A Town Is More Than Pavement and Pipes
by John Weckerle
In recent letters to The Independent (May 14; letter not available online) and the Mountain View Telegraph (May 15), Janelle Turner and Kathryn Cleaver make the case that municipalities should wait until all infrastructure projects are completed, police forces are fully staffed, and libraries are in their final stage of completion before providing funding for other things like Town events and other community initiatives. I respectfully disagree.
This is an issue that faces every municipality in the Valley. In budget deliberations, there will always be a trade-off between funding public works projects and finding money to promote a sense of community. To suggest that one should be pursued to the exclusion of the other is unwise and unrealistic. Further, this position overlooks an important component of reality – the infrastructure will never be completed.
In general, the communities in the Estancia Valley and the East West Mountains are growing. For many years, at the very least, there will be new roads to pave, new areas into which water and sewer service must be introduced, and new community facilities to be constructed. These priorities, while important, must be juggled with community-building initiatives and those that provide a sense of identity and some enjoyment to those who live within it.
Municipalities within the Estancia Valley, like many small towns in rural areas, have an interesting challenge with which to contend: many of the members of the community, people who pay taxes (via gross receipts), volunteer, and contribute financially to various projects do not live within the municipal boundaries. Regardless, they are members of the community, and events such as Punkin Chunkin, Old Timers Days, the Pinto Bean Festival, and the Run, Rally, and Rock (and associated Wildlife West Music Festival) provide a means of bringing the community together and showing it off to people who come to visit.
Further, consider this: for the most part, the roads in most of our communities on which everybody drives are already paved, or being paved. Edgewood has brand-new roads including NM 344, Plaza Loop, and the soon-to-be completed Route 66 project. Estancia’s 5th St., aka NM 41, has been paved for years. Moriarty’s portion of Route 66 was repaved and upgraded several years ago. What remains are the roads that only some people use regularly. While upgrading and/or paving these roads is important, it hardly seems reasonable justification to launch an austerity program. The same goes for the construction of Edgewood’s sewer system; while this is a very important priority from both the standpoints of environmental protection and economic development, it is not the be-all and end-all of community priorities. The system will serve only the commercial corridors – and not even all of them. The residents of the Edgewood area will, for the most part, continue using septic systems. While I am a strong supporter of the sewer initiative, it simply is not the only priority for the Town and should not be used as a rationalization to curtail spending on all other programs.
Ms. Turner, in her letter, suggests that an expanded library should take precedence over Town celebrations and the relatively small degree of funding for the Chamber of Commerce. I agree that the Town library should be expanded, and soon. Moriarty should also get its Performing Arts Center. Like the music festivals, these are quality of life initiatives, and quality of life is at least as important as pavement. However, I will point out that Ms. Turner here falls victim to the very tendency she criticizes in others – elevating her own preferred community project over those favored by other members of the community. There is nothing wrong with disagreeing on this issue, but Ms. Turner and Ms. Cleaver, who states that people with whom she disagrees “don’t get it,” should recognize that their points of view are not the only ones. We do get it, Ms. Cleaver, but we disagree.