近距离内射合集

For more than a decade, we have been helping people in Bernalillo County turn a dream about food into an actual business. The Street Food Institute, the nonprofit we run out of a shared kitchen and education space in the Barelas neighborhood, has helped dozens of food entrepreneurs get off the ground and I have seen firsthand what it takes for a small operator to survive in this community.

Running a food business in Albuquerque means you are always thinking about where things come from. Your ingredients, your suppliers, the people you hire, the customers who walk through your door. Everything is local by necessity, and over time you start to see how connected it all is. When the local economy does well, you feel it. When it struggles, you feel that too.

So when I heard that the Bernalillo County Commission was working on a new approach to economic development, one that would ask companies receiving public tax breaks to actually invest in the local workforce and buy from local businesses, I paid attention in a way I might not have before.

The Street Food Institute is both an educational program and a social enterprise. We support our nonprofit through our own food sales, whether that means catering a wedding, graduation or an employee appreciation event, or hitting the streets of Albuquerque in our food truck. We would not have been able to operate all these years without this community鈥檚 commitment to supporting local food businesses, and we know from experience that buying ingredients from local vendors makes our economy stronger and more resilient.

That experience is why this moment matters to me. What the commissioners passed in February, and what comes before them again Tuesday, is something that has been a long time coming. After a year of community meetings, public surveys, and input from a steering committee of residents and business people from across the county, Bernalillo County now has a framework that ties the size of a company's tax incentive to what it commits to delivering locally.

Corporations will now be incentivized to hire locally and buy from New Mexico businesses if they want tax incentives from the county, with environmental responsibility and community investment factored in as well. The more a company commits to, the more support it receives. That is a reasonable expectation when public money is on the table.

For a food business like ours, the procurement piece stands out. The rubric creates a real incentive for larger companies to buy locally, including from small businesses and minority- and women-owned enterprises, and the food truck owners, caterers, bakers and wholesale producers we work with every day stand to gain real contracts they could not easily access before. Large corporations coming into this county would have a genuine reason to seek out suppliers like us rather than defaulting to whoever they already work with somewhere else, and a steady contract can make all the difference in a business with slim profit margins.

There is also a Community Benefits Fund built into the resolution, drawing from a share of the tax savings companies receive, that would go toward workforce development, small business support and other community priorities. For an industry like food service, where margins are thin and finding trained workers is a constant challenge, a dedicated fund for workforce training is something we have needed for a long time.

Economic development is important and bringing businesses and jobs to Bernalillo County is a goal worth working toward. The commissioners who built this framework clearly believe that too. What this resolution does is make sure that when the county invests public money to attract or retain a company, the community gets something real back for it. That is not asking too much. If anything, it is the minimum we should expect.

This Tuesday is the last opportunity for the public to weigh in before the county manager takes these recommendations and develops a formal economic development strategy for the county. The steering committee will give its final guidance, the commission will respond, and after that the public process is essentially closed. I am asking the commissioners to adopt the rubric as it stands, because the piece that ties company scores to actual incentive levels is what gives the whole framework its weight. Without it, the commitments companies make are voluntary in a way that history tells us does not work very well.

Bernalillo County has spent a full year building something that reflects what this community actually wants. It would be a shame not to see it through.

Tina Garcia-Shams is the executive director of the Street Food Institute, a nonprofit in Albuquerque's Barelas neighborhood dedicated to creating jobs and developing local food businesses across New Mexico.