Developer to tour event center sites

By Zsombor Peter
Staff Writer

GALLUP — The community's latest hopes for a multi-purpose, multi-million dollar events center are riding on a private developer from Canada.

Gallup Development Commission Director Glen Benefield said the developer will arrive Tuesday to tour some of the sites in and around town where he might build the center. If he likes what he sees, he's reportedly offered to build and operate the facility at his own expense.

Because their talks are preliminary, Benefield won't say who the developer is, only that he's based in the west coast province of British Columbia.

During his visit, the developer will be touring sites selected by a committee of city and county officials. City Manager Eric Honeyfield said the group has narrowed a dozen initially suggested sites down to five and spent an hour Monday morning brainstorming pros and cons for each.

The county has been here before. It spent some $3,000 on an Albuquerque architecture firm to come up with a half-dozen potential sites in 2005. But the study hasn't been much help to the committee; only one of the sites the firm suggested just east of Harold Runnels Pool has made its short list.

The problem with the 2005 study is that it focused too much on downtown Gallup, where it made four of its six recommendations. Back then, that was the point.

"The whole concentration at the time was the revitalization of downtown," said McKinley County Manager Tom Trujillo.

The idea was that a downtown events center would create more business for the shops and restaurants around it, helping to revitalize a struggling commercial neighborhood. But with time, revitalization gave way to other priorities to cost, to space, to traffic.

"When reality sets in," Trujillo said, "and you realize you need to find a 20-acre site, we just realized we can't do downtown, not without knocking down a whole bunch of buildings."

"There's just too many problems," he said, "too many properties we would have to buy, too much traffic ... especially the traffic."

Consequently, the sight by the pool is the closest the committee's recommendations come to downtown Gallup.

According to Benefield, it's also one of the two sites the developer currently favors most; the city has sent him aerial photos of each to study before his visit. The other site sits on the west side of N.M. Highway 602 across from the Gallup Sports Complex. Benefield said the developer appreciated the proximity to downtown Gallup of the former, and the supply of available land around both.

Of the other three sites, one sits south of Interstate 40 across from Wal-Mart, another off of the Nizhoni Boulevard extension that runs toward Gallup High School, according to Trujillo.

The committee may be getting along with the question of where to build an events center, but it's barely asked whether an events center should even come to Gallup. In 2004, the last time the county asked the city to consider the idea, most of the city councilors shied away for a myriad of financial reasons, including doubts that Gallup had the market to even support a center. They worried about competition with Albuquerque and Phoenix, and the modest incomes of local residents.

The feasibility study the county paid for does not go far in allaying their concerns. It declares Gallup a "good potential market area," but offers scant evidence for the claim, and concedes a need for more research which has yet to be done.

Even so, former County Commission Chairman Harry Mendoza encouraged by the example of Hobbs believes it could work. The southeastern New Mexico city of 29,000 built a 4,300 seat, $12 million center on 13 acres in 1994. According to Mendoza, it's costing $600,000 a year to run and covers 90 percent of its expenses. He believes Gallup has a larger market of potential patrons to draw from and could do even better.

"If you get the right operator and the right (events), I think you can break even and maybe even make a profit," he said.

The committee envisions a slightly larger facility than the one in Hobbs, something with up to 5,000 seats and as many parking spaces sitting on 15 to 20 acres and likely to cost more.

Of course, market potential won't matter to local tax payers so much if this mystery developer from Canada agrees to take on all the financial risk by building and operating the events center on his own.

"If the guy's for real, I think it's a real good deal for Gallup," said Mendoza.

Benefield said city and county staff have already begun looking into the developer's background; the reference checks they've conducted so far have been positive. They still don't know how the developer plans on financing a center here.

"That's what we're going to find out Tuesday," Benefield said.