Student trail to El Camino Real back on track

Apr. 3—Students at El Camino Real Academy are on track to have a walking trail to school after the city secured an easement to land in the Cottonwood Village Mobile Home Community.

Without the easement, the city was at risk of losing access to $650,000 of federal Community Development Block Grant money being used to build the trail, which is part of the Santa Fe Safe Routes to School program. Under the federal requirements, the majority of the money needs to be spent by May 5.

"We needed the right of way from the mobile home owners," said Romella Glorioso-Moss, a capital projects manager with the Public Works Department. Without it, she said, the city would have lost the funding.

As of last week, Glorioso-Moss said the city had been notified by its contractor the majority of the funds have been spent. The city entered into a legal dispute earlier this year with the property owner of the mobile home park in order to begin construction in time to keep the funding. The court sided with the city.

Public works officials could not immediately provide a date for when the trail will be complete, which El Camino Real Academy Principal Evan Gourd said will give students who live in the mobile home community a way to walk to school without having to cross a busy street or walk through construction. The school is on South Meadows Road, a major thoroughfare on Santa Fe's south side that connects to N.M. 599.

The majority of the school's 740 students, who come from throughout the city, are driven to school. However, many students who live in the Cottonwood Village Mobile Home Community walk to school because it is just a half-mile from the campus.

Students who lived in the village used to walk through a ravine to campus, which Gourd described as "not the best way" to get to school. For at least a year that area has been a construction site for a housing development — also not the best thing for students to be walking through.

Once complete, the trail will provide students and other pedestrians and cyclists with a 10-foot multiuse pathway, according to city documents.

The school has not had a bus route since November, when Santa Fe Public Schools halted seven routes due to staffing shortages. In February, all of the routes expect Route 5 to El Camino Real Academy were resumed.

Gourd said the school worked to create a "walking bus route" from the mobile home village to the school, where students would walk in groups accompanied by volunteers. He said that has seemed to work to provide students with a sense of community and safety, though it was less popular in cold weather.

In December, the city entered into a right-of-way purchase agreement with Cypress Associates LLC, the property owner for the mobile home community, to buy 27,697 square feet of land for $41,550 in order complete the 0.4-mile trail connection.

However, in a January lawsuit filed in First Judicial District Court in Santa Fe, the city said it had been unable to complete the transaction and was suing for permission to start construction on the property.

Without a court order, the complaint said the city would not be able to start construction in time to meet the May 5 deadline.

The city needed to begin construction "or else face the loss or forfeiture of certain grant funds related to the project, and it cannot begin such construction until it acquires the Trail Easement," the complaint said.

It asked the court to allow the city to acquire the land through condemnation of the trail easement and to grant it temporary construction permits for the land.

Emails between a lawyer representing the city and a legal representative for Cypress attached to a legal filing indicate the property owner was not opposed to a friendly condemnation. A representative for Cypress did not respond to a request for comment Wednesday.

The court granted the city's motion in February, allowing the city to enter the property and requiring it to deposit in the court's registry the agreed upon sum of $41,550.

The trail has been more than two years in the making.

"That connection is one that was identified really before we even started our activity as a top priority for trail connectivity in the city," said Tim Rogers, trails program manager for the Santa Fe Conservation Trust.

The trust was previously the manager of the city's safe routes to school initiative, a program to get more students to walk or bike to school, which began in 2021 and was recently handed off to the school district.