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Kelly Loeffler describes herself as an entrepreneur whose work ethic propelled her from a simple family farm to the upper echelons of finance and politics. The truth is more complicated.By Dan Alexander, Forbes Staff
Two days before the 2024 election, former U.S. Senator Kelly Loeffler strode to the stage at a Trump rally in Macon, Georgia, wearing a bright pink jacket that perfectly matched the pink MAGA hats in the stands behind her. “Hello patriots!” she yelled, with her hand in the air. “Is Georgia Trump country?!” Speaking to the crowd, she took direct aim at billionaire Mark Cuban, who had recently said Trump does not associate with strong, intelligent women. “I stood up to Mark Cuban,” Loeffler boomed into the microphone, “And I said, ‘You know what, Mark, I’m an entrepreneur. I’m a former CEO. I owned a basketball team. You know, I’ll take you on.”
Loeffler likes to paint herself as a self-made business titan. There’s no question she has had a successful career, mostly at Intercontinental Exchange, the parent company to the New York Stock Exchange, where she led investor relations, marketing and communications, accumulating enough equity to sell more than $30 million of shares and still retain a $12 million stake. But the real money in her household—a nearly 20,000-square-foot spread in Atlanta—comes from Loeffler’s husband, Jeff Sprecher, the founder of Intercontinental Exchange, who is worth an estimated $1 billion.
Loeffler, who married Sprecher in 2004, two years after joining his company, chafes at the suggestion that she owes her financial success to her husband. Lately, she has jumped at opportunities to prove herself. In 2018, she became CEO of crypto startup Bakkt and promptly rang up massive losses. With the business flailing, she shifted to politics, writing a big check to Georgia’s governor, who then appointed her to the U.S. Senate after Johnny Isakson stepped down amid health concerns (he had been battling Parkinson’s). On Capitol Hill, Loeffler sowed doubts about the 2020 election and spoke out against Black Lives Matter, leading players on her WNBA team to campaign for her opponent. She then lost her only election, handing her seat to Baptist pastor Raphael Warnock and helping flip control of the U.S. Senate to Democrats.
But with enough cash and connections, there’s no end to second chances. Loeffler’s latest: an appointment to Donald Trump’s cabinet, where she will helm the Small Business Administration, despite her own small-business struggles. “Can’t keep a good woman down,” says former Secretary of the Navy Richard Spencer, who worked with Loeffler before and after she joined Intercontinental Exchange and is one of several former colleagues who remain impressed with her. “Why would I want her in charge of the SBA? In fact, the fact that she does have some things that didn’t go perfectly well, you know. Don’t give me the person who has always succeeded. I want the person who is a success but has failed along the way, because they know what scars are like.”
A
communications professional, Loeffler has a knack for self-promotion, portraying herself more like an ultrawealthy mogul than a mere executive, complete with a rags-to-riches tale. She often talks about how she grew up on a family farm in Illinois, emphasizing humble roots while glossing over the significant scale of the operation, which reportedly included 1,800 acres and a trucking business. She stayed near home to attend the University of Illinois, studying business and becoming the first in her family to graduate from college. “An opportunity,” she said on the podcast of Tennessee Senator Marsha Blackburn, “for me to get off the farm.” While Forbes reached her staff and several ex-colleagues, Loeffler did not agree to be interviewed.
Diploma in hand, she moved to California to join the management trainee program at Toyota, where she worked in distribution and finance, eventually as a district account manager. She decided to go to business school at DePaul in Chicago and reportedly borrowed against farmland she received from her grandmother to help pay for it. Upon graduation in 1999, she dove more deeply into finance, briefly working as an equity analyst at Citigroup, then William Blair, before shifting to investor relations at a private equity shop in Dallas. “She proved her salt to me in just the work that she did, the energy that she had and the let’s-get-it-done attitude,” says Spencer, the former president of the private equity firm.
After Spencer moved to Intercontinental Exchange, he brought Loeffler on board in 2002. Referring to those days now, Loeffler minimizes the strength of the business, referring to it as a “startup” that she says she helped grow from “less than 100 employees.” In fact, the company turned a net profit of $35 million on $125 million of revenue in 2002, the year she joined, employing 201 people. Loeffler says she got hired to help take the company public, but as Spencer recalls it, she entered “a good time before that,” noting that Intercontinental Exchange had a handful of major investors back then, including Shell, Deutsche Bank, Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs and BP. “They were needy investors,” he says. “They liked to be talked to a lot. She did a good job.”
