Saturday, January 1, 2005

Students with vision

Ideas about rail stops in county unveiled

Haley Wachdorf News-Bulletin Staff Writer; hwachdorf@news-bulletin.com

Belen Belen and Los Lunas residents will soon be able to get a glimpse of what the proposed commuter rail stops in each town might look like. Since this fall, students from the University of New Mexico's Design Planning and Assistance Center have been designing possible plans for each stop as part of a required course for design and architecture majors.

Program director Mark Childs said he receives 10 times the number of applications for the students' services than they could actually accept. But for the communities whose projects are chosen, the students' best ideas and design skills are made available for free.

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The students have spent time in Valencia County getting to know the area and gathering information. In November, the students held open houses to display their initial concepts and heard input from the community. On Tuesday and Wednesday, the students returned to display their final design ideas. The ideas will be made into a book and a version will be placed on the Web site for the Heart of Belen, a downtown revitalization project of the Greater Belen Economic Development Corporation.

Claudette Bace, executive director of GBEDC, said she had never heard of the DPAC program before she approached the group about Belen's project, but she was very pleased with the results.

"We've been working with them for four months now, and it's just been exciting to see them when they came in and their eyes were all wide open and now they have all these different ideas," she said. "I've just been walking through these projects with the mayor, and saying 'This could work.' This could actually come to fruition, and the biggest obstacle now is just trying to find the funding."

In Belen, Baca hopes to see rail customers venture out from the rail station and into downtown Belen, where GBEDC and the City of Belen are working to make the area up and down Becker Avenue and down to First Street more accessible to pedestrians and tourists. The problem is that the rail station is going to be located across the Reinken Avenue bridge and the tracks of the Burlington Northern Santa Fe freight line.

UNM-DPAC student Jeremy Alford was assigned the task of designing possible ways for commuters who are interested in crossing over to the downtown Belen area. Alford said that initially his ideas were fairly limited, but after talking with the community, he expanded his designs to include every possible option Belen might ever want to add.

"I just went nuts," he said. "Last time, I think I had an elevator and a ramp. And this time, we've got elevators, we've got stairs, we've got a bridge, everybody can get on the train and get off the train. I think eventually you would want them all. But I think they can be phased as the need arises."

Jill Reisz, who was in charge of developing ways to incorporate public art into the designs for the area, started out with the idea of an art train that could serve as a moving display or gallery space traveling between the stops. She is now considering pursuing the art train as a thesis project. And, since the first meeting, she expanded her ideas to include an art bike program. Reisz said that she was inspired by communities that have started bicycle restoration programs to encourage alternative transportation.

"They could fix older broken bikes donated and they could be sold, or we could start a free bike program," she said. "I think this is an excellent opportunity right now for public art as creating an identity and a sense of place. The commuter rail is going to bring a lot of change for these communities, so this is an excellent opportunity to bring people into the towns."

Childs said that he has been pleased that the communities of Belen and Los Lunas were open to his students. But now, Childs said, it's time for the communities to take the ideas presented by students and decide what they want to do.

"Now, we're done, and it's the community's job to say 'OK, interesting ideas, how do we do those,' and to work with the mayor and the council and the council of governments and say 'What can we do?'" he said. "Our job is to raise questions and dialogue and then let the community decide what it wants to talk about and do."

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