested in the opera, I might suggest studying dialogue like this.

The themes in the opera were really what defied my expectations, though; it touched on matters that felt much more relevant and in tune with today than the things I tend to think belong in operas, things such as horned Viking women and another one of those Three Tenors.

This opera, for example, had late 1970s wood paneling and brickwork in its on-stage church offices, a look that had not yet been renovated into oblivion by the time I was entering my first office buildings in the real world. It had functioning TVs. It had discussions of oil being the future of our economy, emotional revelations of domestic abuse, throughlines of the interwoven “separation” of church and state, characters struggling to express sexual non-conformity, racism shaping public policy, and men in cowboy hats.
The Righteous didn’t have a lot of clear resolutions to these very real, very contemporary issues. But it made me ask more questions. Questions about why this story set in the 1980s matters today. Questions about what actually belongs in the theater. Questions about how we can break out of traditional operatic roles and tropes to see a greater swath of humanity interpreted and presented on stage.
I wonder now—and why not—if absolutely anything is fair game at the opera. I mean, they let ME in the door, me and all my undeniable title role energy. This might be the great power and gift of operas like The Righteous: if I belong at the opera, everyone else deserves to see themselves and their concerns represented, too.
Stay tuned for the next time Opera Man returns to the opera, presuming the opera hasn’t

​By Trip Jennings, New Mexico In Depth
​This story was originally published by New Mexico In Depth

This column was written for El Rito Media, which owns newspapers in Española, Artesia, Alamogordo, Carlsbad and Ruidoso.

“Don’t believe half of what you see and none of what you hear.”

Those lyrics come near the end of the sixth song, Last Great American Whale, on Lou Reed’s 1989 classic album, New York.
​
I was reminded of these lyrics recently as I observed several friends on both sides of this year’s presidential election reposting photoshopped or Artificial Intelligence-distorted images and misleading or false memes. 

Accompanying the images usually were accusatory or angry words. 
I’m not advocating for anyone to abide by Reed’s command to disbelieve half of what they see and none of what they hear so much as reminding myself and everyone else to take a second, or better, however long you need, before believing anything you see or hear in this age of rage posting and AI. 

Especially over the next few months as the United States picks a chief executive.

We live in a world where our need for certainty or to score points to win inconsequential political spats — especially given the urgency surrounding this year’s presidential election — undermines the arduous, sometimes unsatisfying search for the truth. 

Perhaps, even more importantly, instantaneous posting or reposting frays at relationships and the communal bonds that are necessary for any healthy society. 

It’s no secret that stopping and thinking is much more difficult than reacting. 

The great satirist Jonathan Swift recognized this particular human weakness nearly three centuries ago when information moved at a much slower pace, measured in days, weeks or months. 

“Falsehood flies, and truth comes limping after it, so that when men come to be undeceived, it is too late; the jest is over, and the tale hath had its effect:”

It was ancient wisdom by the time Swift got around to making his observation. The great stoic Roman philosopher Seneca, who lived nearly 2,000 years ago, counseled that it was better to walk around the block before reacting while angry. 

These days, gossip, lies and falsehoods fly nearly instantly, much faster than when Swift or Seneca were alive.  Combine that reality with another well-known hack of human psychology — if you repeat something enough, even a lie, a substantial portion of people who see or hear it will believe it’s true without questioning how they know it to be true — and you’ve got a ready-made recipe for disaster.  (Political campaigners and marketers have exploited this hack for more than a century to sell people candidates, party platforms and consumer goods.) 

Together, these hacks of human psychology make it all the more challenging to be the thoughtful, deliberate person the founding generation hoped for as they set up the institutions we’ve inherited more than two centuries later. 

While I do not hold myself up as a model of discernment, I have spent decades as a journalist and one skillset a reporter has to learn is how to assess the value of the information he or she comes into contact with. 

Here is some advice I’ve found helpful over the years:
First, there’s the humorous but valuable instruction “If your mother says she loves you, check it out.”

This is not a disparagement of mothers everywhere so much as a reminder to journalists to always document what they are told. The same goes for people on the internet or social media. Just because a site says something, that doesn’t make it true. Especially if you happen to believe what they’re saying. 

It’s always helpful to question your assumptions, particularly about how the world works. Intellectual humility is a powerful invitation to learn. It’s one of the most difficult things journalists are asked to do, but good journalists do it, with varying degrees of success. 

Next, check the source of the information you are passing along. You can do this by searching to see if it’s been verified by reputable media sources. (I mostly rely on newspapers for my information, but I realize not everyone can afford several digital newspaper subscriptions. A simple search, however, often can reveal the source of the information and whether the information has been vetted and is good or whether it’s unverified and merely opinion or worse, misinformation or disinformation.) 