Eventually, Intercontinental did make the move to go public, which Spencer says led to a closed-door meeting between him and CEO Jeff Sprecher as they were preparing the prospectus, also known as an S-1. “Jeff walked in one Monday morning,” Spencer laughs. “And he says, ‘I’ve got something to tell you. And I went, ‘Oh, no.’ And he said, ‘Yeah, I’m going to marry Kelly.’ And I said, ‘Wow, we might have to redo the S-1.’”Power couple: Loeffler joined Intercontinental Exchange in 2002, married CEO Jeff Sprecher in 2004 and worked with him to take the company public on the New York Stock Exchange in 2005.Richard Drew/AP
Chuck Vice, the former vice chairman of Intercontinental, witnessed the dynamic between Loeffler and Sprecher up close, working out of the office between them. “They didn’t really have hobbies,” Vice says. “They both enjoy working. They both enjoy business. And so we always felt like, when they leave the office and they go home, they’re still talking about business. And we’re getting, as a company, we’re getting so much value from the both of them.”
Sprecher owned 4.5% of the firm by the time he took it public in 2005, a stake worth about $60 million, while Loeffler held less than $1 million worth of options, according to an analysis of securities filings. Over the years, they both sold often, converting equity into cash. Meanwhile, the business continued to grow, largely through acquisitions, most notably when Intercontinental purchased the New York Stock Exchange for $11.1 billion in 2013. By the end of that year, Sprecher had sold more than $175 million of stock while hanging onto a roughly $300 million stake.
“She obviously benefitted, and he benefitted, too,” says former New Hampshire Senator and Governor Gregg Judd, a Republican who served on the board of Intercontinental Exchange and describes Sprecher as a visionary who was fortunate to have Loeffler at the company to keep him in check. “She was very much a force to settle things out and make sure that he didn’t run too far too fast.”
Loeffler and Sprecher paid $10.5 million in 2009 for an Atlanta home said to include a 70-million-year-old dinosaur footprint in the kitchen floor. Loeffler also purchased a stake in the WNBA’s Atlanta Dream alongside Mary Brock, the wife of the former CEO of bottler Coca-Cola Enterprises. Loeffler dabbled in politics, too, getting involved at the state level around 2010, then spending more than $1 million with Sprecher to support Mitt Romney’s presidential bid in 2012. Loeffler mulled a run of her own for U.S. Senate in 2014 but decided against it, opting instead to stick with Intercontinental.Loeffler, who co-owned the Atlanta Dream from 2011 to 2021, talked during a 2019 game with team president Chris Sienko, who describes his former boss as “very competitive and extremely intelligent.”Rich von Biberstein/Icon Sportswire/Getty Images
In
2018, she got a chance to prove herself. Bitcoin had captured the imagination of investors everywhere, rocketing from roughly $1,000 to $10,000 in a year. Intercontinental Exchange wanted to get into crypto. In March 2018, the company announced that Loeffler would be leaving at the end of the year.
Her next move came into focus on August 3, when Loeffler took to the blogging platform Medium to announce a new business, where she would serve as CEO. “Today, I’m delighted to introduce Bakkt, a company that will enable consumers and institutions to buy, sell, store and spend digital assets on a seamless global network.” Cryptocurrencies still operated in a digital wild west, and she imagined legitimizing the asset class with the support of Intercontinental.
At the end of the year, Loeffler released a blog post saying that her company had raised $182.5 million. Documents filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission made clear that this was not a typical startup raise. Intercontinental Exchange, still helmed by Loeffler’s husband Sprecher, held a majority stake in the business. In addition, Intercontinental apparently enticed other investors with a sweetener, agreeing to repurchase their interests under certain conditions. Intercontinental eventually recognized those agreements as a liability on its balance sheet.
In early 2019, before Intercontinental reaped any discernable return on that investment, Loeffler received an equity award in Bakkt that an outside advisor valued at $15.6 million—more than the annual compensation of any of Intercontinental’s top executives, including Sprecher. What did Loeffler’s business actually do? Bakkt (pronounced “backed”) mostly seemed to focus on developing a Bitcoin futures contract, which would allow traders to bet on the eventual price of the cryptocurrency. Loeffler blogged about progress she was making toward this goal—highlighting interactions she had with regulators, people she hired and assets she purchased.
