County commissioners select top east side alignment routes

The top three alignments for a road connecting the new Los Lunas Boulevard, which is still under construction, to Valencia County’s east side were selected by county commissioners recently.

Since October 2023, Valencia County staff has been working with Albuquerque engineering firm Molzen Corbin, studying alternate routes from the termination point of Los Lunas Boulevard on N.M. 47 to Manzano Expressway on the county’s east side.

At the Feb. 18 county commission meeting, county grant manager Jeremias Silva and Wyatt Kartchner, vice president of Molzen Corbin, brought a total of 12 possible routes to the commissioners, five more than what the commissioners saw last year.

“This has indications of the right of way, the number of homes impacted, mileage and so forth,” Silva said. “We would like to see a straight shot (east) and avoid dog legs to the north and south.”

Kartchner told the commissioners the project was in the “A/B” phase, where the dozen alignment options needed to be narrowed down by them and then taken to the public for input to select the final alignment.

The commissioners unanimously selected alignment alternatives 6, 7 and 12. All three alignments connect to the boulevard where it ties into N.M. 47 near Otero Road and end at Manzano Expressway, where it intersects with Airport Drive.

Alternate 6 is 3.15 miles long and uses Orona Road on its western end. Before it connects to the expressway, the proposed corridor runs along the southern edge of Cypress Gardens, where the subdivision has been platted but not yet developed. It crosses 68 parcels, impacts 18 structures/homes and crosses seven canals/irrigation ditches.

Alternate 7 uses no existing roads and is 3.06 miles long. It crosses 63 parcels, impacts 17 structures/homes and crosses seven canals/irrigation ditches.

Alternate 12 is also an entirely new road, 3.34 miles in length. It crosses 69 parcels, impacts 7 structures/homes and crosses nine canals/irrigation ditches.

Alternates 7 and 12 also run south of Cypress Gardens.

These three alternates will be taken to the public for input, but a timeline for that step hasn’t been set.

Once a single alignment has been selected, Kartchner said the next steps would be environmental studies to comply with the National Environmental Policy Act, then design. The right-of-way mapping and acquisition would begin once the project was 30 percent designed. Buying property for the right-of-way will follow the federal process as defined by the Federal Highway Administration, he said.

Earlier this year, Silva said the feasibility study for the east side extension is going until the end of 2027, with the end result of the project “a decade out.”

The purpose of the project is to pull increased traffic off of N.M. 47 and route it east, once the Los Lunas Boulevard project is complete. The new road, which will connect Interstate 25 to N.M. 47 is slated to be finished in summer 2029.

If traffic can be taken all the way east to the expressway, then people have the choice of going north to Meadow Lake, east to El Cerro Mission and Monterey Park or south to Rio Communities, Silva said.

“We know we’re going to have a lot of traffic on 47 to go north and south, and that’s going to use local, county streets,” Kartchner said of the impact of the new road.

Manzano Expressway is about 3.5 miles east of 47 using existing roads, according to Google maps. The expressway starts at Meadow Lake Road and then runs south/southwest for about 17 miles before it connects to N.M. 47 at the Belen river bridge on it’s southern end.

At full build out, the Los Lunas project will be a divided highway with two lanes each direction, east and west. Kartchner noted it will be a “mover of vehicles” with limited access from driveways.

“When you look at the alternates to the east, it’s not so easy to do that because there’s so much development to the east,” he said. “It’s hard to control access like on the other project, which means frontage roads and a larger impact. There will be more access points than on the boulevard.

“Unfortunately, there isn’t an option without (impact to) parcels and none that doesn’t impact a structure or home.”

Kartchner said the east side project needs 110 feet of right of way and advised it be purchased all at one time, to avoid a “Bandaid approach,” noting property owners are never happy when road projects take land but coming back twice “makes them really, really mad. We found that out with the Los Lunas Boulevard project.”

While the purchase of the right of way should be done all at once, the actual construction of the roadway includes phased options, the engineer said, including one lane in each direction like the Los Lunas project is doing.

“Since this is a rural area, a raised median might not be a good solution, so some areas with two lanes and a left turn may be more practical since there are so many entries,” Kartchner said. “This is a rural area and that is important to maintain.”

When the top three alignments are presented to the public, Kartchner said he anticipated a lot of concerns, as is typical with these types of projects.

“How is this going to impact things really? New Mexico 6 is a mess. It doesn’t take a genius to see that. How will the Los Lunas Boulevard improve and change traffic patterns,” he said. “We don’t want to necessarily look at flow options that won’t really change things.”

In the initial public input meetings with all three options, there might be feedback gathered that leads to “tweaks” to the alignments “and we can do traffic modeling and come back with a recommended alternate. We may move into Phase C (environmental documentation) with more than one option, depending on what you decide. We don’t want to recommend something with a fatal flaw right off the bat.”

Kartchner also told the commissioners the number of estimated parcels and structures impacted were calculated on the full build out of the road.

“As you go through the right-of-way process, some of that will change. We might find a parcel isn’t big enough or we might take a full parcel versus a partial. This is very preliminary,” he said.