Gross receipts tax revenues are still down. Unemployment is still up. Household budgets are still tight.

As economic worries grip voters' attention, candidates for mayor in Santa Fe's Tuesday election have made sure to offer ideas about how local government might help the area recover more quickly from the effects of a global recession.

Incumbent Mayor David Coss talks about accessing state and federal grants and using private partners in specific employment sectors to come up with "4,000 jobs in 4 years."

If she's elected mayor, former city manager and attorney Asenath Kepler says she will first scrutinize the city's spending priorities with any eye toward more efficiency, then aggressively recruit business that will locate here.

City Councilor Miguel Chavez, meanwhile, emphasizes the city's tourism and cottage arts-and-crafts industries in his campaign for the mayor's seat.

With an unemployment rate resting at just over 7 percent, the Santa Fe region lost more than 5 percent of its jobs over the last year, or about 3,500 full-time positions, according to the state Department of Workforce Solutions.

But political solutions won't mean a quick rebound at this point, said Larry Waldman, senior economist at The University of New Mexico Bureau of Business and Economic Research. Current projections, he said, indicate the soonest that Santa Fe's job market might return to 2008 levels is the middle of 2012.

"Really, it's just going to be a time of severe distress and pain," Waldman said, "and there's not a lot that can be done, unfortunately."

Recruitment of a major private-sector employer could change the picture, he said, but that's a long shot.

"It's a very competitive game to get a firm with more than a few jobs to come and locate in your state. It's a very slow and difficult process, recruitment," he said. Although Hewlett-Packard opened a 1,500-worker call center in December in Rio Rancho, he noted, Santa Fe is not as prime a location for such a large operation.

Aspiring to recover

Coss, a retired government worker and former city councilor elected to his first term as mayor four years ago, has not always had luck with putting timelines on his broad visions. In 2007, he announced his "five-year plan to end homelessness."

Although he notes that two years remain before that deadline, Coss admits the effort hasn't gone as planned, including voter rejection of a tax on sales of expensive real estate that was intended to fund some initiatives.

"We didn't know the economy was going to collapse when we wrote the five-year plan," he said in an interview. "And despite that, we've got some great housing programs. We are getting more people in housing ... If we aspire to just manage the situation, it's not as inspiring as saying, 'We are going to fix it.' But the flip side of that is then people come back and say, 'You didn't fix it.' "

The mayor said he's more optimistic about reaching the goals of his re-election campaign's "blueprint for the economy."

Part of his plan — which he says will require about $320 million in investments to provide jobs in construction, education, film and heath sectors — depends on help from federal economic-stimulus cash.

The city has already received more than $8 million in such temporary national-government subsidies, including some money it is using to pay police officers, according to figures provided by City Manager Robert Romero. He said the city is also "in line" for another $6 million or more, including money promised to repay bonds for the city's purchase of the College of Santa Fe campus.

When it comes to confirming private sector expectations for growth in employment, few details are available. Asked how many jobs they expect next year at the college, private operator Laureate Education Inc. did not respond to media inquires. Meanwhile, at Christus St. Vincent Regional Medical Center, which employs nearly 2,000 people, CEO Alex Valdez anticipates "some growth," including 19 new jobs in a sports medicine program that will be launched soon.

"We need a continued emphasis not just on new job creation," Valdez said, "but on retaining as many jobs as we can here in our community."

Looking for inspiration

As they try to give voters a reason to replace Coss, challengers Kepler and Chavez have both invoked the name of the Angelou Economics plan adopted by the City Council in 2004.

Kepler, who also has a background in banking and insurance work, argued in a campaign news release this winter that the city has not implemented the "sensible approach for attaining economic sustainability" in the plan prepared by Angelou Economics of Austin, Texas.

"If this plan had been led by this mayor and administration, our local economy would have already been in a stronger economic position prior to the onset of the recession. We would be faring better right now and more Santa Feans would be employed instead of worrying if there is a job — any job — in the near future," she wrote.

While Coss says City Hall has been using the plan, he also notes in a flyer mailed to voters that he wants to review the city's economic development spending and make sure it is "delivering results."

The city issued another contract to update the Angelou plan and set goals for the near future in 2008. Since then, contracts show that more than $1 million has been funneled into businesses, youth training, housing help and other economic development initiatives prescribed in the long-range plan.

Challenger solutions

Kepler has said she will work on attracting "new, environmentally compatible businesses to grow the economy."

In addition to sending liaisons to other states, including California, Kepler said she would invite interested businesspeople to Santa Fe to take advantage of current state tax incentives and to investigate "our own personal incentives that we could provide as a municipality."

She has advocated changes to the city's affordable-housing code, which requires developers to build and sell houses at certain prices to income-qualified buyers, and wants the city to buy more homes on which lenders have foreclosed.

After he became mayor, Coss made the former Economic Development Department a division-level operation under another department. Kepler, who is supported by former city department director Lynette Montoya (married to Kepler's campaign manager, Jim Valdez), has said she will restore it to department status.

For Chavez, solutions to Santa Fe's economic problems aren't going to be found necessarily in a new innovation, but in better marketing of the region's traditional strengths and promoting "culture and heritage tourism."

Chavez, a self-employed traditional woodworker, has long been an advocate of supporting local arts and crafts. During his tenure as a councilor, he succeeded in devoting some city capital improvements money to a program aimed at creating an arts hub on the redeveloped Santa Fe Railyard. After purse strings tightened and other political hurdles got in the way, that project was dead in the water by the end of 2008.

In the meantime, Chavez has continued to stress the thought that the Railyard is a community gathering space and its policies should do more to provide craft vendors an appropriate venue.

Local emphasis

All three mayoral candidates have talked about the importance of "buy-local initiatives" that would help increase city revenues from gross receipts taxes. Since those revenues make up about three-fourths of the city's operating funds, the more money spent here, the better the city coffers.

Local business owners say they want leadership from the mayor's office when it comes to the city's decisions on discretionary spending.

"I think right now small business is crying and screaming in Santa Fe," said John King, a co-owner of Paper Tiger Printing, who pointed to vacant Plaza-area commercial properties as a huge red flag.

"The community of Santa Fe is super business-friendly," King said. "I think the community here really tries to support the local business, and the local businesses try to support the community."

The disconnect, he said, is that government spending on such things as printing, from small pamphlets to large directories, often lands in Albuquerque or even out-of state, which means jobs and tax revenue land there, too.

"Instead of looking outside to bring another business in, really look at the businesses that are already here," he said. "What can we do to advance these businesses?"

Former Mayor Sam Pick said he'd like to see Santa Fe return to a mission that he said helped put people to work during his tenure at City Hall: courting wealthy tourists.

"What you want to do is be very exclusive, get the rich people in here, and have them spend money," Pick said in a recent interview. "That's how you do it. ... We are a Vail, not a Bernalillo. You promote the things that people will come in here to see — the Native Americans under the portal at the Palace of the Governors, the good art, the good restaurants."

Pick, appointed mayor in 1978 and elected to two terms starting in 1986, said that strategy will put people back to work in the service industries and stimulate the construction industry. He added, however, that the city "can't be all things to all people."

Contact Julie Ann Grimm at 986-3017 or jgrimm@sfnewmexican.com.