Progress gets approval
Armijo says eastside residents support development plans

By Zsombor Peter
Staff Writer

GALLUP — Most eastside residents say they have no problems with a proposed city ordinance that would usher in decades of development around their neighborhood, according to Mary Ann Armijo.

As the City Council's eastside representative, Armijo is taking extra care to find out how her constituents feel about the plan for "mixed use" zoning, a fancy term that basically means developers will be allowed to build commercial, residential and recreational facilities in tight clusters. Given their proximity to the proposed site, some 800 acres just beyond the city's easternmost limits, they'll be the ones living with most of the benefits and the costs.

Armijo postponed council action and called a special meeting of the Indian Hills Neighborhood Association to gauge her district's mood. The council will consider the plan next week.

"Most of the people (who) read it were OK with it," said Armijo, now that they've had a chance to peruse the official document and think it over. "There really isn't a lot of opposition."

However, that's not to say there's been none.

"Probably there were five percent that were opposed," she said. "Their main concern is the entrances."

With more development comes more traffic. And it's not just the five percenters who are worried that the small web of two-lane roads that now cap the city's east end won't be able to handle it.

"I think the project in general will add value to the neighborhood," Mike Daly said during a past meeting of the neighborhood association. But even he called the neighborhood's modest access routes a "kink" in the plan.

As things stand, the main route in and out of the neighborhood is Toltec Drive, a poorly marked route even now. Any further development in the area will only add to its burdens unless, of course, someone builds another access road.

"We're not going to add to the problem," assured Tom Leatherwood, the private consultant helping the Rehoboth-Red Mesa Foundation the group that owns the land along Gallup's eastern border develop its plan. "We want to augment the solution."

To that end, the drawings he and the foundation showed the neighborhood association imagines a new road just east of Exit 26 connecting their 800 acres to Highway 66 across Interstate 40. If it comes to pass, it could take a lot of pressure off of Toltec and the entire Indian Hills neighborhood. But for now, it's little more than a vision.

Such access roads, and all the other details about the mixed use neighborhoods the foundation hopes to build on its land, will all be part of its in-the-works master plan. The impact those neighborhoods have on the ones that already exist will depend heavily on exactly what that plan looks like.

But first, the foundation needs the City Council's permission to build the sort of mixed use neighborhood it wants. That permission is what the council will be voting on next week. A master plan and a request that the city annex its 800 acres aren't likely to be ready until much later this year.

The foundation, a body of the Christian Reform Church, plans on preserving two-thirds of its 800 acres as open space. Shops, entertainment venues and some 400 residential units from single-unit houses to multi-story apartment complexes would take up most of the rest.

It's not something that would happen overnight. Rhonda Berg, the foundation's executive director, said it would evolve over the course of three, four, maybe five decades pending the council's approval, of course.