Get your kicks: What's going on with the Route 66 Visitor Center — and what's next for the $13.1M building?

Signs are being restored along Central Avenue. Events are being planned. A website is in the works.

The city boasting an 18-mile stretch of historic Route 66 is already gearing up for the iconic highway’s centennial in 2026.

But one facet — the $13.1 million Route 66 Visitor Center — has faced its own winding road to a grand opening. In the past six months, it has undergone an ownership change and lost its main vendor.

So, will the building that bears the Mother Road’s name be fully open by 2026?

“Definitely,” said Shelle Sanchez, the city’s director of the Department of Arts and Culture.

Earlier this year, the city of Albuquerque took ownership of the building, which was financed with state, city and county dollars. The Bernalillo County Commission had voted unanimously in February to drop the property from the county portfolio and declined to continue funding in April.

It’s been almost two years since the building’s ribbon cutting ceremony. The building was incomplete at the September 2022 celebration due to delayed materials and other setbacks.

“I think people underestimate the complexity of really opening and operating a facility that has this many components,” Sanchez told the Journal. “I know that there’s a lot of frustration out there, because it was a huge investment of public dollars … but I also know how complicated it is to get all of those pieces working.”

A vision of the past

The Visitor Center sits at 12300 Central SW, outside of city limits in Bernalillo County, west of the Westside Animal Shelter.

The 21,000-square-foot building is part visitor center, part museum and part event center. It includes a taproom, outdoor amphitheater and banquet hall; additional plans include a gift shop and neon sign graveyard.

Sanchez said some features may be available soon, but a full opening is unlikely until 2025. The Department of Arts and Culture webpage says information about rentals and events will be available this fall.

“We can’t wait to welcome you to the Route 66 Visitor Center, the new gem of Albuquerque, where we’re creating a vibrant cultural hub,” it says.

Celebrating Route 66 history is part of the Visitor Center, which joins similar centers around the country. There’s a Route 66 Visitor Center in Amarillo, Texas; another is in Springfield, Missouri; yet another lies in Litchfield, Illinois.

But the original vision for the Visitor Center looks to the future as much as it nods to the past. Proponents of the facility described it as a catalyst for economic development as well as a needed resource for the area.

One original goal of the project was to attract visitors to Southwest Albuquerque. West Central has suffered from “historic disinvestment,” said City Councilor Klarissa Peña, particularly after the interstate bled commerce from the stretch.

But that vision hasn’t fully materialized. Since June 2023, several key features, including the taproom, have remained closed. The building itself has been open for limited weekday hours.

Compliance issues

Bernalillo County contracted with the West Central Community Development Group, a nonprofit focused on West Side economic development, to run the facility in 2019. The group had long advocated for the center and was the only respondent to the competitive bid. It had experience organizing events like West Fest and surveying merchants in the West Central area.

The group could not be reached for comment. Board president Twyla McComb did not respond to messages left by the Journal.

The city and county agreed to kick in $500,000 annually to subsidize operations. Originally, the request for proposal did not include a dollar figure for compensation — Lisa Sedillo-White, deputy county manager for public works, said the county wanted the operator to have a say in final design and “buy-in” with the project.

The nonprofit took over the building in June 2023 and was paid $125,000 for its work.

But seven months later, the county sent a termination letter to the group, which had fallen behind on required reporting. A letter sent in late January detailed failures to comply. The group submitted required reporting to the county, late, for its first three months of occupancy. Reports for September through December weren’t submitted at all as of Jan. 31.

An audit report due last October wasn’t turned in. Neither was an annual plan, due earlier in January.

The $100,000 destined for the Visitor Center reverted to the state after the group failed to “follow all required steps to receive” it — despite several attempts from the county to reach out, according to the letter dated Jan. 30.

And bank reconciliations — a fraud-preventing transaction summary that compares the account balance to internal records — weren’t submitted for November or December as of the letter’s date.

Sedillo-White gave the group an opportunity to return to compliance. A return-to-compliance plan was due Feb. 15; Sedillo-White said the group turned in all missing documents before the deadline.

Sending the letter was the county’s “due diligence,” Sedillo-White said.

The county was expecting the building to be fully operational — with a working taproom and kitchen — by June or July 2023.

“We have a contract, and that contract says that we’re going to have a visitor center,” Sedillo-White said. “We’re going to have it operational by such-and-such time. We learned the initial plan wasn’t going as planned.”

The transfer

As early as September, Sedillo-White said, county and city staff started discussions about transferring ownership. A main reason was challenges with the liquor license, she said — the city had experience managing alcohol sales that the county didn’t.

But Sedillo-White said regardless if the WCCDG returned to compliance, the county was planning to transfer ownership. That decision required the contract to be terminated.

Records show that $250,000 in city funds were transferred to the county; Bernalillo County spokesperson Tia Bland said the county expects to return part of the funding after all expenses are identified.

From June to August, no revenue was logged — Sedillo-White said it was premature as the taproom and banquet hall were not fully operational. In the first three months, close to three dozen inquiries were submitted for event rentals.

The group spent approximately $18,000 of the $125,000 by the end of August 2023, primarily on insurance, building utilities, advertising and “other expenses,” as well as $13,000 in state dollars for exhibit materials.

In those months, the Visitor Center had 959 visitors, including attendees for one event and from three tour buses.

In fiscal year 2023, the Albuquerque Museum saw 120,409 visitors, in comparison. The National Hispanic Cultural Center had 64,485. About 85,000 Explora members visited the science center and museum.

Looking to the future

The city is developing a new roadmap for the building. Sanchez said by October, the department should have a comprehensive plan for landscaping and other features.

The city took the building under its wing in February — late in the fiscal year, Sanchez said. The building wasn’t fully operational, and there was no budget or staff set aside at that point.