Bakkt’s Bitcoin futures contracts finally hit the market in September 2019. On October 24, she published a blog post cheering a record day for the contracts, with 590 of them, valued at roughly $5 million, changing hands. Bakkt, which was not generating revenue from the contracts at that point, planned to start charging $1.25 per contract the next year. That suggests that, even if it were able to keep up that record rate every day for a year, the company might expect a few hundred thousand dollars of annual revenue from the product.
Loeffler never even made it to the next year. By the end of 2019, her business had generated zero revenue and accumulated $33 million of losses. It still depended heavily on Intercontinental Exchange, for both money and operational support, and Bakkt’s business model needed a complete overhaul.
In
August 2019, Loeffler donated $18,100, the maximum legal amount, to the campaign of Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp. A few months later, Kemp appointed her to fill Isakson’s Senate seat. “Kelly has really lived the American Dream,” Kemp said at a press conference, comparing her to Ivanka Trump. “I’m confident that she will work every single day to keep that dream alive.” Loeffler took the podium and recounted her narrative, emphasizing her business experience without mentioning the company she was leaving in disarray. “I’ve spent the last 25 years building businesses, taking risks and creating jobs,” she declared.
Mixing business and politics can be complicated, as Loeffler soon found out. As she prepared to leave for the Senate at the end of 2019, her husband’s company changed the terms of her equity awards in both Bakkt and Intercontinental Exchange, accelerating their vesting schedules. Loeffler’s shares in Intercontinental Exchange surged. She began selling multimillion-dollar chunks of stock in early 2020, far larger than her previous record sale of $1 million, according to an analysis of SEC filings. The sales helped spark a scandal, however, when Covid-19 tanked the stock market, leading to suggestions that Loeffler traded on nonpublic information gleaned from her position in the Senate. She denied the accusations at the time, saying third parties managed her portfolio without her knowledge. Her spokesperson did not respond when asked, more recently, whether Loeffler was just trying to cash out her new pile of shares.
Controversy carried over into the summer, when the George Floyd murder sparked sometimes-violent protests, which Loeffler condemned. She urged the WNBA to reverse its decision to partner with Black Lives Matter. Players on her Atlanta Dream franchise, for sale since January of that year, revolted, openly campaigning for Warnock, the Democrat running to oust Loeffler from the Senate.
Loeffler’s internal response impressed Chris Sienko, the president of the Atlanta Dream at the time. “What is not known to the public is that Kelly was aware [in] real time of what the team was doing,” he says now. “Never did Kelly try and stop or silence the team, nor ask me or others to stop or deter them in any way. While I believe that Kelly appreciated the players’ right to free speech and opposing viewpoints, as a senator, Kelly was focused on a much bigger constituency.” Loeffler ended up losing to Warnock, even after she dumped more than $20 million into her campaign and Sprecher poured over $10 million into a related super-PAC. After leaving office, Loeffler sold her 50% stake in the basketball team to an investor group that included one of the former players who had spoken out most prominently.
Rather than return to her husband’s business, Loeffler dove deeper into politics, founding a nonprofit named Greater Georgia Action, with the goal of registering right-leaning voters and boosting confidence in elections. She also made a turn toward the right-wing economy, a group of politically minded businesses targeting Trump-friendly customers—and investors. In 2023, Loeffler became a director at conservative e-commerce company PublicSquare, which welcomed Donald Trump Jr. to its board at the start of December. She may soon have another connection to the Trump family. In November, the Financial Times reported that the Trump Media and Technology Group, the parent company to Truth Social, may purchase Loeffler’s old crypto outfit.
Since Loeffler departed Bakkt in 2019, the company reinvented its business model and expanded its top line through acquisitions, growing to $1.9 billion in annual revenue. But it has not yet figured out how to make money, losing $142 million over the last four quarters, leaving just $29 million of free cash on its balance sheet. Trump’s business has the opposite problem—plenty of liquidity but virtually no revenue. Buying Bakkt would at least allow the Trump Media and Technology Group to conduct some significant business. And, with a crypto-friendly administration headed to the White House, perhaps the cash-strapped venture will finally figure out how to turn a profit—or at least convince MAGA-minded investors that the company, like its first CEO, should get another chance.
