Las Cruces leaders hope to create focal point for city lost in urban renewal
Las Cruces Sun-News POSTED: 07/18/2015 10:38:15 PM MDT
By Diana Alba Soular
LAS CRUCES >> When city leaders and citizens gather Friday for the ceremonial groundbreaking on a downtown plaza, it will be the culmination of more than two decades of planning, praying and pushing — and the start of about a year’s worth of building. Plaza supporters said the event will mark a major milestone in the effort to revive downtown and correct the errors of a failed revitalization attempt that started in the 1960s.
A key goal of this central gathering space, with its planned splash pad and covered stage, is to attract more people and new investment that will ultimately spur economic development in the downtown area. But the second aim, they said, is to boost the quality of life in Las Cruces by creating a venue people — tourists and locals — like to visit.
“It brings a focal point to the downtown,” said City Councilor Miguel Silva, who represents the district that includes the new plaza. “We really don’t have a focal point. That’s really some of the value it brings to the overall plan of downtown revitalization.”
The plaza will be built over the course of about a year on a 1.95-acre parcel of land just south of the Bank of the West building. The land now holds a bank drive-through formerly owned by Bank of the West and a historical monument owned by the Catholic Diocese of Las Cruces. The city bought the land Wednesday.
Faded glory
A decade ago, a walk through portions of Las Cruces’ downtown on most days called to mind an abandoned movie set.
Main Street was closed to vehicle traffic. Sidewalks covered the historic street, topped overhead by permanent canopies. And, while there were buildings interspersed with businesses and nonprofits throughout the so-called outdoor pedestrian mall, there weren’t many pedestrians — except during the twice-a-week farmers and crafts market.
The city’s once-vibrant center was in a state of stagnation that many residents trace back to urban renewal — a city attempt in the late 1960s and early ’70s to revitalize the downtown area. Instead of revival, the project had the opposite effect, as business and traffic dwindled.
By the early 1990s, when former Mayor Ruben Smith first took office, the languishing status was fully felt. Smith, when asked whether people were disappointed at the time with the aftermath of urban renewal, replied: “Disappointment, I think, was probably an understatement.”
It was about that time the city launched its first efforts to correct those mistakes downtown, Smith said. A plan at the time identified three major needs: memorializing the historic St. Genevieve Catholic Church torn down in the ’60s, reopening Main Street to traffic and building a civic plaza.
“Those three probably had the unanimous support of everybody,” he said. “There was a strong conviction and commitment that we had to get those three things done if in fact we were going to revitalize downtown. So I was very, very excited the city is finally in the position of starting on the plaza.”
A memorial was erected in the late ’90s to mark the historic church. And in August 2005, city officials hosted a ceremony that marked the start of demolition of the downtown mall and reopening of Main Street, which had been closed to vehicles since the early ’70s, according to Sun-News archives. After years of construction in the multi-phase project, the street reopened entirely in November 2012.
Since reopening Main Street, the city has spent about $9 million on downtown revitalization, if the recent land purchase and plaza construction costs are factored in, said City Manager Robert Garza.
‘Turning point’
Over the years, downtown revitalization — plaza construction included — has faced a number of challenges. There have been multiple city councils and administrators in place since the effort began. Ideas have varied about how to accomplish revitalization. And perhaps the biggest challenge of all, city officials said, was finding a source of revenue for the costly endeavor.
The “turning point” was the city’s establishment of a special taxing district, known as a Tax Increment Development District, Silva said. It provided a source of money for the redevelopment projects, he said.
The district, established in October 2007, is a geographic area surrounding downtown in which portions of city, county and state shares of sales and property taxes are collected for the purpose of downtown revitalization.
To date, $9.93 million has been collected through the TIDD, according to the city.
Las Cruces Mayor Ken Miyagishima said during Gov. Gary Johnson’s administration in the 1990s, local governments weren’t getting much funding help for big projects from the state. Then, a state law passed under then-Gov. Bill Richardson, who took office in 2003, allowed for the redevelopment districts to be created. The city took advantage of the opportunity to create a TIDD — a strategy that’s become “something of a model for other communities” looking to revitalize their downtowns, he said. Without the tax district, the city would either have to scrape together funding from another source — or more likely — not build the projects at all.
“It’s definitely the instrumental part,” Miyagishima said.
City councilors in recent weeks sold the former city hall on Church Street to a private company to generate more than $1 million toward civic plaza construction.
In addition, of the $9 million spent so far on downtown revitalization, about $3.5 million stemmed from non-TIDD funds — money used for the Main Street work. Garza said nearly $2 million came from grants and legislative appropriations.
Other hurdles
In addition to finding money for the downtown revitalization, some challenges were specific to the proposed plaza itself, including that the ideal parcel was privately owned, city officials said.
Silva said the bank’s ownership changed several times. And the owners were always headquartered in another state, making negotiations harder. And the price kept climbing.
“Over the years, it was always difficult to find an agreement in regards to the price and the quantity of land,” he said. “It’s taken a while, but we’re finally there.”
On Wednesday, the city — via a go-between purchaser, Las Cruces Community Partners, which is also the plaza developer — bought the land in a multiparty real-estate sale.
Las Cruces Community Partners purchased the Bank of the West and church land from the owners of those parcels. The city, in turn, bought the subdivided plaza land from the developer for $1.42 million.
LCCP owned the plaza “for a split second,” Miyagishima said.
The city also placed $4.26 million in escrow to be paid to LCCP incrementally, as the company does work over the next year on the plaza.
“They’ll get paid for how much they accomplish each month,” Miyagishima said.
City officials said the deal with LCCP is structured so that, even if something goes wrong with construction, the city will still own the land for the plaza — itself a step forward from past years.
LCCP will be paid an 8 percent “overhead, profit and management fee,” amounting to about $450,000, for carrying out plaza construction, Garza said.
As for the land sale, Garza said LCCP is not actually making a profit directly. Rather, the developers, who’ll retain ownership of the Bank of the West building, are counting on the building to gain value by remodeling the structure. The plaza also should boost the value.
Delayed start
City administrators thought toward the end of last year they were narrowing in on the start of construction on the plaza. But the City Council didn’t like the fact that the plans left out a permanent stage. Councilors added it back in, prompting a delay, as revisions to construction plans and a key pricing agreement with LCCP had to be redone.
It may have taken years to reach this point, but the revitalization so far, as well as the plaza itself, hasn’t been a simple task, said Arianna Parsons, executive director of the nonprofit Downtown Las Cruces Partnership, which promotes downtown renewal. There’s been a lot of work done on the plaza proposal.
“It’s all a matter of timing and getting the right players in place, and that’s not something that comes around very often, as we’ve seen,” she said. “It’s not at all surprising that it took this amount of time.”