The University of New Mexico has lost out big time because of the greed of the Board of Regents and administration back in 1985. It has now been announced by Forest City, the developers of Mesa Del Sol south of the Albuquerque International Airport, that they are pulling out. This development should be a prospering community by now but the conflicted Board of Regents back in 1985 killed the development of the planned community because they wanted to figure out a way of taking the land held in trust for them by the State Land Commissioner and getting it into their own hands, thus depriving the permanent fund of the money. I was Commissioner at the time and had worked closely with UNM to make sure the planned community would work. I even parceled out a 480 acre section for them to use as they needed. They agreed to the process but when bids were opened on the first 2700 acre allotment the Board of Regents, heavily salted with conflicts of interest from westside developers, stopped the process and the winning bidder walked away.
Nothing was done with the project for years and the west side took all of the development. Mesa del Sol withered and missed the boom. The permanent fund lost big time and now that money is gone forever. And UNM's current administration gets screwed for it.
3 comments:
How about naming names? Who were the Regents, and what were the conflicts?
Its web site bills it as "a new place designed to celebrate art and industry, the individual and the community, Mother Nature and common sense."
In other words, doomed from the beginning.
Just drive around the west side and everywhere you see developments that are the exact opposite of that, and according to Jim, the board was "heavily salted with conflicts of interest from westside developers."
People don't engage in Capitalism to help out the community. If enough people in the community want to regulate Capitalism it can result in benefits to the community, but if not, it won't. As long as Capitalism is our economic system it will keep tending toward what the Republicans want. Capitalist control of everything. Fascism.
http://mesadelsolnm.com/
I'm emphasizing a point Jim didn't, but it's one prism though which anything like this can be viewed.
Idiocy is another. Just a few posts ago you were mentioning some of the stupid legislation Republicans were putting forth in Santa Fe. Now today this bill that would prosecute women for destroying evidence if they have an abortion is making national news. Some other stupid thing will soon knock it off the front pages but activists in the women's movement might be using it as an example for a long time.
Albuquerque does not seem to have a good history of urban planning, if you can call it that. And I know some are hostile to the concept. Since the '60's I've been hearing about how Albuquerque is just one more big project/company away from becoming a real city, but it never happened. My wife and I are planning on retiring to Portland next year, because of it's infrastructure, which makes life better for everyone, not just wealthy elites. While living there a few years back, we easily got by with one car and had a walkable neighborhood, and we are not seeing anything remotely like that in NM, other that the usual gated suburbs, almost sealed off from the rest of town. Mesa Del sol is probably going to end up being another upscale suburb.
We will miss much of NM, but it's not worth it to spend our retirement in a city that still, has no center.
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