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Residents have been complaining about one of Rio Rancho’s busiest streets — Southern Boulevard — for years. The narrow lanes, striped with cracks, have angered locals to the point that some city councilors made addressing it a key issue during their election a year ago.
The city’s governing body agreed last month to accept an $850,000 state Department of Transportation grant to initiate a study to improve Southern Boulevard from NM 528 to Rainbow Boulevard. The city will invest $144,850 in matching funds for the study that addresses pavement needs, drainage, rights-of-way for auxiliary lanes, intersection improvements and access control.
The study also will be directed to anticipate and address concerns that might come from an environmental impact study that will likely be part of any final construction plans.
Public Works Director Scott Sensanbaugher said the city will use leftover money from a 2009 bond issue for construction on Unser Boulevard for its match.
Once the city has the study in-hand, Sensanbaugher said the city will be able to leverage it to obtain more than $7 million from the federal government in 2017 — money he said the feds are already planning to allocate to the city. But, he said, that amount won’t be enough to fix the entire study area, so he would tell construction crews to work on the worst part of the street first.
Applying that triage to the two miles between NM 528 and Unser Boulevard would surely quiet many of the angry residents who use it as a main thoroughfare and begin to chip away at the overall project.
Money for the study has come to the city earlier than expected, which allows Sensanbaugher to seek additional funding sources between now and 2017. Once the city possesses the study of the entire project, the city should complete the project by replacing sections of the road as money allows. That way, instead of just making repairs that temporarily address Southern’s problems, it will eventually complete all changes the study recommends.
The federal government has been prioritizing funding projects based on whether they are “shovel-ready,” a political term used to describe large-scale infrastructure projects where the planning, engineering and funding have advanced to the point where all that projects need to start up are the laborers.
Through Sensanbaugher’s leadership, the city may get the Southern Boulevard plan advanced enough that it would qualify as a “shovel-ready” project. By doing so, the city may be able to extend its dollars even more.
To use a baseball analogy, the governing body and Sensanbaugher are ahead of the curve and may be able to hit a home run. That’s how we like to see our tax dollars spent.
