The city of Española almost lost about $367,000 in state funding for a long-planned railroad museum last month after it failed to submit design plans on-time.
The city did not submit design plans for the museum to the state Highway Department by an Aug. 14 deadline. This caused the Department to come close to pulling the project’s funding, according to Acting City Manager Veronica Albin and emails between the city and the Department.
Albin was able to talk the Department out of revoking the funds, she said, and as it stands now, the funding has been reallocated, with the city receiving $72,000 in design funding this year and the remaining $295,000 in construction funding beginning in January. According to multiple grant forms, that latter amount, and the city’s 25 percent match, should cover the whole cost of construction, especially if the city is able to have railroad cars donated, as officials plan, Española Plaza Director Andrew Herrera said.
The Department agreed to give the city the money without setting a new deadline, according to Albin.
The design plans had been held up because the Department has not signed off on the city’s plan to pay for its construction match by using the value of the land at the proposed museum site, Albin said.
“We were not willing to sign documents without something stating we could pay the designer,” Albin said. “So we couldn’t move forward on those plans because we didn’t have assurance about using the land as match.”
Even without the Department’s approval of the match the city now plans to sign a contract for architectural services.
The city sent out a request for design proposals last year, and selected Santa Fe-based Atkin Olshin Schade as the project’s design firm based on the responses, with a bid just under a $100,000. However, because they had no written guarantee of the funding to pay the firm, city management had delayed signing the official contract, Albin said.
The city plans to use the value of the 1.78 acres of land at the southeast corner of the Española Plaza, the proposed museum site, for the construction match, but the Department has been hesitant to give approval, e-mails between the city and the Department show.
“Regarding your request to use city-owned land as the local match for your Railroad Museum project, the answer is probably,” Widoe wrote to city staff in late April.
To get approval for the match, the city has to prove the land wasn’t purchased with federal funds and prove the land was worth at least $133,000.
The city still is not certain of the land’s cost nor whether federal funding was used to buy it after at least four months of looking.
“The chances that it was purchased with federal funds is pretty low,” Albin said. “So that’s still our plan. For the design match, we’ll probably have general fund money for that and probably tap lodger’s tax money too.”
Neither the source of funds nor the original cost of the land, which was purchased from the store People’s Inc. in 1989, is included in the warranty deed for the land.
At the time of purchase, city officials told the Rio Grande SUN the land was paid for out of a 1988 bond issue to acquire land for the Plaza project, meaning no federal funds were used. The original cost of the land was $400,000.
The project manager before Albin was Herrera, who claims the Department never informed him of the impending deadline while he was in charge of the project.
“I really don’t know anything about what’s going on now,” he said. “But I can tell you (the Department) was really late in telling us about Aug. 14.”
Calls and emails to the Department were not returned by deadline.
The deadline is not stated in the grant agreement between the city and the Department, Albin said, but she was told about it when she took the project over.
Design plans should be completed by mid-December, Albin said, which would mean construction would start in January or February when the construction funds are released.
The project itself has been a goal of the city’s since the early 1990s, when it was included in a master plan for the Española Plaza. To date, only two of the features in that plan have been built.