Bernalillo County commissioners approve a new plan and a new park for Mountain View neighborhood

The Mountain View neighborhood will get a new sector plan and could be home to a new park.

The rural neighborhood to the south of Albuquerque, just north of Pueblo of Isleta and near the Rio Grande, is also home to industrial businesses.

The Bernalillo County Commission unanimously agreed to spend $1.25 million from the county general fund to create a new sector plan and an environmental improvement plan for the neighborhood and to acquire land for and start designing and building a new public park.

The environmental improvement plan should document pollution in the neighborhood and aggregate data from work that different entities, such as the New Mexico Environment Department and Environmental Protection Agency, are already doing in the area, said Commissioner Eric Olivas, who sponsored the measures.

“This is a front-line community that really lacks a lot of community investment,” Olivas said. “We have a community center there that’s just been named, and that’s about it. ... There’s the Valle de Oro (wildlife refuge) there, there’s the bosque, but that’s a very different green space than a park. You don’t play soccer in the bosque. The bosque is a beautiful place, a wonderful place to recreate, but they’re very different.”

The money will not be enough for the full cost of a park and may not be enough to purchase land for a park, said Commissioner Steven Michael Quezada, who sponsored the sector plan motion. Mountain View is in District 2, Quezada’s district.

“I think this is a start, and I’m hoping that when I’m gone Vice-Chair Olivas will continue to keep advocating for the money and follow through on the park for the design, the build, which will probably end up being somewhere around the ballpark of about $3 to 4 million,” Quezada said.

The sector plan will not change any zoning in the area but should help the county plan ways to attract different kinds of businesses to the neighborhood, Quezada said.

“If you’ve been in Mountain View all these years, then you know that it has been historically earmarked for the polluting type of industries, whether it’s ground or whether it’s air. ... What we’re trying to do is incentivize through a sector plan bringing in different types of industries,” Quezada said.