If you track down the information to a particular website, check it to see if it has an about us page. If it doesn’t have one, that always makes me leery.  Because you don’t know who or what interests are behind it. If it does have an about us page, check it out to see where the outlet’s funding or capital comes from and who their staff are and what their backgrounds are. 

One additional tidbit: Just because an outlet is identified as conservative or liberal doesn’t mean the news it produces comes with a conservative or liberal slant. Usually, an outlet — and I mostly am talking about newspapers here — is viewed as liberal or conservative because their editorial pages lean liberal or conservative, not necessarily the newsroom, which produces the newspaper’s reported stories. At well-run newspapers, the wall separating an editorial page and its newsroom is robust. Newspapers without a robust wall are more suspect, in my opinion, than ones with robust walls. For example, there are newspapers whose editorial pages do not reflect my understanding of how the world works, but their newsrooms produce extraordinarily well-reported stories, and I trust their process. In other words, I trust their reporting process. One way to check to see how robust the wall between the editorial page and the newsroom is, is to see how often reported stories clash with the conclusions of the paper’s editorials, or at least present a picture that is more complicated than an editorial’s slant. 

I hope this helps a little. The next few months are not going to be easy for any of us. 

By Carol Bondy
 
Note:  As this article was going to press, NYP was contacted by a realtor who said that the land had listed on Monday for $610,000 though no public listing has appeared as of press time.

Abiquiu residents recently have heard through the grapevine that the owner of the property across from Bodes plans to sell the property. Currently, the property hosts the post office, the Frosty Cow (ice cream and frozen yogurt), the hair salon Studio 84, the weekly Tuesday Farmers’ Market, and the Northern Youth Project (NYP) garden (a teen program focused on agriculture, arts, community service and leadership, profiled in last week’s edition of the news). Fueling the buzz, NYP and the Market recently reported that owner Tres Semillas declined to renew their leases or licenses past the fall.
 
This centrally located 12.5 acre property was once owned by Karl Bode, of Bode’s Mercantile and General Store. Bode sold the land to Tres Semillas in early 2008. The sale included a transfer of Bode’s zoning rights: the County rezoned 6.9 acres for small-scale commercial use, and required other parts of the land to remain open space. The acre of irrigated land where NYP is located is zoned to remain free of commercial use.
 
Tres Semillas was founded back in 2007 as a public charity with a donation that came from Helen Hunt, a former owner of El Sueño de Corazon Ranch. The charity has been stewarded by Bernadette and Steve Gallegos, who have been on the board since the beginning. The charity’s bylaws say that its purpose is to pursue “economic development in the Abiquiu, New Mexico area.” But the history of the land’s use and state registration have reflected a broader purpose: as the state registrar described the charity’s submissions (scroll to 2009 Registration), the purpose is “development of land for community purposes including education, arts, health, economic opportunity, and other forms of community support.”
 
In an early meeting complete with whiteboards, Bernadette Gallegos engaged the community in a brainstorming session about possible uses for the land. The charity’s application for tax-exempt status noted the importance of the community’s involvement and committed to continuing to involve the public on all future planning and development. The application also proposed possible uses that included a low-income daycare or other businesses that would be started by a Women’s Cooperative. The emphasis was on “businesses that provided training and employment opportunities for the unemployed and underemployed in the area.”
 
In 2009, according to Tres Semillas Planning and Development Director W. Azul La Luz, plans were underway to create a Women’s Cooperative to run the whole project, to develop activities like the low-income daycare. In the meanwhile, Tres Semillas began to take on tenants to generate income to support the Women’s Coop and cover costs.
 
Tres Semillas inherited both the post office and the gallery Tin Moon as tenants (though Tin Moon did not survive past the sale).  Fifteen years ago, Tres Semillas welcomed the Northern Youth Project (profiled in last week’s edition of the news), providing the project with an acre of irrigated space on which Project interns learned how to grow plants and crops.
 
In 2011, Tres Semillas rented space and a portable classroom building to the Rising Moon gallery, which operated as both a local artist gallery and community gathering space for performances, lectures, movies and more.
 
More recently, in 2019, Tres Semillas provided space for the Farmers’ Market, watching as the market grew from a group of four vendors to a thriving and well-attended weekly market with more than 25 vendors. The Frosty Cow moved across the road from behind Bode’s to the property in 2021.

​To provide clear information to tenants and interested community members, Tres Semillas agreed to meet with the property’s current tenants and other interested stakeholders—a group of about seventeen--on July 26th. Peter Solmssen, a Tres Semillas board member and the group’s spokesperson for the occasion, joined the group via Zoom.
 
