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Journal North: Home | Sports | Opinion | Obits | Entertainment
Saturday, February 21, 2009
3 Offices Moving To New Complex
By Vic Vela
Journal Staff Writer
Moving vans arrived at one of the Thornburg companies' downtown Santa Fe offices Friday afternoon, the start of a weeklong move into Thornburg's new $45 million new digs northwest of town.
Thornburg Investment Management Inc., is the first part of the Thornburg organization to move into the new campus, located off N.M. 599 at the intersection of Ridgeway Road and Avenida Rincon, with Thornburg Mortgage, Inc., scheduled to follow next weekend.
The move into the new 102,000-square-foot office complex will mark the first time about 400 Thornburg employees from various branches of the financial services group will work under the same roof — staff has been split into three downtown offices on Lincoln, Washington and Marcy streets.
The investment side of the business is expected to resume international trading, beginning Sunday evening, while mortgage staffers will leave work early Friday and return the morning of March 2.
“All the staff is immensely excited,” said David M. Miller, Thornburg's managing director of corporate communications. “We've had a lot of bumps along the way, but we're going be really happy to be together.”
Those bumps included a court challenge by neighbors who argued that the office campus was out of scale with the surrounding area of expensive homes and the serious troubles of Thornburg Mortgage, which has been caught up in the nationwide housing market and mortgage loan disaster.
Thornburg Mortgage's stock, which traded for more than $28 in the summer of 2007, was going for a nickel Friday.
Miller did not directly respond when asked if the move into the new facility could result in a morale boost for the struggling mortgage side of business, choosing to laud the employees instead.
“All of our staff are some of the best talent in New Mexico and the U.S.,” Miller said. “We're all a very motivated and positive group.”
The slick new facility with views of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains is eco-friendly. A 50,000-gallon cistern that holds roof runoff water is expected to provide the water necessary for landscaping and the building should use only about half the energy of an older building of similar size, Miller told the Journal last summer.
One of the last legal disputes over the construction of the building was apparently settled this week, when the state Court of Appeals upheld a lower court decision that Concerned Residents of Santa Fe North — the group that opposed construction of the Thornburg office campus — has no right to enforce restrictive covenants in the Santa Fe Estates area where the Thornburg building was built.
Thornburg's move to outskirts of town is something new for a big Santa Fe employer. It remains to be seen what will happen to the office space that Thornburg has occupied for years in the vicinity of City Hall.
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