Bernalillo County gets $900,000 for tradeport project

Interstate 40 has long been a trade route for goods from California’s shores to travel to growing markets in Texas, the South, the Midwest and beyond. Bernalillo and Sandoval counties are aiming to be a more useful hub for that movement of goods.

The U.S. Department of Transportation has awarded Bernalillo County $974,000 to plan, study and begin designing an I-40 Tradeport Corridor. GLD Partners of Scottsdale, Arizona, has been contracted to plan the project, Sandoval County Manager Wayne Johnson said.

Albuquerque’s metro area is a small piece of a much longer I-40 trade route plan that begins at California’s port of Los Angeles, then travels through Kingman and Winslow, Arizona, before reaching the Albuquerque area.

“I-40 connects New Mexico communities and businesses to some of the largest markets and trade opportunities in America,” Sen. Martin Heinrich said in a statement. “I’ve been proud to advocate for and now welcome this strategic federal investment to modernize the I-40 corridor. This funding will help prepare the whole region for more clean and electric delivery vehicles on the road and maintain New Mexico’s central position in our nation’s supply chain and shipping network.”

The I-40 Tradeport Corridor project is meant to simplify the country’s supply chain and ease the backup of goods at the Port of Los Angeles by creating trade ports that can move those goods inland faster, Bernalillo County Executive Development Officer Marcos Gonzales said.

The importance of a functional supply chain was highlighted during the COVID-19 pandemic when a crippled supply chain created shortages of a wide range of goods.

“Even now, if you’re talking about affordable housing issues — there’s somebody that can’t get the screws that go into making the project, the lumber shortages — all those things are adding to the cost of building housing in general, too,” Gonzales said. “So, everything is going up. If we can find ways to make it efficient and make sure that products actually get to where they need to be, we can kind of do some cost control on our public projects and even our affordable housing projects.”

The plan in the Albuquerque area is to build a fueling station for hydrogen- and electric-powered vehicles and to build warehouses for goods transported along I-40. The money from the USDOT’s infrastructure accelerator program is essentially seed money for developing the infrastructure project.

“The thing that’s really driving it is California throwing down the gauntlet of, by 2035, all trucks need to be not using petro fuel in the state,” Gonzales said. “So that’s really pushing a lot of shippers.”

I-40 is already an active shipping route. In 2017, 47 million tons of commodities came through New Mexico along I-40, according to a freight analysis framework created by the Federal Highway Administration’s Bureau of Transportation Statistics. The freight analysis predicted that by 2050, 86 million tons of commodities will travel through the Land of Enchantment along I-40.

The funding application to the Department of Transportation proposed a 6,000-acre facility with warehousing and distribution space built through a public-private partnership, Gonzales said. Locations are still being scouted.

“So now we’ll look for the private capital and let business and private owners know that this is a space that is designated by the USDOT where those warehousing and logistics pieces can happen,” Gonzales said.

Growing a region

Rio Rancho is one of the fastest growing communities in New Mexico. But, Johnson said, “68% of Rio Rancho residents cross the river every day to go to work,” creating a job imbalance west and east of the Rio Grande.

Johnson believes the corridor project could keep more people working west of the river and grow both metro areas by creating jobs with a similar economic value on the west side of the river.

The project could create jobs in warehousing, distribution, clean energy, manufacturing and support industries like retail, Gonzales said.

“It also becomes attractive for investors, so I’m talking about manufacturers coming here,” Johnson said.

The Tradeport Corridor is the first time the two counties and Los Lunas have collaborated on a project of this scale, demonstrating the way Los Lunas and Rio Rancho are increasingly tied economically to Albuquerque. Altogether the three entities have spent $124,500 to prepare and submit the application for the Regional Infrastructure Accelerator program, Johnson said.

Just 20 minutes south of Albuquerque, Los Lunas has seen tremendous growth over the past 20 years, said village Senior Economic Developer Victoria Archuleta, attracting a Meta data center, a large Walmart distribution center and a soon-to-be a 600-employee Amazon warehouse.

“The long-term vision is to also incorporate Los Lunas as an additional vein off of that I-40 artery to connect into other parts of New Mexico and even eastward into parts of Texas,” Archuleta said.

NM Highway 6 runs east to west through Los Lunas and connects to I-40 northwest of the village. Los Lunas also has a BNSF Railway spur connected to a 1,400-acre property waiting for development.

“We’re not a sleepy little town anymore, because I think for a long time we were considered just a bedroom community,” Archuleta said, “and that is not the case at all.”

Doña Ana County received a similar grant for $1.1 million last year for developing a logistics hub on the Interstate 10 corridor. Bernalillo and Sandoval counties will be looking to work with Doña Ana to push for more federal funding for the projects, Gonzales said.

Companies don’t necessarily look at government boundaries when they decide where to invest, he said.

“They just look at what is going to make a good location fit for them, whether it’s actual location, the workforce pieces. We as communities need to start banding together,” Gonzales said.