After about 19 months in the making, Pojoaque Pueblo’s massive new Buffalo Thunder Resort opened its doors Tuesday.
It’s a so-called “soft launch” which will give Resort managers a few weeks to ramp up operations and iron out any kinks, paving the way for the official grand opening in September. As of last week, the casino pit was ready and new servers and bartenders, many of them short-term student workers from Turkey, bustled around unpacking glasses and practicing service techniques on teams of construction workers and other Resort staff.
“It’s like taking a brand-new cruiser out,” Hilton General Manager Tim Booth said. “We slowly but surely increase the number of guests.”
The Resort’s hotel portion has a bit more work to be done — the lobby was still draped with plastic sheeting and the ballroom where Gladys Knight will sing in concert is stacked with rolls of carpeting and other construction detritus.
Hilton is managing the hotel, 12-room spa and several on-site restaurants, but the Resort itself is solely owned by Pojoaque Pueblo, Resort Senior Marketing Director David Oakeley said. The Pueblo sold nearly $300 million worth of bonds through Merrill Lynch to finance both the construction and furnishing of the Resort, Oakeley said.
The Pueblo already has a sizable strip of commercial properties along Highway 84/285, but the new Buffalo Thunder represents a much larger undertaking, almost on the scale of a new city suddenly appearing in the desert — it required not only new gas lines but new fiber-optic lines and a nearly-operational wastewater recycling plant with a 500,000-gallon daily capacity.
“We have had to build an infrastructure,” Booth said.
Santa Fe County water and wastewater operations manager Doug Sayre said the plan is ultimately to use the water discharged from the treatment plant for recreational irrigation — meaning irrigation of landscaping, golf greens and athletic fields.
Wastewater plans for the resort have drawn concerns from some non-Pueblo residents in the Pojoaque Valley. Santa Fe County and the Pueblo struck an agreement to build and operate a wastewater treatment facility, but some residents feel like they’ve been left out of the process.
Paul White, a member of the community group, Pojoaque Basin Water Alliance, said he sees the need for some sort of system, but community members were never asked for their thoughts about the project.
“We have been excluded from the decision-making process, and that’s wrong,” he said. “I believe this would just be a gift to Buffalo Thunder Resort at our expense.”
Despite its plans to recycle water, White said he is still concerned about the resort’s potential water usage.
“That’s my first concern, is impairment to surrounding well owners — over-diversion by the Pueblo,” he said.
Back inside the casino, Chuck Babler, of Chimayó, stood behind one of the pit’s blackjack tables practicing his skills on two fellow dealers. Babler said until recently, he was working as a bartender at Rancho de Chimayó; a fire that destroyed much of that restaurant’s kitchen sent him back out onto the job market.
One of Babler’s stand-in players, Alexander Reidy, said he had been working at a food co-op in Albuquerque and looking for a way to return to the Española Valley. Now he’s living in Arroyo Seco and could be found manning the roulette table at the launch.
Pojoaque Pueblo Governor George Rivera said he expects the Resort to have a major economic impact on Northern New Mexico.
“It’s not a temporary impact, it’s a permanent impact,” Rivera said.
Rivera said the Pueblo itself obviously benefits economically from business ventures like the Resort, but its people’s cultural and social life will remain private.
“The Pueblo tends to keep its social and business life separate,” Rivera said.
Visitors to Buffalo Thunder will likely be curious about visiting Pojoaque Pueblo, but the Resort’s focus is also on stimulating interest in all the area pueblos and the region as a whole, Rivera said. The Resort is partnering with the Southwest Association for Indian Arts to operate a Santa Fe Indian Market gallery inside the hotel. That will promote the Market, of which Pojoaque is a three-year title sponsor, and also give artists year-round access to customers, Rivera said.
Booth said the Resort hopes to open up the Santa Fe area to the business-conference circuit, which has lacked all-inclusive facilities large enough to accommodate groups of 200 to 300 people. Toward that end, the hotel’s formal name is the Hilton Santa Fe Resort and Spa at Buffalo Thunder, and marketing materials stress its proximity to the state capital. For businesses looking for a new locale, even the distance to the airport may not be a deterrent, Booth said.
“It takes me longer to get from the Hilton Chicago to O’Hare than from Albuquerque to here,” Booth said.