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On a warm, sunny beach near Melbourne, Australia, Alethea Jerebine watched her daughters scrambling up a jumble of rocks. “Can they do that?” she worried about her 10-year-old and 13-year-old. The rocks were pocked with crevices and so steep that they gave Jerebine vertigo. Instinctively, she wanted to tell them to stop.At the same time, she knew her pangs of anxiety were incongruous with her own research. What her children were doing is a kind of ‘risky play’ — activities ranging from climbing and jumping from heights to simply leaving the watchful eye of an adult. Jerebine is a public-health and psychology researcher at Deakin University in Melbourne, who studies the wide-ranging benefits of risky play. Still, she’s not immune to the pressure that many parents and guardians feel to protect their children from every possible harm.Governments are banning kids from social media: will that protect them from harm?Over the past two decades, research has emerged showing that opportunities for risky play are crucial for healthy physical, mental and emotional development. Children need these opportunities to develop spatial awareness, coordination, tolerance of uncertainty and confidence.Despite this, in many nations risky play is now more restricted than ever, thanks to misconceptions about risk and a general undervaluing of its benefits. Research shows that children know more about their own abilities than adults might think, and some environments designed for risky play point the way forwards. Many researchers think that there’s more to learn about the benefits, but because play is inherently free-form, it has been logistically difficult to study. Now, scientists are using innovative approaches, including virtual reality, to probe the benefits of risky play, and how to promote it.Even safety advocates support it. “Most people assume I would be against risky play,” says Pamela Fuselli, president of Parachute, an injury-prevention non-profit organization based in Toronto, Canada. “But the benefits are so broad in terms of social, physical, mental development and mental health, I don’t think we can underestimate the value.”Thrilling and excitingThe origins of risky-play research date back to 1996, when Norway passed a regulation on playground safety that required things such as handrails, rounded corners and equipment that minimizes the risk of injury from falls to be added to play areas. A few years later, psychologist Ellen Sandseter noticed that playground equipment was being removed as a result of the law and replaced with elements that offered little chance for risk-taking. She found this concerning. Her research had shown that adolescents who had fewer opportunities for positive types of thrill-seeking — such as mountain climbing — were more likely to take negative risks, such as shoplifting1. So, Sandseter, who works at Queen Maud University College of Early Childhood Education in Trondheim, Norway, began to study risk-seeking and sensation-seeking in children aged three to five. Unable to find a definition of risky play in the literature at the time, she built one on the basis of hours of observation and interviews with young children about what activities they thought were scary, risky or thrilling.Her definition of risky play is still widely used: thrilling and exciting play that involves uncertainty and a risk — either real or perceived — of physical injury or getting lost.Risky play is thought to help build risk-management skills that can transfer to other situations.Credit: Thomas Barwick/GettyImportantly, risk is not the same as danger. Danger is something a child isn’t equipped to notice or deal with. For example, it’s dangerous, not risky, for four-year-olds to go barefoot around broken glass or to cross a busy street with no practice. Risk changes with age and doesn’t always include things that look risky to adults. For a one-year-old who has never walked before, taking a single step is probably risky enough.The goal of promoting risky play isn’t to turn cautious children into thrill-seekers, it’s simply to allow them to take incremental risks at whatever pace they choose, say proponents. “What risky play looks like for one child will be totally different to what it looks like for another,” says child psychologist Helen Dodd at the University of Exeter, UK.And getting chances to take risks is as important for children with naturally cautious personalities as it is for those who are born daredevils. “All children need to be able to stretch their own limits, and all children want that,” says Sandseter.Risk management Risky play is associated with greater resilience, self-confidence, problem-solving and social skills such as cooperation, negotiation and empathy, according to studies by Sandseter and others. When a study in Leuven, Belgium, gave four- and six-year-olds just two hours a week of opportunities for risky play over the course of three months, their risk-assessment skills improved compared with those of children in a control group2. In this study, the risky play took place at school, in a gym class and in the classroom.Young people’s mental health is finally getting the attention it needsOutdoor risky play might have extra benefits. It is linked to having low levels of stress and anxiety. Dodd hypothesizes that risky play lowers children’s risk of anxiety by teaching them about physiological arousal, the adrenaline and racing heartbeat that accompanies anxiety and excitement. Over time, her theory posits, when children have a chance to repeatedly experience the cycle of challenge, arousal and coping, this helps them learn to manage anxiety and understand that physiological stress isn’t a disaster and doesn’t last