August 21, 2008
Albuquerque Journal Business Outlook
One-On-One with Lee Reynis
At a Glance
By Autumn Gray , Assistant Business EditorTHE BASICS:
Born Lee A. Reynis, May 25, 1948, in Worcester, Mass.; married to David Stryker since 1979; two daughters, Anna and Kate; undergraduate degree in economics from Mount Holyoke, and masters and doctorate degrees in economics from the University of Michigan.
POSITION:
Director of the University of New Mexico’s Bureau of Business and Economic Research — the first woman to head the organization since its inception in 1945; director of the Institute for Applied Research Services; former chief economist for the State Department of Finance and Administration and former city economist for the City of Albuquerque.
WHAT YOU DIDN’T KNOW:
She and her husband plan to climb Mount Kilimanjaro this year. “We’re going in a bad month in terms of weather. We’re going in December.”
Albuquerque’s pre-eminent economist Lee Reynis has no particular affinity for numbers; it’s people she’s curious about.
And meandering trails. And what that mountain over there would be like to climb. And what makes one Nepal village different from its neighbor. And how to sketch a person just so.
Reynis, who found her New England blood ran truer in the mountain West, is in so many ways more Georgia O’Keeffe than one might expect of the director of UNM’s Bureau of Business and Economic Research.
Yes, there’s the coarse silver hair pulled back in a loose bun and the naturally tanned face and high cheek bones. And you can’t miss the bright orange scarf slung artfully over her shoulders. But the comparison also meets at the soul.
Raised in a rural, mostly white Massachusetts town, Reynis’ independence and appetite for the world became apparent not far from her family’s house on the lake.
“I always wanted to wander off. We’d go down the highway, and I’d say, ‘I want to take that trail into the woods,’ ” Reynis said of her memories as an only child.
It was that same yearning to go beyond that would later draw her to the country’s opposite side.
Reynis was in graduate school in Ann Arbor, Mich., when a friend talked her into going skiing in Wyoming. She had never been West, and white-out snow conditions made seeing it impossible. Until “the last day that we were there, the clouds lifted and I could see in the distance the Wind River Range, which is beautiful. And I thought, those are the mountains, those are what I want. That’s what I really want to do. I want to go and climb mountains like that.”
Q : How did you end up here?
A: When I left Michigan, I decided if I was going to get an academic job, there were two places I would think of. One was New York City and the other was out West, the mountain West. So the job that I had really wanted in New York at Brooklyn College disappeared, ... and I got a job offer at the University of Utah so I went to the University of Utah (about 1975, teaching economics). So I’ve been rattling around (the West) for a long time.
Q: Were you always a numbers person, or what is it about the subject you find interesting ?
A: I don’t think it was a numbers fascination. I think I was always kind of interested in what made society tick. And I think I became aware at an early age that economics sort of mattered in terms of people’s lives and what their options were. So I think that was a real motivation to do that. I always found it was the stuff on the fringes that was really interesting. Like I wrote my undergraduate thesis on an African common market. ... So I never could kind of keep myself just in the narrow boundaries. I always wanted to expand out, understand more.
Q: How does your current position foster that?
A : I feel like I have a need to do stuff that is practical, that addresses problems, which is why I like this job. ... I have a real commitment to putting good information out there to help people make decisions. (The bureau has) done three studies for Santa Fe on the living wage and what are the impacts of the living wage. These are things that I think are really interesting projects. We did a study on arts and cultural industries for Santa Fe. We did a similar study for Albuquerque and Bernalillo County. We also develop methodologies and databases for doing population estimates, essentially to estimate all the different geographies that the Census Bureau would estimate and also to do projections of populations. We have just come out with a new set of population projections that go through 2035.
Q: You mentioned two art-related projects and have said how much you like visiting galleries and hearing live music. Do you paint or anything as a hobby?
A: I really , and I haven’t been doing that recently. I’ve always drawn, always drawn. I like to draw people. I like to go out and sketch, real quick stuff. I kinda got into drawing from models. I took a class or two and got really into that. And then I had a bad accident. I broke my scapula, lost my glasses, hurt my spine and had a variety of things that made it difficult for me to draw. So I’ve kind of gotten out of doing it. I really need to get back into it.
Q : What happened?
A: It was in Bolivia (three years ago). I fell off a mountain. I fell down a rock face, and I was by myself. It was very scary. I had decided not to do the summit because I was feeling a failure of will. Anything requires that you be mentally there and that you say, ‘This is important; I’m going to do this, I’m going to focus on this, I’m going to do it.’ And I wasn’t there. So I dropped out. Everybody else took off to the top, and they said, ‘Oh you’ll be fine, just walk down the mountain.’ Sure that would be fine — except I got lost. I took the wrong turn, and I didn’t recognize it. And so I was on this rock face and I thought, I love scrambling on rocks, I can do this, this is fine. And there didn’t seem to be much exposure because there was a ledge. So I figured, you know, how much am I going to fall? It’s only going to be like 5 or 6 feet, which isn’t bad. What I didn’t realize is that if you fall with a pack on your back that far, you’re probably not going to stay on the ledge. So I fell from one ledge to another, to another, to another. So I fell a long way. And then I did a very stupid thing. I said, well obviously I can’t function with this pack. So I threw my pack off thinking it would drop a little bit, and it went all the way to the bottom. I had a whistle, and I blew my whistle all day long. (Some of the people she had been with found her just before dark.)
Q : How did you recover?
A: I exercise a lot. I do a lot of yoga. I ride my bike to and from work probably three times a week. I’ve generally recovered. The only thing I haven’t gotten back to doing is drawing. But I will.
Q: With the economy on everyone’s minds, I should ask how you think Albuquerque and New Mexico are doing and what you predict for us in coming months.
A: It’s interesting because New Mexico was one of the states that led after the recession in 2001, so we were among the fastest growing states, and it kind of stayed up in the top 10 or so. And then in 2006 we had a very strong year, and then we just kind of went off the cliff and the growth rate really decelerated very fast. And we ended up instead of being in the top 10 or maybe 15, we were way down in the rankings of the states in terms of employment growth. So we kind of went from being way up among the states to being way down very fast. We kind of led the pack down on two sectors: One was construction. Not a surprise. It’s happening all over the country. We’ve seen a tremendous falloff in single-family construction, but our housing industry has generally not been affected as badly as some states. The other quite frankly was the Intel layoffs. ... So I think it’s those two things have hit Albuquerque in particular very hard.
Q: So do you see Albuquerque headed for a recession?
A: No. But you always worry.