Santa Fe City and County Advisory Council on Food Policy

Agenda Regular Meeting of the Santa Fe City and County Advisory Council on Food Policy May 8, 2025 at 9:00 AM Santa Fe Farmers’ Market, 1607 Paseo De Peralta, Santa Fe and on Zoom 1. Call to Order 9:03am 2. Roll Call Nate Crail - Present Maria Sanchez-Tucker - Present Eric Renz-Whitmore - Present David Sundberg - Present Susan Perry - Present Emigdio Ballon - Excused Tejinder Ciano - Not excused Said Assali - Not excused Jasmine Meyer - Excused Peter Ives – Present Sergio Mata-Cisneros - Not excused We do have a quorem Staff Pam Roy Helen Henry Guests: Michelle Stizza, Santa Fe County Extension Office Shana Woodworth - Cooking with Kids Coy Maienza, Santa Fe County James Martinez, Santa Fe County Senior Service Program Hvtce Miller, Santa Fe County Manager’s Office 3. Approval of Agenda a. May 8, 2025. b. Prioritization and Agenda Order. Vote to approve the agenda as is. David moved Sue seconded All approved 4. Approval of Minutes a. Minutes of April 10, 2025. Vote to approve the notes as is. Sue moved David seconded All approved 5. Communications from the Floor Michelle Stizza: The County has a Seed to Supper program which is a six week beginning gardening program that teaches people beginning gardening skills. This is run through ICANN and the Master Gardener program. 6. Initiatives and Actions a. Legislative Follow-up - Hvtce Miller, Santa Fe County, Intergovernmental Outreach Coordinator, Pam Roy, Sergio Mata Cisneros, and group. Hvtce: We need to be aware of the funding that did not make it into the budget. Pam went over the line items that are in the state’s approved budget: ●​ The WIC and Senior Farmers Market Nutrition Program is a federal program, but the state also put in $1M. Veronica Griego leads this program which provides opportunities for seniors and women and children who are on the WIC program to be able to go to farmers markets to buy local produce. They also started a box program for seniors to get produce out to areas in the state where there are no farmers’ markets. ●​ $430,000 for the New Mexico Approved Supplier Program at the Department of Ag is essential to the underpinnings of getting farmers, the food safety trainings and things that they need so that they can sell into public institutions ●​ $5 million for Ag Water Resilience Program, which is now going to New Mexico State University (NMSU). (Originally supposed to be in NMDA’s budget but the governor line item vetoed the words “New Mexico Department of Agriculture” so it will be at New Mexico State University. ●​ $2 million for the Healthy Food Financing Initiative at the Economic Development Department. They get close to $7 million in requests for funding for things like grocery store infrastructure in rural and underserved communities, refrigerated trucking for locally produced foods. There's also federal funding coming from the Healthy Food Financing Initiative that's now branded as “New Mexico Food Pathways.” ●​ $41 million fo Healthy Universal School Meals program which is in statute so it's a requirement. And in addition to that. Is the $7.8 millio $7.848 million for the Healthy Universal School Meals for fiscal year 2025 shortfall and $3.054 million for the Healthy Universal School Meals prior year shortfall, then $5 million towards the program into this coming fiscal year starting July 1st.  ●​ $30 million towards food, emergency food assistance programs, spread over three years (10 million for each year), using the TPEF formula to divide it among the five food banks. ●​ Grants for assistance for meat processing facilities. We're also hoping that the state does get the state meat processing program in place in the next year which would mean that we would have state inspection. ●​ Veterinary loan program so we can keep veterinarians in the state. ●​ $1 million dollars towards early childhood education scratch cooking. They are also taking out of their childhood education fund a large part of funding that goes towards a lot of different things, such as $300,000 so that Early childhood programs can purchase locally grown fruits and vegetables and also proteins from our ranchers. ●​ Sergio: $4.7 for the Food is Medicine program, each year for three years. The federal government each year matches 16 million, which makes it 21 million for the following three years, and then that adds up to a total of $64 million for the program. This will go to tailored meals and tailored grocery boxes to women who are pregnant and seniors who are homebound. Food Depot is working with the Health Care Authority (HCA) to hopefully launch that program this coming summer, but there's a long process to become vendors of HCA and there are other complications to work through. ●​ Pam: SM19 NM Meat, Cheese and Produce in Schools is a memorial that was passed which was brought by four senators in an effort to focus on getting more proteins into school meal programs and specifically to K through 12. The NM Department of Agriculture and NM Department of Public Education will put together a working group to focus on this. New Mexico produced meat is already in school meals, dairy is a little harder to track. Action: Pam will find out more about how the Water Resilience Program at NM State University will be structured. Pam: Some things that we didn't cross the finish line in the way we were hoping for. One was to get $2.3 million additional funding for New Mexico Grown for School Meals. To compensate, $2 million will be taken out of the $41M for Universal Healthy School Meals and $1.5 million for the senior centers. b. Federal Farm Bill and other Federal Updates-group round-robin. Federal administration is really focusing on a lot of cuts - See (link) Senator Lujan asked us a couple weeks ago if we would provide him, along with the rest of our New Mexico delegation, with a deeper understanding of who's benefiting from both federal and state programs, in the sense of funding. The task is to determine how many people