Serving the High Plains
Serving the High Plains
The circled area above illustrates a possible plan proposed by UNM architecture students for the Sands Dorsey building site. The plan would partially preserve three walls and include a park. This view is looking down from the northwest.
link The circled area above illustrates a possible
plan proposed by UNM architecture students
for the Sands Dorsey building site. The plan
would partially preserve three walls and
include a park. This view is looking down
from the northwest.
By Steve Hansen
QCS Managing Editor
If all goes according to the plan launched Thursday at a special Tucumcari City Commission, the rubble-strewn site of the Sands Dorsey building will be cleared and level by the end of October.
The commission approved its first concrete step Thursday in a plan to rid downtown of a prominent eyesore that has festered there since 2007, when fire gutted the Sands Dorsey building, which had been a downtown landmark since its construction in 1917.
In a unanimous vote, the commission approved a contract worth $43,500 before gross-receipts taxes with Forsgren Engineering of Albuquerque to start planning the destruction and disposal of the building’s remains.
Forsgren’s tasks will be to assemble an action plan and bid package to lure contractors to perform the work, City Manager Jared Langenegger said.
After that process is complete, which may require about three months, the bids must be solicited and evaluated, which may take another month to six weeks, Langenegger said.
The contractor’s work is expected to take three to four weeks, which places the end of the project some time in October.
Langenegger said approvals from the New Mexico Environment Department’s Solid Waste Division at several stages in the process could require four to six weeks each, which could delay the clearing of the site.
Assistant City Manager Doug Powers said that in initial conversations with Forsgren, engineers told him the cost of clearing and leveling the site is likely to be significantly reduced with the opening of a waste landfill in Clovis that can accommodate asbestos-contaminated materials like some of the Sands Dorsey’s masonry.
Before this landfill site became available this year, wastes from the Sands Dorsey site would have had to travel as far as Hobbs, 200 miles away, or Mountainair,164 miles away. Clovis is about half the distance from Tucumcari as Mountainair.
Langenegger announced earlier that the city can do the job with funds on hand, the product of years of cost-cutting. In previous years, city officials have insisted the city did not have adequate funding for the building’s disposal and had been seeking grant funds to do the job.
Powers and Langenegger have both said grant funds are not available from any source for building demolition.
“The morale value is immeasurable,” Commissioner Rick Haymaker said of the demolition and disposal project. “People are going to see that we care.” The building and the downtown area are in Haymaker’s Second District.
Mayor Robert Lumpkin said some building components may be preserved for their historic value.
Commissioner Amy Gutierrez suggested the commission receive community feedback on plans in a proposal from University of New Mexico architecture students.
The plans call for parts of three walls and an arched doorway to surround a diner and a park equipped with tables and seats for dining.
