8-25-2023 9:49am

Cloudcroft Street Vendor Debate Continues

Chris Edwards Editor

The village of Cloudcroft held a working session for dialog around a potential ordinance to allow street vendors in the business district. The workshop was led by Mayor Denny without allowing any public comment. The workshop held August 22nd to a crowd of many local small business observing was a discussion among the elected community leaders.

In a report we published 7-12-23 and a followup on 8-14 we reviewed how the normally reserved meetings of the Cloudcroft Board of Trustees was anything but reserved during last the early July session. The agenda flow was relatively standard and status quo for the village until they got to the agenda item about street vendors on Burro Street.

There were several of the Burro Street business owners at the meeting. During the public comments section specific to the agenda item to discuss street vendors, some business owners commented and raised concerns. Resident Richard Welch gave a compelling statement and then things got heated.

Other business owners also commented about street vendors and food trucks; and suggested the present situation of ordinances was broken and the present situation with one street vendor is broken.

Trustee Maynard made a motion to temporarily suspend the current street vendors contract until they could look into this matter however Maynard could not get a second and the motion died.

After the passioned plea of Mr Welch, Trustee Maynard stated obviously there are a lot of businesses that are upset about this and made the motion again to suspend the contract but couldn't get a second.

Since that meeting there was a public workshop announced and then cancelled and then this most recent workshop. The outcome of this workshop was to send a survey out and a notice of the survey via the water bill. With input from the community survey the hope is then that a consensus can evolve to create an effective ordinance specific to street vendors.

Local Burro Street business owners are opposed to street vendors. A vocal opposition leader to allowing street vendors in Cloudcroft is business owner Richard Welsh. After the work session he provided AlamogordoTownNews.com and KALHRadio.org the following statement:

“This is what I see will put a lot of businesses out of business which will cause a huge loss in revenue from taxes which will have permanent citizenship to move out of the village causing the prices of real estate to drop and developers to swoop in buy up everything.

Building apartment buildings, houses and very and expensive retail outlets.

Turning Cloudcroft into a place made for only the rich to live.

Becoming like Vail and Aspen, yes at one time those two mountain towns were just like Cloudcroft.

Preserve our quality of life and don't allow it to be destroyed for the rich to have what we already have.

If this is far fetched then someone please explain to me why the village council is so Hell Bent on getting vendors in here after being told by the village business owners and citizens we don't want that here.

It was stated by one Trustee it's not all about the businesses and another Trustee said even if the survey comes back not in favor of allowing vendors on public property you can still vote yes, go with your heart.

I'd rather not saw the names of the Trustee's at this time as maybe they didn't realize what they were saying.

Eventually they will vote on this and if they vote yes after what the majority of the constituents vote no I will call them out at that time.

One more thing that concerns me is developers have a great deal of influence and might be able to buy National Forest surrounding Cloudcroft expanding the size and totally destroying the Cloudcroft we love.”- Richard Welch

Action by the village related to this issue will be on a future agenda before the village council. This continues as an evolving story, stay tuned…