(The following story appeared on the Albuquerque Journal website on March 23.)
SANTA TERESA, N.M. — A new port of entry. A 25,000-lot subdivision. A massive railyard and fueling station.
Those three projects being pushed by developers and government officials could someday transform the desert sprawl of southern Dona Ana County into a busy center of commerce and home to tens of thousands of new residents.
“It is an exciting time,” said Dona Ana County Commission Chairman D. Kent Evans. “It is going to explode, and it will explode in a very good way that will benefit us all — not just New Mexico but El Paso and Juarez, too. We’ve just got to be smart and manage it right.”
On the rail front, Union Pacific Railroad wants to build the railyard and fueling station on a stretch of desert along its rail line northwest of the Santa Teresa Airport. It plans to eventually build an intermodal facility at the site to transfer cargo from trains to trucks.
For the port of entry, the city of Sunland Park in January finally submitted its formal application to the State Department to gain approval to open a new port, for passenger cars and pedestrians, at a site leading to Colonia Anapra on the western edge of Ciudad Juarez.
The city’s application says that, if approved, the port of entry would handle more than 300,000 vehicles in two-way traffic by its third year of operation — a flow that would provide a powerful economic engine for the lowincome, largely Hispanic town.
Meanwhile, the El Pasobased Verde Realty group is moving forward with its plans to build a new community in the area. It owns 21,000 acres of land from Sunland Park west past the Santa Teresa port of entry. In late 2005, it won approval from Sunland Park and the Dona Ana County Commission for a master plan for its real estate holdings. The plan calls for, at final buildout, nearly 25,000 residential lots, along with pockets for retail stores, offices and industrial parks.
All three projects, however, face substantial hurdles.
Work to do
Before gaining approval from the federal government for the proposed port of entry, Sunland Park must complete an environmental assessment on the project. That is expected to be completed in late 2008.
The city has an agreement in principle to purchase private land needed for the port of entry, but a final sale has not yet been negotiated.
The Verde Group, meanwhile, has received local approval for Village One, the first phase of residential development on 1,111 acres of land at the northeast corner of N.M. 9, also known as the Columbus Highway, and the Pete Domenici Highway, which runs from the Santa Teresa port of entry to connect to Interstate 10.
For now, a dirt road cuts through the center of the tract that could become Village One, a development of more than 4,200 housing units for a population of 16,000 to 20,000 new residents.
But before Verde Realty can move ahead with plans for residential and industrial development, it must negotiate a plan acceptable to the Dona Ana County Commission to establish several tax increment development districts, or TIDDs.
The TIDDs would allow Verde to use a portion of new taxes to finance the construction of hundreds of millions of dollars worth of infrastructure, such as roads and sewer lines.
But using TIDDs to subsidize new construction in undeveloped areas is controversial in some quarters. Verde’s efforts to negotiate a TIDD plan acceptable to the county last year, before the legislative session, derailed in part over affordable housing and control of the TIDD board of directors.
Jack Darnall, vice president for Verde Realty, said obtaining an agreement on TIDDs is critical to moving forward with the group’s development plans. “The economics don’t work without government support,” Darnall said.
Train track
Union Pacific’s plans may have the smoothest road ahead.
To make about 1,600 acres of land available for Union Pacific’s use, the U.S. Bureau of Land Management, which controls the land the railroad has targeted, is working on an elaborate land swap with the State Land Office. The proposed uses for the land must be scrutinized in an environmental assessment before gaining federal approval.
To make the relocation of some Union Pacific facilities from El Paso feasible, the New Mexico Legislature last session exempted locomotive fuel from state gross receipts taxes starting July 1, 2009.
Chuck McMahon, Dona Ana County’s director of community development, said Union Pacific has plans to build about 70 miles of new track in the Santa Teresa yard and be able to park two 10,000-foot-long trains simultaneously for fueling.
“The scale of it is massive,” McMahon said, “and that’s just phase one.”
If Union Pacific builds a new fueling station and intermodal facility northwest of the Santa Teresa Airport, the project would be “a huge economic driver to the region,” Darnall said.
In a related, but separate, effort to make the Santa Teresa area more of a railroad hub, Gov. Bill Richardson in January met with Mexican President Felipe Calderon to support construction of a railway bypass that would take railroad traffic out of downtown Ciudad Juarez and move it west to the Santa Teresa area.
Railroad traffic currently runs through downtown Juarez and into El Paso, but the traffic is limited to the hours between 10 p.m. and 6 a.m.
Officials with Union Pacific and BNSF Railway Company, which also stands to benefit from the proposed move of railroad lines within Juarez, both said the project is a long-term one that, because of its high cost and political hurdles, might not come to pass.
But Calderon last year pledged his support for building a railroad bypass from a point south of Juarez to a new international crossing several miles west of the Santa Teresa port of entry.