SWAT Squad

Our local news is much taken with beautification efforts this year. Op-ed articles, letters to the editor, and town reporting have been constantly focused on the horrible state of Santa Fe's road medians.

The city has appointed a Special Weeds Action Team (SWAT, huh) which includes reassigned parks workers and several volunteers. They are to come up with a plan for the city's center road strips and put additional manpower on fixing them. And there are 581 medians! That's not including all the city parks that badly need maintenance too.

I'm accustomed to the east coast, where road development spread out organically centuries ago along old narrow roads bounded by forest and not wide enough for medians.

Santa Fe, which grew out from the small city center more recently, had nothing but open space to work with. They made big wide roads with planting strips in the middle and since there were no tall trees growing naturally, they planted the sides of streets with shade trees.

Our urban plan specs still call for this kind of green, flowery, leafy, high maintenance design for any new developments in Santa Fe. The city government web site has very specific requirements for urban greenery, and road design specs include planted medians. It's all good, and well thought out to promote a beautiful city. But it all needs maintenance.

And maintenance has been woeful.

The issues are political -- prior administrations let the medians get out of control, ignored citizen complaints, prioritized all the wrong things, etc.

The issues are environmental -- the town is committed to not use any chemical weed killers, which makes the effort even bigger. Medians were designed with non-native high maintenance plants that don't thrive there. Plantings need to be re-designed.

The issues are financial -- it takes funds, full time workers and constant manual maintenance. Not everyone wants their tax dollars spent on weeds.

The issues are also aesthetic -- native wildflowers look like weeds to many. Education is a big part of the SWAT group's focus.

Some medians in the center of town are privately maintained by 'Adopt a Median' businesses, and they can look really good when appropriate plants are installed and when someone comes to weed the area and keep it clean. This is an example I like near the center that works very well, but it takes money and attention to get it to look this natural. And water, at least in the beginning.

But it shows the possibilities.

The SWAT team is going to focus on 20 of the more than 500 medians that need help. Certainly they will be the most visible ones on our main arteries, in other words, the areas tourists see when they come into town. I doubt the median on the road that leads to our Nava Ade neighborhood is on the list and it's pretty much a mess.

The SWAT team has already said that some badly designed medians can't be weeded or rehabbed, and simply have to be paved over. That works, I guess.

Other medians will need to be redesigned and re-planted with things that can tolerate the conditions better and with rock swales and ditches that use rainwater better. Some just need to be mowed.

Then there's always this option, but I really don't think this is what the SWAT task force has in mind:

And even this sand + rock arrangement needs weeding when dry winds blow tough desert seeds into the median rocks and summer rains sprout them.