are benefiting from federal programs and how that could affect New Mexico in terms of what the state would have to pick up to make up the difference. Sergio: There is a process going on now called the “budget reconciliation” which is a maneuver where you only need simple majorities in both the House and the Senate to pass something And there's a big push to get some titles of the farm bill in there, especially from big ag, which would mean that there would be no Farm Bill this coming fall. So a lot of ad groups are opposing that because that means that there will be no farm bill. That is something that we need to watch. Cuts will likely be happening to all the nutrition programs, which will have a huge effect. If they raise the threshold on SNAP eligibility and make it more difficult for people to access these and other nutrition programs then we will see the complete elimination of Healthy Universal School Meals in the state of New Mexico because it will cost the state too much money to provide that. Peter: What I am interested in doing is making sure that we are performing our role as an advisory council to the governing body of the city and the Board of County Commissioners on recommendations to try and do what we need to do in our communities. We need to hold this conversation Hvtce: They're having budget hearings at Santa Fe County this week and next week as well. One of the items that commissioners were speaking about is not not being reactive - take a look at what are the possibilities, even if they're remote, of what's going to be cut and how that's going to affect the localities and look at how to start preparing for that in our local budgets. This group could summarize and provide the information to our local bodies. All the local governments throughout the state are working on their budgets. Maria: The city has seen some smaller cuts, and is planning for contingencies. She would like to have a dashboard of our statistics on who we're serving. Peter: It would be great if the city and county could do that and aggregate that data. Is there an interest in having a study group around understanding the implications of federal funding cuts? Yes. Action: Peter will organize this. Coy reported that there is lots of confusion about the status of their federal grant. She shared a spreadsheet that lists programs that are affected by the federal funding freeze - https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1LT0asUUTTVLutGrxc_zrnA-TJ7hrPP0N/edit?usp=sha ring&ouid=114734474735293606329&rtpof=true&sd=true Pam shared the state’s NM Food Initiative Dashboard - https://www.nmdfa.state.nm.us/dfa-dashboards/food-initiative-dashboard/ There is somewhat of a problem with the consistency of the reporting because data is captured differently in each agency. Hvcte said that he’ll share information with the state as well because they have a new interim committee looking at the federal cuts and how that would affect the state. Pam mentioned the Town Hall for Farmers and Ranchers on the federal funding freezes on May 6. There will be a summary of this meeting. Action: Share out this information and subsequent info with the Council. Farm to Table has been tapped to provide a person who will do every other week roundtable conversations with farmers, ranchers, food system managers and then report out to our delegation and create a report which will help create a consistency with what's happening and what's not happening and be able to provide that publicly. Pam will report out on this as it unfolds. Pam talked about scheduling with the city and the county at some point when it's appropriate to report to the City Council and the County Commission and to strategize about how we can work together to address some of the issues that are coming up including issues around water use. Action: Maria will talk to Counselors Romero Wirth and Jamie Cassett, who've been champions and ask them about how we can best communicate to them, what they suggest for us and to remind them that we are a resource for them. Hvtce will be able to schedule us to present to the County when we are ready. They meet monthly. Sometime this summer would be a great time to present. Sue shared that we want to work with the City Council and County Commission to schedule several presentations throughout the year. Hvtce said he can help get us on an agenda. He needs a two week notice to do so. 7. Presentations a. Tour of Santa Fe Teen Center-Maria Sanchez-Tucker. (postponed) 8. Staff Communications none 9. Items from the Council none ​ a. Member check-in. Eric: The Santa Fe Small Business Technical Assistance Program is coming online and there are some key meetings at the end of this month and phasing in as almost a soft launch throughout June. This is a program they're doing with ARPA funding and in partnership with NMSU's Arrowhead Center. Maria: The Teen Center is doing a program where they're growing vegetables and plants. 10. Matters from the Committee None 11. Items from the Chair a. New Member Update.  Shana’s application is in process. Coy will have to go through the application/approval process. b. Next Meeting: June 12, 2025 - Vote for Hybrid. Vote to have an in-person meeting only at the Teen Center on June 12. Action: Maria will book this and get this into the record. David moved Sue seconded All approved c. Topics for future presentations. Send an email to Sue if there are things that you want to hear about. Pam suggested a tour of farms and facilities in the County that we could also invite Commissioners and Councilors to as well. Hvtce can facilitate this. 12. Next Meeting: a. Thursday, June 12, 2025. 13. Adjourn 10:18am These notes were taken contemporaneously and may contain errors and omissions. Signed by ___________________________ Helen Henry. I verify that these notes have been approved by a quorum of members of the Santa Fe Food Policy Council. Signed by Susan Perry, Co-chair or, Peter Ives, Co-chair _____________________________________________________