Columbus, New Mexico, to get $1 million for flood management; Santa Teresa eyes lengthy sought-after funds for research to justify $170 million modernization
EL PASO, Texas (Border Report) – The Senate’s $1.5 trillion omnibus spending invoice contains funds for enhancements at two New Mexico worldwide ports of entry, a lawmaker says.
The Columbus Port of Entry is slated to get $1 million for drainage work that features the development of berms to stop flooding on either side of the border; the Santa Teresa border crossing is getting $500,000 for a feasibility research deemed as a cornerstone for a future $170 million enlargement and modernization mission.
“Now we have been working hand-in-hand with communities in each nook of the state to make sure that extra federal {dollars} discover their technique to New Mexico […] Every thing from highway, emergency companies, waste and water infrastructure,” mentioned U.S. Sen. Martin Heinrich, D-New Mexico, a member of the Senate Committee on Appropriations.
The Home on Thursday accredited the omnibus with bipartisan assist, with the Senate following suit a number of hours later.
Heinrich mentioned one other $2.25 million is earmarked for hangar enlargement on the Santa Teresa-based Doña Ana County Worldwide Jetport. That ought to carry extra enterprise to the jetport and the economic parks at Santa Teresa.
“There’s a checklist of 60 people and organizations that wish to lease hangars on the market, in order that’s going to assist loads,” mentioned Jerry Pacheco, president and CEO of the Border Industrial Affiliation. The jetport helps non-public and business aviation.
However the cash for the border crossing feasibility redesign and enlargement research, although solely at half one million {dollars}, has the potential to carry main commerce enlargement on the Mexico-New Mexico border, Pacheco mentioned.
“With that cash we will get the research to make the case that we want a brand new port of entry. Then we will go on to the following steps, like design, to have a modernized port of entry.”
Pacheco mentioned Santa Teresa has turn out to be the second-busiest business port of entry in Far West Texas and Southern New Mexico, surpassing El Paso’s Bridge of the Americas and trailing solely the Ysleta-Zaragoza crossing.
“Columbus a number of years in the past received $84 million for a brand new port of entry; Tornillo, Texas, additionally obtained $120 million and we’re larger than each of them mixed,” he mentioned. “We’re breaking data yearly and we’re going to hit a degree that we get a bottleneck that’s going to have an effect on our (truck) crossing occasions, that are the quickest within the area at lower than half-hour.”
In line with the U.S. Burau of Transportation Statistics, 12,066 business vehicles, most with cargo, used the Santa Teresa Port of Entry in January. The Ysleta facility in El Paso’s Decrease Valley processed 56,108 vehicles that month.
However with Ysleta being in a rising city space, Santa Teresa has turn out to be the popular crossing level for 160-foot-long wind blade generators manufactured in Juarez, Mexico, and shipped to wind energy farms within the Midwestern United States.
Pacheco mentioned an expanded port would handily accommodate such outsized cargo in addition to the elevated truck site visitors that’s making Santa Teresa considered one of New Mexico’s high financial improvement engines.