forever.Dodd had set up an observational study3 to test this theory. It began in early April 2020 and captured data during the first month of the COVID-19 lockdown in the United Kingdom. Dodd found that children who spent more time playing adventurously had fewer signs of anxiety and depression (according to parent reports) than those who spent less time in adventurous play. The kids with more opportunities for risk seemed happier. This pattern of risky play as a protective factor against mental-health issues was stronger for children from lower-income households than for those from higher-income households.As a whole, the quality of research in the field of risky play is mixed, says child-development researcher Mariana Brussoni at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada, but often with good reason. Not many studies are gold-standard randomized controlled trials, but these “are expensive and sometimes inappropriate to the research question”, she says.None of this means that parents should tell kids to take more risks, says Dodd, because that doesn’t lead to positive learning. “Play should always be led by the child and what the child wants to do,” she says. The adults’ role is to provide a conducive environment and then get out of the way — or at the most, to cheerlead gently. This makes risky play hard to study experimentally. “It ceases to be play the moment an adult tells a child to do it,” says Dodd.The Venny, an adventure playground in Melbourne, Australia, provides opportunities for risky play.Credit: The VennyIf risky-play advocates have a rallying cry, it is probably this: “Children should be as safe as necessary, not as safe as possible.” But what’s a parent to do with this injunction? A child’s facial expressions and body language can be good markers to observe. A study4 led by Brussoni contains a table that the team used to sort positive risky play from hazardous or dangerous play as they observed children. When kids are in the productive risky-play zone and trying things that are above their current skill level, they might have an expression of determination on their face, seem in control of their body and use trial and error. If that’s the case, Dodd suggests nearby adults to “just hold back that little bit more, count to ten before you say ‘no’. See if they can resolve something for themselves rather than always jumping in.”The topography of a playground can also encourage risky play, research shows4. Play on uneven surfaces — such as boulders — or steep slopes was much more likely to involve positive-risk behaviours than play on flat areas in Brussoni’s 2023 analysis4 at a play space with nature elements at the Santa Barbara Museum of Natural History in California.Virtual rock-hoppingOne of Brussoni’s hypotheses about risky play is that it can help to build risk-management skills that transfer to other situations, such as crossing a busy street, she says. That’s hard to test. “Ethically speaking, you can’t really throw kids in traffic environments, because they could actually get hurt,” she says. So Brussoni, Sandseter and their colleagues created a virtual setting in which they could convincingly test children’s risk-management skills, without the danger.First, they gave children aged seven to ten eye-tracking virtual-reality headsets and fitted motion sensors on their joints. The kids were able to explore three scenarios: crossing a street, leaping from rock to rock to cross a river and roaming a virtual playground to balance on the equipment.
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Health
A top nutrition scientist said people should focus more on fiber than protein. He shared how a mostly plant-based diet can help you get both macronutrients.
Serafina Kenny
2025-01-08T11:41:07Z
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Tim Spector is a nutrition expert who thinks people should prioritize adding fiber to their diets instead of protein.
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Tim Spector, a top nutrition scientist, said most people get enough protein but not fiber.He recommended people focus on increasing the amount of fiber they eat each day.His tips include switching meat for beans and eating different types of plant-based protein.High-protein versions of foods such as cereal bars and pasta have taken over grocery-store shelves as people try to eat more of the macronutrient. But a top nutrition scientist said fiber should be our focus.
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New Delhi: Rocket scientist V. Narayanan will be the next chairman of the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO), the appointments committee of the cabinet announced Tuesday. Narayanan, currently the head of ISRO’s Liquid Propulsion Systems Centre (LPSC), is set to succeed S. Somanath on 14 January and will be in office for the next two years as the 11th chairman of India’s premier space research organisation.
He will also serve as the secretary of the Department of Space, which comes directly under the Prime Minister’s Office (PMO).
Narayanan, 61, has been part of ISRO since 1984, working first at the Vikram Sarabhai Space Centre (VSSC) in Thiruvananthapuram and then, after his M.Tech in 1989, moving on to the LPSC in Valiamala, where he worked his way up to director in January 2018.
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Narayanan has been a rockets and propulsion man throughout, working first in solid propulsion using solid fuels when India was developing smaller satellite launch vehicles like the Augmented Satellite Launch Vehicle (ASLV), to eventually moving on to cryogenic propulsion using extremely cold, liquid fuels for more advanced vehicles like the Geosynchronous Satellite Launch Vehicle (GSLV).
