Trouble on the Rocks
Red Rock Park — who will hold the deed?

Without funding to maintain its facilities, Red Rock Park may be in danger of closing. The state wants the city of Gallup to hand over the deed to the property, but the city fears that if it does, the state will not have enough money to maintain the grounds, forcing it to close. [Photo by Brian Leddy/Independent]

By Zsombor Peter
Staff writer

GALLUP — The year was 1974 and Interstate Highway 40 hadn’t even arrived yet. But with Route 66 already cutting a popular path through town, a brand new arena and convention center just east of city limits, set humbly amidst the giant fingers of Churchrock’s winding sandstone mesas, was packing them in.

The complex was Red Rock Park, and the event was the Gallup Inter-Tribal Indian Ceremonial, its first year at the new facility.

“We had just opened Earl’s about then,” said Ralph Richards, whose family owns and operates the popular Route 66 eatery, “and (the Ceremonial) bailed us out.”

Since then, restaurants, shops and hotels across Gallup have come to rely on the Ceremonial, and all the other events the park pulls in during the warm months, for a seasonal boost to business.

“(The park) is one of the biggest attractions that we have going,” said Mayor Harry Mendoza. “If we lost it, look at all the events that we would lose.”

But with an overdue deal for the deed to the park caught in the lurch, that’s just the predicament the city now faces.

Change of course
The city owns the park for now. But more than 30 years of ceremonials, conventions and rodeos have taken their toll, and officials say general maintenance of the facility hasn’t kept pace.

All that wear and tear have caught up. By the state’s own figures, the park needs up to $10 million worth of work just to stay in shape, let alone develop.

With so many other needs pulling at the city budget, the council decided the park was just too much to take on by itself.

“As magnificent as that facility is, it’s much bigger, much more expensive than the city of Gallup could ever hope to maintain on its own,” former City Manager Eric Honeyfield said in February.

If it tried, then Mayor Bob Rosebrough agreed, “we couldn’t do anything else.”

So the city turned to the state.

Gov. Bill Richardson said he’d approve the millions the park needed — in exchange for the deed. The council approved the idea Feb. 13.

But the devil, as they say, is in the details. The city and state hoped to have them worked out by July 31, the date they’d agreed the deed would change hands. But July 31 came and went, and the deed still sits with the city. The state still wants to take the park over, but it now wants the city to lease it back.

State Park Director David Simon says the idea has been around for months. City officials say it’s new to them.

Either way, the city sees little sense in giving the state the park only to lease it back. Whoever runs the park is responsible for bringing it in line with the federal government’s Americans with Disabilities Act, a job that could run more than $1 million. By handing over the deed, the city was hoping to hand over the bill as well.

“But if we lease it back it’s our facility again and we would have to fix it anyway,” said city attorney George Kozeliski.

Simon said the state wants the city to lease Red Rock back because the Parks Department can’t run the facility on its own. The New Mexico Legislature approved only two full-time staff for the park during its last session; the department wants the city to provide the rest. The city already agreed in February to spend $250,000 a year operating the park; the state has agreed to spend another $270,000.

Kozeliski sees little choice for the city.

“We’re going to have to run it or the state’s probably going to close it,” he said.

The mayor has another idea.

Along with the $270,000 to cover operating expenses, the state has agreed to reward the deed with another $1.2 million to help fix up the park, the first installment of the $10 million. Mendoza says he’s trying to convince Richardson to hand over the $1.2 million but let the city keep the deed.

A new deal
That’s exactly what the governor wants to avoid. City officials only agreed to hand the deed over in the first place because Richardson said it was the only way the park would ever see the kind of state funding they were asking for. When he met with city officials in May 2006, Richardson insisted on the deed, but assured them they’d be rewarded handsomely.

“We want to make sure that it’s a first-rate state park,” he said. There was no money set aside for the park yet, he added at the time, “but it will be a good state budget, that’s for sure.”

That’s a far cry from the mood inside City Hall today.

If the state were to have the deed, Mendoza said, “there’s a possibility down the line, in two or three years, the state could come in and shut it down.”

“If they start shutting facilities down, are they going to start here or along the Rio Grande corridor?” he added rhetorically, playing on the common complaint among rural New Mexicans that Santa Fe ignores them in favor of the larger population centers — and voting blocks — along the river.

“I can’t say never because none of us knows what’s going to happen to the state of New Mexico” so many years into the future, Simon said. Even so, he set the odds of the state shuttering Red Rock at “extremely low.” And even if the state tried to close the park, he added, the city could chose to take it back first, thanks to a “safety provision” in the joint powers agreement they signed in February.

It ‘s hard to imagine the city not exercising the option.

“There’s several entities that bring millions (of dollars in business) to the city through that park,” Richardson said. “If it closed, where would they go?”

“The outlying communities want our piece of the pie,” he said; if the park were to close, they’d probably get it.

Mendoza wants the city to keep the park, even though it’s had a tough time holding costs down. Red Rock was costing Gallup taxpayers more than $700,000 a year when the council decided to hire a private management firm to handle day-to-day operations in 2004. Although the move saved a few hundred thousand, the park was still proving a heavy burden.

With that company now out of the way, Gallup Parks Director Ben Welch says the park is closer to breaking even than ever. He thinks that may be giving City Hall new confidence to hold on to the deed. But if Richardson continues to insist, those millions the park needs to keep from falling apart could easily stay in Santa Fe.