I am writing today to announce the closure of the New Mexico Independent. After three and a half years of operation in New Mexico, the board of the American Independent News Network, has decided to shift publication of its news…
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Roughly one quarter of University of New Mexico students are unimpressed with the state’s flagship public school, according to a survey that questioned college students about their higher education experiences.
Inside the bicycle park, looking east toward Buena Vista Street.
The City Council took up the issue of the bicycle park last night, also referred to as a stadium, located directly across the street from a neighborhood last night, at the corner of Avenida Cesar Chavez and Buena Vista Street, SE.
The consensus seemed to be across the board that the stadium’s location harms the neighborhood, and that building the stadium in its current location violated city procedure.
Multiple residents spoke to the council about the physical difficulty they have with the stadium, which is an open-air, steel barn-like structure with contoured mounds of dirt for bicycle racing, about 160 feet from the first row of houses.
Residents said that while the project itself is great for kids, the noise, dust, lights and the large trucks moving in and out place a significant burden on the neighbors.
Councilors repeatedly expressed dismay that what was built on the site was so different from the site plan approved by the Environmental Planning Commission. In the EPC approved site plan, the stadium is shown on the west side of the lot, with another facility and some tennis courts acting as a buffer between it and the neighborhood. But it got built on the east side adjacent to Buena Vista Street, on the spot that originally held the tennis courts.
City Councilor Isaac Benton, an architect and contractor whose district includes the park in question, said this showed there was a procedural problem with how the stadium was built in its current location, in addition to the physical problems described by neighborhood residents who testified.
“When you go as a developer to the EPC, you go with a site plan,” Benton said. “What ensued is completely different, though. The site development plan sent to the DRB [development review board] was apparently administratively changed. Administrative changes are supposed to be minor, which means about 10 percent. This just jumped out at me as a very strange departure from that procedure.”
“This is the key point in a way,” Benton continued during the discussion. “We get decisions of the EPC appealed to us all the time. The EPC is the venue where the neighborhoods get notified. And this is the place where they [the neighbors] were notified, and thought they were going to get one thing, and got something altogether different.”
For this reason, he said, his bill calls for an explanation about the “egregious failure to follow our own EPC and site approval process.”
The bill the council unanimously approved last night also calls for a cost/benefit analysis within 30 days, which will then give them information about what steps can be taken to reduce the harm to the neighbors. Options discussed ranged from building a 10-foot wall with trees as a buffer, to actually moving the stadium.
The idea of moving the stadium elicited quite a bit of humor, with councilors bantering back in forth about getting out their ratchets. Even Ed Adams, the city’s chief administrative officer, got in on the fun, saying that the city would be happy to loan the councilors some toolkits.
