PAL, Olguin seek new path after break with the city

At the Jack Candelaria Community Center re-opening ceremony on June 28, Flory Olguin took the opportunity to converse briefly with Albuquerque Mayor Tim Keller.

That exchange served only to confirm what Olguin already knew: that the partnership between the city of Albuquerque and the New Mexico Sheriffs and Police Athletic League is over, and it’s not coming back.

With that extra bit of closure, Olguin, PAL’s longtime executive director, is looking to the private sector.

“I have a couple of buildings that I’ve got to look at,” Olguin said in a recent phone interview. “Hopefully, we can find one that works for our needs, and maybe form a partnership with the owners of the building, open up again and not be worried about being shut down every five months.”

Regarding the on-again, off-again, 12-year partnership between PAL and the city, here’s the Reader’s Digest version:

When fully open, PAL, which offers boxing, wrestling and martial arts, as well as a mentorship program for at-risk youth, was housed in a privately owned building on Girard NE when, in 2013, the city — under then-Mayor Richard Berry — proposed a partnership. Olguin and PAL accepted and moved into the spacious old New Mexico National Guard Armory on Wyoming NE.

The city, however, found other uses for the armory and, in 2016, moved PAL into a ramshackle building off Osuna NE.

In March 2020, just as the COVID-19 pandemic was surging, Olguin was notified that the building PAL was occupying was due to be condemned and later demolished to make way for a new roadway.

The city offered to house the program in one of its community centers or in one of several privately owned buildings it had looked into. Olguin pointed out that the community centers had their own programs and that most of the privately owned buildings were either too small or in unsuitable locations. Negotiations fell through, he said, for use of one such property that might have worked.

In January 2024, the city, having terminated its memorandum of understanding with PAL, moved to evict the program from the building off Osuna.

The city later allowed Olguin to move PAL’s boxing ring and other equipment into the gym at the city’s Wells Park Community Center, which was under renovation. Eventually Olguin was able to run his program, or at least some of it, out of Wells Park.

But in May, as the Wells Park renovation neared completion, PAL was required to leave.

Olguin said his program is free to the kids and teens who participate. PAL subsists, he said, on sponsorships, donations and federal, state, county and city grants, which generally are available only when the program is functioning. Long periods of inactivity, he said, whether due to COVID or to unavailability of housing, have hurt.

Ideally, he said, he’d like to find a building spacious enough to host amateur boxing events as another revenue source. PAL had done so at the armory building on Wyoming before it was forced out.

Reflecting on the past five years, Olguin talked in the phone interview about what he described as broken promises and mixed messages on the city’s part.

The city’s stance throughout has been that it had bent over backward in attempting to salvage a partnership that the previous mayoral administration, not the current one, had entered into.

PAL, the city said in a February 2024 news release, had failed to comply with conditions set out in the MOU. That sometimes was true, Olguin said, but only because the program was unable to operate amid repeated shutdowns.

In any case, Olguin acknowledged, it’s time to move on. but added that if the city should elect a new mayor in November, he’d take a shot. Keller is running for re-election but has several challengers.

In the meantime, Olguin has brought Justice Jiron, a longtime boxing protégé of his, onto the PAL Board of Directors as part of this new beginning.

“We’re looking for a new place,” he said. “... And we’re looking for sponsors.”