Chile RPCV Mark Lautman is private sector economic developer
Developer takes vision to other cities
Vic Kolenc
El Paso Times
Mark Lautman, who bills himself as a private sector economic developer, will get more time to ply his trade as Santa Teresa Real Estate Development Corp. is restructured.
The five-person partnership that owns the company is spinning off its business units into separate companies to broaden their business beyond Santa Teresa and to also make managing the enterprises more easier, Lautman said.
Lautman, 54, president of the development company, and Jerry Pacheco, the company's director of business development and Mexican relations, have formed Santa Teresa Development Services. The company will continue to sell Santa Teresa, but is also contracting with other cities to recruit companies and develop industrial parks similar to those in Santa Teresa, Lautman said.
Before coming to Santa Teresa Real Estate Development in 1998 for what he saw as a chance to create a new city, Lautman did economic development for the company that developed Rio Rancho, N.M. The Albuquerque suburb is famous for being the location of a huge Intel computer-chip manufacturing plant.
"I get introduced as the guy who brought Intel to Rio Rancho," Lautman said. But Intel already had a small plant there when he arrived in 1983, he said. However, Lautman played a part in helping Rio Rancho compete with other cities for several Intel plant expansions, he said.
Steve Vierck, president of the Mesilla Valley Economic Development Alliance, who previously was senior vice president for the Greater Phoenix Economic Council, said Lautman is "as good as anyone I know on making projects happen. He's a driver; he's creative. ... In New Mexico, he has a very strong reputation" for his economic development expertise, he said.
Lautman, who eats and breathes economic development daily, said economic development became his vocation ever since his first economic development job in 1983 in Grants, N.M.
"I realized what this stuff does to people's lives. It's like a Peace Corps assignment," said Lautman, who was in the Peace Corps in the early 1970s in Chile. "You can literally remake the economy if you have people with the right capital" and other resources.
