City Council Approves Quality of Life and Infrastructure Projects

June 7, 2022

City Councilor Brook Bassan proudly announces that at last night’s meeting, the Albuquerque City Council unanimously approved legislation to sell Gross Receipt Tax (GRT) Improvement Revenue Bonds and R-22-34, to appropriate $100,000,000, for which she was the lead co-sponsor in quality of life and infrastructure projects that will improve the lives of the Citizens of Albuquerque and continue to further the development of Albuquerque as a wonderful place to live and raise our families.  

City Councilor Brook Bassan, who has championed this legislation for numerous years, stated, “This bill is the culmination of years of hard work by many people, including my co-sponsors, Councilors Isaac Benton and Dan Lewis. This will construct projects throughout the City to provide recreational opportunities for our residents and create a complex of regional sports facilities for swimming, BMX, indoor court games, shooting tournaments, and pickleball that will attract tournaments from throughout the Southwest and the Rocky Mountains regions. Hosting regional competitions will be a boost to the City’s economy. It will help fund critically needed housing and public safety services necessary for a resilient and stable City.”

The $100,000,000 will create a suite of comprehensive improvements across the City, including:

• Completes funding for the City's first fully qualified indoor swimming pool to bring in regional swim meets, offers an indoor pool for the residents of north Albuquerque, provides warm water pool therapy for disabled persons and upgrades the City's other tournament pool at West Mesa. Funds the construction of a BMX pump track at Los Altos Park, creates the City's second community bike shop for the east side of the City, upgrades to the City's heavily used shooting range, adds improvements to the City's booming regional pickleball complex at Manzano Mesa Park, and continue to build funding for the City first Indoor Regional Sports Complex at the Jennifer Riordan Sparks Kindness Sports complex. 
• Funding to help keep shelter over the heads of many Albuquerque residents at risk of losing their housing to increasing housing costs and infusing new capital into the City rental housing market, allowing our entrepreneurs who provide rental housing to further invest in their facilities. 
• Funds critically needed improvements to APD’s headquarters and a public safety complex on the City’s Southwest Mesa to close a gap in the City’s fire coverage and creates new public safety facilities for the area. 
• Allows road construction to remove a large portion of the traffic choke point on the City’s Northwest Mesa by completing funding to expand sections of Paseo Del Norte and Unser Boulevard to four lanes and will complete funding for a safety project on Ouray Boulevard west of Coors.
• Fund reclamation and conservation of the recently purchased Poole Property Open Space and Wildlife Conservation Area.
• Finally, it will fund the expansion of the Loma Linda Community Center for the South Yale neighborhoods to provide community services and recreation facilities to the surrounding neighborhoods.

The City Council approved O-22-25 to authorize the selling of the GRT Bonds. The companion bill, R-22-34, approved the specific projects to be funded.

Councilor Bassan added, “I look forward to the improved quality of life these projects will bring for our children, our senior citizens, and the taxpayers who work so hard every day to build a great community.”