“We just not have been able to plan and really dedicate resources where we’re going to do it well,” Sanchez said. “We’re going to really, I think, fulfill the promise of the investment.”

That promise includes two main features, Sanchez said: One, serving as a community event and gathering space for the West Side and two, “telling the story of Route 66 and how Central Avenue has shaped our state and our city.”

That will include both indoor and outdoor exhibition spaces. Sanchez said an outdoor sign park will weave together old and new, including historic neon signs and potentially contemporary installations.

A main feature of the building is a taproom. Sanchez said the city is in the process of securing a liquor license, which will allow for a permanent operator to come onboard — but in the interim, the space can be used for other purposes.

There’s still a long checklist to get the building ready, Sanchez said. “We’re just taking the time to do all those things right,” she said.

Sanchez said some work had been done at the site, but some projects remained incomplete. An audiovisual system had been purchased but not installed. The elevators weren’t operational.

“A lot of those things were underway,” Sanchez said. “But a lot of things didn’t get all the way to the finish line.”

‘We need it to be a success’

County Commissioner Eric Olivas said he started asking questions about the center early into his tenure. Elected in 2022, the request for proposal was approved before his term began.

Olivas said there were fundamental challenges with the business plan, and he called it “dubious” to rely on alcohol sales given the location of the building.

“It was always going to be a lift to get this to be a successful place,” Olivas said. “Particularly when you put a vendor in charge of it that perhaps wasn’t ready.”

But he said he hopes the city can transform the project to benefit the area.

“We’ve got nearly $20 million into this thing as a community,” Olivas said. “We need it to be a success.”

For Peña, there’s more to the story.

“There’s so much history, and people take snippets,” the city councilor said. “People have perceptions.”

Beyond the years from groundbreaking to ribbon cutting, Peña said the project has been in the works for decades. Events hosted at the location have been well attended, she said, but operations have been unable to keep up with interest.

Peña thinks the project is “on track” now that the city has assumed ownership. Pena said she thinks the WCCDG should occupy an advisory role in the future.

She is sponsoring a proposed ordinance up for council consideration on Monday to set up a Route 66 Visitors Center Commission, which would include four representatives designated by the WCCDG. A total of seven members of the group, including the mayor or a representative, and two city councilors would be voting members, with non-voting advisory members from Visit Albuquerque and the Hispano Chamber of Commerce.

“People say, ‘Oh, it’s been a long time since the groundbreaking,’” Peña said. “It’s been a long time for a marginalized community that has advocated from a grassroots level to get a building like this built.”

But in that time, some of the original advocates are no longer involved, Peña said. She was the executive director of the WCCDG in its early years; her husband is a past board president. It appears the group is not interested in operating the building in the future.

“We were fighting for so long for it that I think operations was (originally) part of the idea,” Peña said. “But then all of a sudden, they’re building the damn building.”

County Commissioner Steven Michael Quezada, another advocate for the center, did not respond to requests for an interview.

As far as County Commissioner Barbara Baca is concerned, the center has found its new home with the city. The county did its part, Baca said, overseeing the construction, buying the land and putting in “sweat equity” — one of the reasons she didn’t support an April measure to continue county funding of the project.

The proposal, which would obligate the county to pay the city $250,000 per year for operations costs, failed for lack of a second.

Baca said she didn’t believe the center would ever become self-sufficient, as originally intended. She pointed to Explora, which she said took time to get off the ground but still requires some public funding.

“A large venue like that is a difficult thing to run without some subsidy,” Baca said. “... It’s a tall order for a facility of that size to be self-sustaining by a private nonprofit.”

The original plan

In the original proposal submitted by the WCCDG, the group said it would hire a part-time employee to staff the center while event rentals ramped up, allowing for more staff to be hired.

But analysts were unconvinced by that business plan, in a 2020 market report.

“The proposed WCCDG staffing concept of beginning operations with a .5 FTE (full-time equivalent) position and scaling up operations based on increasing revenues is — in our opinion — not a viable business model,” the report stated.

Originally, event rentals were intended to subsidize building operations, which was billed as a self-sufficient enterprise.

In a March 2019 email obtained by the Journal, a county official expressed concerns about the period of time between the opening and when revenues would allow for adequate staffing to Nancy Montaño, then-executive director of the WCCDG. Elias Archuleta, then the Public Works Technical Services Department director, wanted to ensure there was a “viable plan” in place.

“If the center can not adequately staff the center and pay its bills during this time, it will not make it to the point where it has a full-time paid staff,” Archuleta said.

The market report cautioned that while the location would be good at snagging visitors driving into Albuquerque from other locations, the “remote location” may make it a struggle to compete with other facilities for local weddings and banquets — and make it difficult to find a taproom tenant as “everyday customers have other bars and restaurants at more convenient locations to their home or place of work.”

But the location didn’t dissuade the founders of Rio Bravo Brewing Co. Between car shows and other events, part of the building’s allure, they thought it could grow into a lucrative second location.

“We saw what they were trying to do, and felt that it would be a great fit for us,” said Rio Bravo Brewing Co. co-founder Randy Baker.

They took a swing at becoming a tenant. But questions remained. Goals, management, security and even the operating hours were uncertain, Baker said.

“That sat in the crockpot for about six months,” Baker said. “Then we got the ‘Dear John’ letter.”

That letter took the form of a Zoom call in which Baker said he was told the nonprofit was planning to go in a different direction. He still thinks the center is a good idea, and in the future — with a solid plan — Rio Bravo might be interested in applying again.

“They put the wagon long before the horse … I know they’re utilizing the place, but not to the potential it has,” Baker said. “Just be nice to see something happen out there.”