Where the Pavement Ends

A section of West Alameda Street will remain closed until at least August or September as crews repair a section of the road that caved in during late March, city officials say.

Severing the major east-west thoroughfare between Coyote Ridge Road and Camino Vistas Encantada, the closure has upended traffic in the area.

And at a meeting with local residents on Tuesday, city officials signaled that months of work lay ahead to reopen the road.

Public Works Director Regina Wheeler placed much of the blame on poor construction. She says the road caved in when a culvert failed. But the culvert was not constructed or engineered properly when Santa Fe County last widened the road, she argued.

“I don’t think it was engineered, period,” she told SFR after a community meeting on the project at the Genoveva Chavez Community Center.

The city took over the road in 2013 when it annexed land to the south. A study completed in 2021 said the culvert would need to be replaced. But the project, and a larger plan to widen West Alameda Street, has not been funded and the city and county have been in negotiations over annexing a nearby section of Agua Fria.

Still, some residents question whether large trucks may also be partly to blame for the culvert’s failure. Wheeler dismissed the suggestion, though some in attendance Tuesday night—including Alma Castro, a candidate to represent District 1 on the City Council—raised the prospect of limiting large trucks on the road just as the city does on some other roads in Santa Fe.

Wheeler says the city will entirely replace this section of the road and plans to include wider pipes—two 60-inch pipes, instead of two 54-inch pipes—to better handle heavier flows of water moving through the arroyo beneath the road. And the project will aim to slow those flows to prevent erosion.

Among the factors complicating construction are utility lines that run beneath the road. CenturyLink and New Mexico Gas will need to replace lines along this section of the street, according to city officials.

The mayor and council are expected to vote Wednesday night to approve $720,000 in funding for the project, which would employ the city’s on-call contractor GM Emulsion. Designs should be complete the week of June 5, with eight to 12 weeks of construction following.

Still, the months of waiting mean longer detours for some in the area.

“All of us feel like the timeline is frustrating,” District 1 Councilor Renee Villarreal told SFR after the meeting.