nw-loop-road-landscape-photo3ALBUQUERQUE — Plans for a 39-mile loop road through the western hinterlands of Sandoval and Bernalillo counties are seeing new life.

After about two decades on county planners’ drawing board, the controversial NW Loop Road project picked up new steam last week with the kick-off of a federally mandated environmental study that is required for any project receiving federal dollars.

Boosters of the project say the road will eventually serve as a relief valve for traffic congestion in the metro region. But critics say the road is not only unnecessary, it will promote sprawl and serve mainly to benefit developers.

The loop would run through a vast expanse of private, undeveloped land, connecting U.S. 550 in Sandoval County to Interstate 40 at the Rio Puerco, in Bernalillo County.

Gayland Bryant, a spokesperson for Sandoval County, said the road has been in the planning stages for over 20 years with the idea that it’ll serve as a major economic development corridor. It’ll also relieve transportation pressures in the metropolitan core, he said.

“The intent of the road is two-fold,” he told the Independent. “It would open large tracts of land for economic development and job creation, plus serve as an effective bypass of the Albuquerque metropolitan area. We can only improve the Big-I so many times.”

But to Albuquerque City Councilor Michael Cadigan, the road is a harbinger of rampant sprawl with the beneficiary being SunCal Corporation, which bought Westland Development Corporation’s 55,000 acres in 2006 and is the largest landowner in the vicinity of the proposed road.

“This project is nothing but a corporate welfare give-away to SunCal,” Cadigan said. “Nobody lives anywhere near this planned roadway now. It’ll result in hyper sprawl.”

And Jack Lord, transportation project manager for the Mid Region Council of Governments, said extensive studies conducted by his organization to project transportation needs for the next few decades don’t show a need for loop roads in the metropolitan region.

“In some cities, loop roads are really valuable for getting people between suburbs where there are a variety of employment centers,” Lord said.

“But this isn’t the case in Albuquerque where the employment centers are located along I-25, in downtown Albuquerque, the university and Kirtland Airforce Base.” Plus, he said, Mesa del Sol just south of Albuquerque’s downtown on I-25 is on track to be a major employment area in the future.

“The majority of the big employment centers are centrally located,” he said, “so the transportation needs looking forward to 2030 are more radial in nature, rather than loops.”

“We can’t prevent development”

Sandoval Public Works Director Phil Rios dismissed those studies, though, saying “that’s just planners talking.”

“Twenty years ago they probably didn’t show a need for Paseo del Volcan,” he said. “They’re short-sighted — they can’t see the future. “

“We can try to prevent growth, but there’s nothing we can do about it. Look at 98th Street — that’s happened in just the past 5 to 8 years. The city of Albuquerque has policies to try to rein that in, but they don’t work. Everyone has the right to use their land as they please — we can’t prevent development.”

For this reason, Rios said, planning roads and trying to bring economic development to the West Side is important. Otherwise, he said, there will be a continued focus on building bedroom communities for people who then have to drive across the river for work.

Bryant, the Sandoval County spokesperson, said in the long run the county envisions an airport, a desalinization plant for the large reservoirs of brackish water recently discovered deep underground in the area, plus about 2,300 acres of industrial zoned land in Sandoval County — all accessed by the northwest loop road. But the road will be built in stages, he said, so it’ll be many years before the entire project is completed.

In the early 1990s, Sandoval County was given a 300-foot right-of-way for the road by the owners of the private land through which it would run. At the time, Rios explained, these included the “King brothers,” Amrep, Recorp and Westland Corporations, and an entity called Albuquerque Development.

The rights-of-way for the proposed NW Loop were given with the proviso that the road be built within 25 years, which is why environmental assessments are now slated to begin. Otherwise, the parcels would revert back to their original owners, Rios said.

Though currently conceived as a two-lane road, the size of the right-of-way would allow the loop to grow much wider. According to Lord, for instance, the Interstate 25 right-of-way is only about 150 feet.

Lord explained that the loop road is shown in the county’s long range plan because of the planning work Sandoval County has done on the project.

“[Sandoval County] was successful in getting congressional earmarks to do planning work for it, so we had to include it in our long range plan, which was adopted in June 2007,” he said.

But, he continued, it’s considered a privately-funded road that local governments — except for Sandoval County itself — haven’t prioritized for funding.

Sandoval County added the road to their wish list for federal stimulus dollars, Bryant said, which was submitted to the Mid-Region Council of Governments — the entity through which federal highway dollars flow to the metropolitan region.

But the road isn’t ready to go, so won’t see stimulus dollars.“We started out with a huge list of projects provided by different localities and have reduced that to projects that truly are ready to go,” Lord explained, “and that’s a considerably smaller group — the northwest loop road isn’t on that list.”

Editor’s note: Water availability is a key part of any discussion of growth on the west side, but outside the scope of this article. NMI Managing Editor David Alire Garcia recently took an in-depth look at the issues swirling around brackish water in New Mexico, for a segment of KNME’s television show New Mexico In Focus. In it, he and the Albuquerque Journal’s John Fleck traveled to the area through which the NW Loop Road would be built. The video can by viewed by clicking here.