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In cryogenic propulsion, liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen are used as propellants at extremely low temperatures.The cryogenic systems that Narayanan worked on were what formed the basis of India’s major launches including Chandrayaan-2, Chandrayaan-3, and Aditya-L1. For the upcoming human spaceflight mission Gaganyaan, the LPSC, under Narayanan, is working on making the cryogenic stages and launch vehicles that will be used in the mission human-rated.
Narayanan’s profile on the LPSC website talks about how, when India was initially developing the cryogenic stage of the GSLV Mk-II vehicle in the late 1980s, the country needed some hardware to be imported from the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR). Narayanan was, thus, in charge of not only doing research and development for the project, but also coordinating with USSR counterparts, managing contracts and missions. With Narayanan’s appointment, this is the third time in a row that a director of LPSC has been appointed the next ISRO chairman, as Somanath and his predecessor K. Sivan, too, served as heads of LPSC before their ISRO chief tenures. “Narayanan will have a lot of challenges ahead of him—the human spaceflight mission Gaganyaan will be one and, of course, the work ISRO is doing on Chandrayaan-4 and Bharatiya Antariksha Station,” former ISRO Chief K. Sivan told ThePrint. “But I am certain if there is anyone who can handle this role, it is him.”
Also Read: ISRO to carry out 1st space docking experiment. Why the indigenous tech is crucial for future missions
Scientist, manager, academic
The propulsion scientist began his academic journey with a diploma in mechanical engineering (DME) and went on to take the AMIE (Associate Member of the Institution of Engineers) examination, which is recognised as equivalent to an engineering degree by the Government of India. Before joining ISRO in 1984, Narayanan worked in various organisations including TI Diamond Chain, Bharat Heavy Electricals Limited (BHEL) Trichy and Madras Rubber Factory for a year and half after his DME.
Narayanan went on to complete his M.Tech in cryogenic engineering at IIT Kharagpur while he was working at ISRO, and received a silver medal as well as first rank from the institute. As he moved up the ladder at LPSC and became one of the pioneers of novel cryogenic propulsion technology in India, he worked on his PhD thesis in aerospace engineering simultaneously and received his doctorate from IIT Kharagpur in 2001. He has over 1200 internal ISRO reports and 50 journal papers to his name.“He is obviously an expert at propulsion systems and rockets, and this experience will help him in his new role. But beyond that, he is a great manager, too,” said Sivan. “He will be able to handle ISRO’s multiple responsibilities in the coming years.”Narayanan’s role in India joining the rank of countries with independent cryogenic propulsion systems went beyond his scientific contributions.Later, in 1993, when the US blocked a deal made by India to procure cryogenic engine technology from Russia, Narayanan was one of the key people who set out to develop indigenous cryogenic engines in order to not rely on external sources. His thesis, titled ‘Thrust & Mixture Ratio Regulation System of Cryogenic Rocket Engines’, formed a pivotal part of India’s development of indigenous cryogenic propulsion systems, making it only the sixth country in the world to achieve this feat.
(Edited by Radifah Kabir)
Also Read: From ‘father of the Agni Missile’ to INSA’s 1st woman physicist fellow, scientists India lost in 2024
BY LOS ALAMOS LOCAL BUSINESS COALITION STEERING TEAM
Dear Community,
The Los Alamos Local Business Coalition (LALBC) is comprised of 61 community members and local business owners committed to fostering a thriving business environment in Los Alamos and White Rock. Our mission is to advocate for policies, accountability, and structures that support local businesses. We appreciated the opportunity to provide feedback on the Metropolitan Redevelopment Area (MRA) initiative for East Downtown Los Alamos and we want to share the input we provided with the community at large.
The LALBC supports the MRA initiative. This initiative holds promise for revitalizing a downtown area and addressing critical community needs. However, we offer several recommendations that we think are important to drafting and approving the East Downtown MRA plan. Our feedback is based on our just completed survey of 59 participants, reviews of multiple data sources, and input from County forums, community surveys, and public comments. For detailed survey results and comments, please visit: https://bit.ly/MRA-Survey-Results The results of the Coalition survey align with and provide an important supplement to the results of the previous County survey by gathering input to put the MRA’s in context with the needs of the larger commercial property areas, prioritize MRA-specific objectives, and prioritize the uses of incentives.
