Federal government investing in southern New Mexico's infrastructure

Apr. 24—Doña Ana County has been awarded a $2 million grant from the U.S. Department of Transportation to create a resilience plan focused on infrastructure vulnerability during evacuations and climate-related disasters. The money is part of $830 million in federal funds going to communities throughout the country to prepare infrastructure for climate change.

The city of Las Cruces, meanwhile, is getting $470,000 from a federal grant to help the city weatherize homes, promote clean energy systems and train workers on how to retrofit homes to be more energy efficient and prepare for extreme heat events.

"We are seeing more extreme weather conditions, and we need to make sure that our cities, which are economic heartbeats really for our state, are weathering that in the best possible way and staying productive, and that starts at the local level," said Sen. Martin Heinrich, D-N.M.

Broadly, the federal government is trying to focus more on supporting apprenticeships, according to Heinrich, because much of the work to weatherize homes is electrical and plumbing work — trades that use an apprenticeship structure.

"New Mexico cannot get left behind in this economic opportunity that it takes to build a renewable energy workforce," Rep. Gabe Vasquez, D-N.M., said. "Not only can we not get left behind, but we also stand to gain tremendously as a state that ranks amongst the top states for both wind and solar renewable generation and transmission capacity."

Heating up in Las Cruces

Las Cruces Sustainability Officer Lisa LaRocque helps people navigate the government's existing rebate programs to weatherize their homes with more affordable heating and cooling systems.

The area that the city is targeting with the new federal dollars is called the infill area, an area in Las Cruces from Main to University and I-25 to Valley, where most of the homes were built 50 years ago, she said.

"In that 5 square miles, 55% of the low- and moderate-income communities live there, and their houses were built before building standards were geared towards being more efficient," she said. "So it's a lot of cinderblock homes that don't have good insulation. Now, a lot of their HVAC systems are aging out."

City staff want to create a one-stop shop to help people find funding and rebates to update their heating and cooling systems, add ceiling insulation and cooler reflective roofs.

Evaporative coolers or swamp coolers tend to be inexpensive and can reduce the temperature in a home by roughly 20 degrees. But with higher summer temperatures during the most humid time of year in New Mexico — humidity makes evaporative coolers less efficient — that's no longer enough cooling power, according to LaRocque.

"It ends up being like 110 in the infill area, because when we have 100 or even 105, which we had for a month last summer, it's 10 degrees hotter there in the infill area, because there's so much concrete and asphalt and cinderblock that it's just a heat sink," LaRocque said.

Instead, heat pumps, which can also serve as a heating and cooling system and are more efficient than gas furnaces, are an affordable alternative, she said.

Making sure infrastructure stands up to storms

Doña Ana County will use the $2 million to plan a roadway system that will help create mobility, accessibility and circulation impact, said Doña Ana Director of Engineering Mo Moabed.

"Because of climate change, we have a lot of heavy flooding that really disconnects our communities from any highway," Moabed said.

In 2021, La Union, a small community in southern Doña Ana County, experienced heavy flooding, damaging homes and warranting evacuations. Flooding has gotten worse with stronger storms and higher rainfalls in the last few years, according to Moabed.

"Also our communities are growing, and more lands are being taken. ...When you have more lands impeded, you have more runoff and so more water coming down," Moabed said.

The plan will also help the county evaluate where communities are growing and need more access points, Moabed said.

"This plan will help the county, but I'm hoping that our congressional delegates can help us in the next few years after we finish this plan to implement it and build it," Moabed said.

BernCo's approach to resiliency

Storm drains and culverts are designed to meet the needs of the 100-year storm — a worst-case scenario, the biggest storm the area is likely to get over 100 years, according to Bernalillo Deputy County Manager for Public Works Elias Archuleta. Infrastructure built in the county over the last 25 years has been designed to meet that need, said Archuleta.

Storms are measured by rain intensity and length. That intensity is starting to creep higher, Archuleta said, and more intense storms are occurring more frequently. Storms aren't meeting the 100-year storm threshold the infrastructure is designed to handle, but more storms are lasting longer.

"We're seeing some of our older facilities that may not be up to the current standards; that's where we see them running half full or full. I think it was last year when we saw that channel on I-40 filled up after a storm," Archuleta said.

If that trend continues, the civil engineering industry will have to address the shift, Archuleta said, which could mean increasing infrastructure components like pipe diameters. But to make those changes, they need more years of consistent data, he said.

"At first when it was happening, we were thinking they were anomalies. But we're starting to see four or five of these intense storms a year where we got maybe one every couple of years," Archuleta said.

One big change the county has made in the last few years is a risk-based approach with a focus on continuous maintenance, instead of a worst-first approach.

"Where we're seeing the most risk is in our culverts that cross irrigation ditches throughout the county, and the reason those are a bigger risk is those hold water for anywhere from seven to nine months out of the year. Most of our other drainage facilities, they transfer water when we have a rain event, which living in New Mexico, that hits mostly during our monsoon season," Archuleta said.

The county hasn't seen an unexpected failure in one of those culverts in the past two years, said Archuleta, because of closer oversight.