Las Cruces contemplates renewal of major corridors and neighborhoods

LAS CRUCES — A family sat together at a picnic table enjoying hamburgers loaded with toppings and french fries, eating outdoors in a parking lot on a corner of El Paseo Road.

Nearby, the food truck that produced their meal stood wrapped in vibrant graffiti-style art, with music playing as laughter and the smell of food on the grill wafted from the truck. The business, Deputy Dawgz and Smash Burgers, had just weathered a lunch rush and the crew of three were catching their breath.

The truck sits next to a building that once housed a succession of restaurants, but has been empty for years. Business partners Gino Rizzon, Jeffrey Koza and Todd Roberts plan to transfer the business into a sit-down burger and hot dog restaurant once renovations to the building are complete. In the meantime, the building has gotten a fresh coat of paint and is now wrapped in lavish designs by the same artist who painted the food truck.

“It’s been kicking up, bro,” Rizzon said of his business. As community builds, the Los Angeles transplant has been learning from his regulars about the history of El Paseo Road, a mixed-use corridor connecting downtown to New Mexico State University over a mile and a half south.

“This place used to be the place, the road to take if you had a nice car,” Rizzon said. “Everybody would go nice and slow down El Paseo. It wasn’t about Main Street, it was El Paseo back in the day.”

Close to downtown, Deputy Dawgz sits on a block featuring a jumble of retail stores, fast food joints and strip malls entwined with boarded-up buildings, abandoned signposts and empty lots.

Over the past decade, the city has adopted a new comprehensive plan, an overhaul of outdated planning and zoning codes, a transit plan friendly to bicycle and foot traffic and incentives for developing vacant lots. There have also been committees and draft plans specifically addressing El Paseo and S. Solano Drive, a similar corridor to the east.

Findings from those efforts were incorporated into a new draft plan discussed by the City Council during a work session Monday. The city designated the two streets and the area between them as a Metropolitan Redevelopment Area in 2023, where the city may use legal and financial mechanisms to address blighted areas and encourage private investment.

The draft MRA plan was presented by urban planning consultants Dani Wilson and Allie Caskey from Sites Southwest, an Albuquerque-based firm. The 170-page document is also presented on the city’s website for public comments.

The firm proposed that the city extend the MRA a few blocks further to University Avenue and NMSU’s properties. The council will also vote on adoption of the plan at a future session.

Input from community members showed that public safety features, from police resources to street lighting, were the top priority among the public, followed by a desire to see El Paseo become a vital and beautiful corridor once more, as well as preserving neighborhood identities within the MRA.

The aim, Wilson said, was to establish a framework the city could use to rebuild an “economically thriving and pedestrian-friendly area, something that … hearkens back to how people remember El Paseo.”

Across the street from Deputy Dawgz, a vacant movie theater was recently acquired by the Boys and Girls Club of Las Cruces, which is raising capital to renovate the building into its new headquarters.

Club CEO Ashley Chavarria told councilors she was delighted the club might help pioneer an area the MRA plan conceives as a “family services district” located near medical offices, Las Cruces Public Schools facilities and nonprofits serving children and families.

Chavarria also acknowledged the area’s challenges, as the club’s future home has contended with squatters and fires.

“I like to look at it on the positive side,” she said. “I see us as being kind of the headliner, if you will, to going in there.”

Even so, she pointed out, “The longer the buildings sit empty, the more concern we have.”