Letter to the Editor: Vision of Multi-Use Facility is a Bad Dream

Published February 9th, 2024 at 1:20 pm, Last Updated March 26th, 2024 at 7:30 am

Submitted by Bob Belinoff, Corrales resident

When I first heard about the Village’s plans to spend eight million dollars on a destination theater – a mini-complex of sorts-  in the middle of downtown Corrales I thought it was a joke. 

Then I learned the land had already been purchased, not

far from the recently shuttered Wells Fargo branch Bank. Then I saw the plans and drawings, prepared under the careful eye of the Village’s first multi-use Facility planning committee. Ken Duckert was a member of the committee that produced those plans and he wrote about his vision for the

proposed center in this space on January 25th.

Mr. Duckert and the group he is working with envision a self-sustaining entertainment- education- meeting complex with a stage and a 240 seat auditorium. He writes of 6-10 salons annually, classrooms, events and classes available from CNM, other classes for children, seminars, workspaces, rooms with movable walls opening into galleries. In order to be self-supporting the facility would need to be large enough to draw people from outside Corrales. To accommodate the expected throngs it would have not only the 240 seat theater but a parking lot large enough to flatten half a  small soccer field of wild grass into asphalt. And of course the high intensity lighting required by law for such parking. All this not far from our delightfully funky Village center.

The facility would serve the Village as well as visitors from near and far, we’re told. It is likely this venue could then be promoted as some kind of arty destination theme park, like ones in Texas, which, as Mr. Duckert noted, were among the sites studied in order to come up with their vision of our Village’s future. The Village might then, apparently, be designated a New Mexico Art and Culture District, putting Corrales on the map, so to speak. Corrales of course has been on the map for quite a while and it is becoming an intensely busy place. Initial renderings of the facility look, at least on paper, like a cross between a Target and a bunker, though it has been repeatedly suggested these plans were only to get the ball rolling, not to be seen as final. There is no business plan for the proposed facility yet, Mr Duckert noted, but there needed to be one. 

Actually there could never be a business plan that would show the true costs of building something like this, or anything approximating its size and capacity for disruption. No financial document could  justify it’s maintenance and other costs, which includes more people, more traffic, more noise, more water and sanitation considerations, a likely stop light or two on Corrales Road, perhaps the widening of the road if that were even possible and, most expensive of all, the loss of a quality of life Corrales has provided since the early 1700’s  and other communities could only dream of.

Our focus should be on keeping what we have left of that idle and to use any available funding to expand the sense of quiet and space and our connection to nature as well as providing art and education and meeting venues, if we can. Can you factor the loss of these things into a business plan? This task should require imagination. But what do we get? More bricks and mortar and construction, a lot of money changing hands, traffic and maintenance costs. We are already the only Village of our size with two free standing gymnasiums and there are three or four other sizable Village building projects already on the books in the near term.

Mr. Duckert speaks of the need for an “anchor tenant” for this new facility. What are we Cottonwood off Candi Lane?

Many of us, maybe most of us who live here are trying to preserve our last little island of sanity in this expansion – crazed, multi use, multi task, non-stop happening world. This is our refuge. This was the general consensus, revealed at two very productive open community meetings held last month under the ancient vigas of the Old San Ysidro Church on Church Road. Yes, a new and larger structure is needed. Yes, various groups from kids theater to 4H to garden clubs  to meetings of the Equestrians etc. need to be addressed. But of the 150 or so people who attended two days of open meetings, only two, by my count, were in support of Mr. Duckert’s vision. Over thirty spoke passionately and lovingly of the need to preserve what we have, the need to deal with traffic – already growing at an unsustainable rate and the desire to build something reflecting the character and scale of our Village – and to keep Corrales rural. 

The Old Church, with its hand plastered walls and hand tooled vigas was a fitting place to have such a discussion and, as it happens, a better model for what we should actually be considering as a new multi-use facility, as opposed to the 240 seat complex, the aforementioned rendering of which, remarkably, sat framed, mounted and enshrined in the back of the Old Church as most neighbors passionately protested its development.

Mr. Duckert and the Mayor-appointed ad-hoc committee produced that artist’s rendering. His and the committee’s challenge was to produce a functional, practical, appetizing, Corrales centric building for our Village. They could have unveiled pie-in-the -sky anything. Yet  their vision of “appetizing” was to produce and tout a building out of scale to its surroundings and with no evident connection to the Village’s history, culture or character.

This does not inspire trust in the vision, the aesthetic taste, the leadership or the thoughtfulness of the powers that be. 

Who are the powers that be, anyway? And what is going on at the Village Hall?

Among the most valuable assets we – our families and our kids – have in Corrales are space, quiet, proximity to nature and some semblance of darkness. This space and quiet and access to nature is a treasure… and we are the luckiest people on earth. Nothing would bury our treasure faster than the kind of thinking my neighbors, Mr. Duckert and his colleagues, espouse.

So there it is. We would build a business/entertainment multi-use facility that would bring us an Art and Cultural District designation along with visitors from far and wide and the traffic and congestion that would destroy our Village. What am I missing here? And what is going on in Village headquarters?

We are a Village of workers and professionals, blue collar and white…commuters and kids and seniors, horses and llamas and goats and peacocks and ditches and farmers and Bosque paths and artists and builders, musicians and crafts people of every sort. We have architects among us and weavers and carpenters and engineers, ditch diggers and even adobe layers. 

Maybe what we actually need is something very much like the Old Church and maybe we can figure out a way to help build it ourselves. Nothing builds community like a community that builds something together.

Mr. Ducker’s vision is “more is better”. More is not better. And the idea of creating a space is actually something of a holy act, not a real estate venture. It is not just about the things that might take place there. It is about building trust, and relationships and a co-operative spirit…about ideas that take us forward – not just into meetings, but into community.

The plan Mr. Duckert reveals a vision of Corrales totally out of sync with who we are, where we come from, what we have and value and what so many of us, maybe most of us, want our future to look like. 

One more thing. There’s a special danger, I believe, in couching plans like this as “art and culture for our kids”. These kids may very well grow up and look back at their parents and the remnants of our rural Village and ask, “What have you done?” “And why?”