Below are the key themes and recommendations:
1. Prioritization of Resources
Equitable Focus: A strong majority of both local businesses (84.2%) and concerned citizens (65%) want to see equal attention given to all commercial areas (Los Alamos and White Rock).
Support Existing Businesses: Respondents emphasize the importance of prioritizing existing local businesses rather than devoting attention solely to MRA.
Concerns were raised about the MRA benefiting large developers at the expense of small businesses.
White Rock Needs: Some respondents stressed that White Rock is underserved and should receive equal priority.
Recommendation:
Distribute resources giving equal attention to all commercial areas in Los Alamos and White Rock.
Focus on incentives like expedited permitting, public-private partnerships, and affordable retail space to support local businesses.
2. Types of Development & Incentives
Support Existing Local Businesses & Affordable RetailRespondents emphasized the importance of retention and support for current businesses alongside efforts to create more affordable commercial leases.
Mixed-Use Spaces & Workforce HousingSurvey participants strongly favored incentives for retail, dining, and entertainment (74.6%) and affordable workforce housing (64.4%).
Lower Priority for Office, Hotel, and Market-Rate HousingMost survey participants with an opinion (over 50%) believe these sectors should not be prioritized for public incentives because they are lower priorities.
3. Incentive Tools & Public-Private Partnerships
Streamlined ProcessesAn overwhelming majority of businesses (78.9%) called for expedited permitting and improved regulatory procedures to reduce barriers for local business owners.
Public-Private Partnerships & Targeted GrantsOver 68.4% of business-owner respondents support using LEDA (Local Economic Development Act) for public-private partnerships. Storefront improvement grants and gap-financing programs also garnered 68.4% support.
Skepticism About Tax Increment Financing (TIF)Many respondents felt neutral or hesitant regarding TIF, suggesting a need for clear explanations of benefits and impacts.
4. Transparency and Communication
Many respondents felt the MRA process was not well-communicated, leading to confusion and mistrust.
Recommendation: Share a draft MRA plan with the public and provide for meaningful public engagement before scheduling it for approval. Important decisions like this need careful consideration and time for public engagement. Introducing any recommended decision just a few days before a Council meeting, with the only opportunity for engagement being to make a one-way comment, is not sufficient public engagement.
Proactively disclose proposed project details, funding mechanisms, and discussions with developers. Develop clear metrics to evaluate the success of the MRA in achieving community priorities. Regularly report findings and adjust plans as needed.
Conclusion
The MRA initiative can be part of a valid approach to address challenges and foster a vibrant future for Los Alamos and White Rock. By prioritizing transparency and equitable support for all commercial areas, this effort can help drive sustainable growth and empower local businesses as the foundation of a thriving community.
This input was also provided to Los Alamos County staff directly by submission in their “Have Your Say” input form and by letter to the County Council. We thank the County, LACDC, and Main Street for their efforts in downtown revitalization. As the Los Alamos Local Business Coalition, we are committed to ensuring that local businesses thrive as part of this process and look forward to working together to achieve these goals.
About the Los Alamos Local Business Coalition:
The Los Alamos Local Business Coalition is a collaborative group of local business owners and stakeholders dedicated to fostering a thriving business environment in Los Alamos and White Rock. We advocate for solution-focused policies, structures, and accountability that support local businesses.
Our membership criteria are a shared interest in our purpose and a willingness to receive communications and respond to surveys when asked. All local businesses and individual citizens interested in improving the local business environment in Los Alamos and White Rock are invited to join the mailing list by completing the form at https://bit.ly/LALBC-sign-up – You can opt out at any time. You will receive occasional email communication from the Coalition to keep you in the loop and will be invited to express your opinions on future issues affecting the local business environment. There are no costs or fees associated with joining the group.
LALBC is a small, grassroots group that began meeting in November 2024 to discuss how we could improve the local business environment. Members of the initial small group agreed to become part of a steering team that has met several times and is working on how to make a difference. The Steering Team includes Leslie Linke, Kevin Holsapple, Karen Wray, Carolyn Cowan, Allan Saenz, John Courtright, Shannon CdeBaca, and Anna Dillane. There is no head person. We’re a group of people who care about Los Alamos and White Rock and want to work toward a positive future for our community.