Archives for November 2019

 

Quiet streams flush with native trout.

World-class quail hunting among the cactus and mesquite.

Ribbons of flowy singletrack hidden among the purple silhouettes of New Mexico’s mountain ranges and high desert ridges and canyons.

It’s not hard for state recreation official Axie Navas to sell the outdoor virtues of New Mexico. She reminded state lawmakers during a meeting Thursday that the Land of Enchantment is home to a handful of national forests, more than a dozen sites managed by the National Park Service, numerous wilderness areas and dozens of state parks.

“We are a vast, wild state and we offer the types of experiences that people have come to crave and that are becoming increasingly rare. Visitors know this,” she said.

Since taking the helm of New Mexico’s new outdoor recreation office six weeks ago, Navas has traveled 3,000 miles (4,827.8 kilometers) to visit with business owners, government officials and nonprofit groups in 18 counties. The discussions have centered on the opportunities and challenges of growing the state’s outdoor recreation economy.

Navas told lawmakers the industry already contributes billions of dollars to New Mexico’s coffers and employs some 33,000 people around the state. But there’s room to grow.

She and others who attended Thursday’s meeting pointed to Western states that have been able to coordinate efforts to grow outdoor recreation through dedicated agencies or commissions. That includes Colorado, Utah and Arizona.

Now that New Mexico has its own office, Navas is focused on sharing with key industry players the well-kept secret of the state’s outdoor offerings and correcting any misconceptions.

“We can change this,” said Navas, who worked previously with Outside Magazine. “These conversations are changing especially as companies realize the lifestyle they have built their brands on is dissolving in places like the Front Range of Colorado or the Bay Area due to exorbitant real estate prices and traffic.”

New Mexico already has been successful in growing the tourism industry overall with its long-running “New Mexico True” campaign. Last year marked another record-setting year, with an estimated 37.5 million visitors spending more than $7 billion in the state. Spending has increased 29% since 2011.

Much of that has been driven by lodging and recreation, officials have said.

State Tourism Secretary Jen Paul Schroer told lawmakers growth has been steady over the last decade and that her agency is in the midst of creating a destination road map that will catalog New Mexico’s assets while identifying places where more investment can be made.

Francisco Valenzuela, director of recreation, heritage and wilderness resources for the U.S. Forest Service’s Southwest Region, said the federal agency also has to rethink the way national forests can meet visitors’ recreational needs.

He said forest managers still have a long way to go to modernize trails, camping spaces and boat ramps, but that the new outdoor recreation office can help with motivation and coordination.

“It’s like the sleeping giant is awaking in the outdoor recreation world and the question is how can we take advantage to help the citizens of the state, particularly rural citizens,” Valenzuela said.

By: Susan Montoya Bryan (Albuquerque Journal)
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Industry and legal experts say that the growing number of states legalizing marijuana is having a major impact on real estate markets, and professionals who operate in the space need to be careful. The cautionary comments came during the forum, “Marijuana Legalization: Business Headache or Opportunity?” during the recent 2019 REALTORS® Conference & Expo in San Francisco.
Fourteen states so far have approved adult use of cannabis. About 33 states and territories have some form of public legal medical marijuana.
“So why do we care?” Megan Booth, director of federal housing and commercial policy, told attendees at the forum. “Because marijuana has to be grown, processed, distributed, and used on real property. Every property type that’s out there, marijuana laws are impacting.”
The Trump administration has indicated that the federal government will not prosecute state-legal marijuana entities, Booth said during the forum. But she cautions there is still a federal law called civil asset forfeiture that allows the federal government to seize any property associated with illegal activity. “That’s something you should know if you get involved with cannabis business,” Booth said. “It is not very often used by the federal government for state-legal activities and I don’t think it is a tool the federal government will use randomly.”
NAR does not have an official policy on marijuana legalization, but it does have a policy on cannabis banking. “[Related] businesses in a state that has legal marijuana—because they remain illegal under federal law—do not have access to FDIC-insured banks,” Booth said. “This means they can’t accept credit cards and more of their businesses run in cash.” Booth said there is added liability of operating with cash-only businesses that can be exposed to added risks and security concerns than traditional entities.
“On the federal side, there is no way to minimize risk,” added Neil Kalin, assistant general counsel for the California Association of REALTORS®. “So you have to ask yourself, are you willing to live and work in a field where you are subject to federal prosecution?”
NAR lobbied for H.R. 1595, the Secure and Fair Enforcement Banking Act, which passed the House on Sept. 25. “It is apparent that the state-legal cannabis industry’s connection to other markets—including real estate—will continue to grow in the coming years,” John Smaby, immediate past NAR president, said following the House’s vote in September. “With current laws keeping the industry’s money out of America’s banking system, our nation is jeopardizing economic growth while forfeiting critical opportunities for oversight and transparency.”
By: NAR
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About 18 months ago we began working with a large local construction firm that hates servers. They hate buying them, installing them, backing them up. “It’s 2018,” the CEO said to me, “Why do I still have servers?”

Many of our customers are expressing the same sentiment. As people grow more comfortable with the cloud and embrace it for their banking, office functions, and line of business applications, they are finding ways to become completely cloud-based businesses. Some of the advantages are increased flexibility, ease of access and reduced capital expenses on IT infrastructure – but (of course there’s no free lunch) here are some of the trade-offs.

1. Security

As services like banking, file sharing and email move to the cloud, security becomes more critical because no one needs physical access to your servers to gain access to your data. Basic security begins with a good password policy (like complex passwords and no password recycling), extends to multi-factor authentication and then increases to whitelisting access so that only certain internet connections can gain access to your online resources. The higher the risk, the more cost should be allocated to protection, and the more inconvenience the end users will experience. Your users will grumble, but not as much as your customers will if you experience a breach.

2. Backup

When our data is on a cloud server, do you still need to back it up? The answer is a resounding: sometimes. Most cloud service providers provide some kind of backup for their services and that is part of the cost built into the service. One of the main reasons we engage with cloud providers is to offset those kinds of responsibilities to them to save us time and money. Here are a couple examples of when you might want additional backup.

• Email: You may depend on a cloud provider like Office 365 or Google to host your email, but what if you delete an email that is critical to a lawsuit 2 years down the road. Or you may have a disgruntled employee that clicks “Select All > Delete” on their last day. In these cases you might want to have a backup archive of all email so you can preserve those communications for the unforeseen.
• File shares: Many of our customers are moving files from a local server to SharePoint. This can be a great and flexible new platform for sharing files, but the default settings only store deleted files in a recycle bin for 90 days. What if a file is deleted 6 months earlier and still needed? That’s why you might pay a few bucks more per license to add a backup service that can archive all files and allow recovery if needed.

3. Access

Access to online resources is another important consideration when moving services to the cloud. You may feel comfy with your fiber internet connection, but Century Link’s entire New Mexico service went down less than a year ago for a couple days. Comcast went down the year before that. Without internet, your staff will be left twiddling their thumbs. So while you may be saving money on the capital expense of a new server, remember that you may have to invest in a second internet connection just in case the primary goes down.

Like I said, there’s no free lunch, but the menu of cloud services has gotten better over the past few years.

By: Jonathan Sandmel (Albuquerque Business First)
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