Opening Open Space

Santa Fe County Commission sets aside $150,000 to solve its open space woes

The Ortiz Mountains Educational Preserve, shuttered to the public for a month, may be reopened for occasional guided tours, in keeping with the spirit of the parcel—an outdoor mining museum at 8,000 feet.

Maria Lohman, the county's program manager for open space, tells SFR that her staff plans to bring the idea before the Santa Fe County Commission for approval at its June 30 meeting.

But that's just the temporary plan on how to deal with the 1,300-acre property, owned by the county for nearly a decade, but traditionally managed by the Santa Fe Botanical Garden up until this spring.

The long-term solution with the property should start to surface by this winter, when the county starts the process of hiring a consultant to draft a management plan. Bids are expected to go out in December.

The dilemma facing the Ortiz preserve is just the latest piece of county property considered "open space" yet taxpayers don't have access to it. It's a problem that the Santa Fe County Commission hopes to solve by setting aside $150,000 for consultant fees for fiscal year 2016.

On May 15, the Botanical Garden's board of directors decided the road leading up to the preserve was too rocky and risky for vehicular traffic. So it decided to sever its role of giving tours, citing liability concerns.

Other properties facing public access obstacles include Thornton Ranch and Petroglyph Hill in Galisteo, where tours are also conducted on case by case basis; and La Bajada Ranch, where county staff are already negotiating for a private lease.

As Terry Lease, the county's operations manager for open space, has noted: "Not all pieces of open space were necessarily meant to be open to the public at all times."

Yet the county, he says, is trying to make them open. It just might take some time finding the middle ground between public access and conservation.

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