Solmssen told the group that after much deliberation, Tres Semillas had decided to sell the land. The charity was pivoting to “move in a direction more closely aligned with the [charity’s] charter.” In the board’s view, Tres Semillas was not owning the land well—the land was not covering its costs, and the land ownership model was "slowly going broke.” Solmssen said that there had been management challenges, and that fundraising had been variable.
 
A review of Tres Semillas 990 forms filed with the state (scroll to Financials in link) reveals that since the organization’s founding fifteen years ago, expenses exceeded revenues in three years: 2018 (revenues $11,568 expenses $22,137); 2013 (revenues $28,695 expenses $43,523) and 2011 (revenues $23,692 expenses $26,941). In the other eleven years, revenues exceeded expenses, in four years by $10,000 or more, and in one of those years by $20,000.
 
When contributions are added to income, Tres Semillas available funds appeared to exceed expenses by even more. In 2014, contributions were at a high of $57,815. Including contributions for each year, expenses exceed contributions plus income in only one year, 2018. For the last four years, charitable contributions to the charity have been at zero. Solmssen stated at the meeting that a great deal of work had been done over the years by volunteers, primarily board members Berna and Steve Gallegos.
 
When asked about these financial statements, Solmssen responded, “Tres Semillas did not operate in the red every year. It doesn't mean things were going well.” Solmssen mentioned the need for reserves for obligations like a roof repair for the Post Office. “It was responsible cash management. Tres Semillas had ongoing obligations that had to be funded.” 
 
At the July group meeting, in addition to the problem of going broke, Solmssen also emphasized that the land ownership and charitable activities were not meeting the organization’s original charter: economic development to benefit people who were in economic need, according to Solmssen. Despite many attempts to find an economic development strategy that was “viable, sustainable and effective,” the charity’s model had failed, he said Instead, Tres Semillas was now “running a public park with private resources.” (According to resident David Shavor, in 2012, Tres Semillas in fact authorized a committee to do some work towards creating a public park on the property.)

Representatives from NYP, the Farmer’s Market and the Frosty Cow pointed out their contributions to the area’s economic development. NYP noted that the organization had raised over $750,000 in donations and grant funding (scroll to Financials in the link), money that had stayed in the community to develop teen skills in agricultural development.  The Farmer’s Market estimated that the market was doing $140,000 per season in business for local vendors. Director Andrew Furse noted that the market simultaneously provided under-resourced families with access to healthy nutrition and kept the money in the community to support local vendors rather than national chains. The Frosty Cow also told Solmssen that the business employed six to nine kids each season, paying for their education to get a food handler’s permit and training them in the running of the business.
 
Solmssen congratulated these organizations but did not appear to concede that these activities counted as economic development under the charter. However, under New Mexico law, the organization’s ability to claim a property tax exemption for the land appears to require that the property’s “primary and substantial use” be for charitable purposes. No tenants other than NYP and the Farmers’ Market appear to be currently engaged in such use.
 
Asked about the possibility that the charity was closing, Solmssen said that it had not yet decided to shutter—that call would depend on how the board decided to use the money from the land sale. Solmssen acknowledged that Tres Semillas was actively considering donating the money to the Los Alamos National Lab Foundation scholarship program, which serves seven northern counties. Speaking for himself and not the whole board, Solmssen expressed concern, saying that the sale had to benefit the Abiquiu community as per the original charter. (Federal and state law appear to require that a non-profit selling assets to a for-profit entity must use the proceeds of the sale, directly and immediately, in furtherance of the charity’s tax-exempt purposes to benefit the “same class of beneficiaries.”)
 
Solmssen appeared to rule out the board’s reconsidering the decision to sell. He also described as unlikely the option of recruiting new board members to take over from the current board, given the board’s decision to sell the land.
 
Solmssen discussed a preliminary sale price of $500,000 but said the actual price would depend on real estate expert advice. Solmssen appeared open to NYP purchasing their land, or a purchase by other stakeholders, but said it depended on the effect of those on the overall price of the land. Asked whether the board would just sell to the highest bidder, Solmssen said that the board’s sense was that it wanted to consider the community’s best interest when choosing a buyer. Solmssen, who is a retired corporate governance lawyer, expressed his own view that fiduciary law would allow the board to do that, though he noted his view of the law was likely in the minority in the legal community. In terms of the timing of a sale, Solmssen said the group was not in a hurry but had been working with a realtor to prepare for the sale. 
 
Since the meeting, the Farmers’ Market leadership has begun to call on members of the public to contact Tres Semillas, (and send a copy of the letter to  abiquiufarmersmarket@gmail.com), asking the charity to reverse the decision to sell and to appoint new board members.   Other community members have suggested that Luciente, another local non-profit focused on community development, serve as a sponsoring organization to which Tres Semillas can transfer the land to pursue the economic development objective. Still others have discussed locating angel investors to purchase the land and forming a community land trust.

With reporting by Daria Roithmayr