Pointing to both a spate of new construction activity and continued population growth, a real estate listings service says Aurora, Colorado is one of the ten fastest-growing suburbs in the country.
That ranking was compiled by the Santa Clara, California-based Realtor.com, placing Aurora as the only such location on its top ten list in the West. Of the other fast-growing suburbs listed by the site, four were off the Atlanta coast, two were in Texas, with one each in Iowa, Louisiana, and Tennessee. Realtor.com said it determined its rankings by looking at “home appreciation over the last three years, and the increase in the number of home listings in that same time period.” The site also looked at overall population growth, with Aurora’s population jumping from 276,000 in 2000 to more than 366,000 today. The fact that Aurora has seen an unprecedented increase in the pace of new retail, residential and public construction, was also factored in by Realtor.com, which came to its findings after studying the growth statistics of suburbs in more than 7,000 zip codes within an hour’s drive to the nearest city. Aurora, located 16 miles to the east of Denver, is also 26 minutes away Colorado’s largest city. By Garry Boulard
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Less than a year after the voters of Fort Collins approved a bond to build a citywide broadband infrastructure, plans are now being reviewed for when the project will begin. The bond ballot question in November, which passed with 57 percent of the vote, asked to give the Fort Collins City Council permission to “establish a telecommunications utility to provide broadband services.” Two months later, the council voted to officially move ahead with a project that will see the building of high speed, next-generation fiber throughout the city, including on the Fort Collins campus of Colorado State University. In addition, the City of Fort Collins issued a Request for Proposals for the engineering, design and marketing of the new system, to be called Connexion. The project has now taken an important step forward with Fort Collins’ successful selling of the $142 million in bonds needed to fund the ambitious project. Where exactly the first segments of the new network will be built remains to be determined, but city officials have said they hope to see work begin on part of the infrastructure by next year, with the entire project completed sometime in 2021. By Garry Boulard Work could begin later this year, or in early 2019, on the construction of a 12,000 square-foot enclosed swimming pool in Las Cruces.
The project will cost more than $17 million and will include the construction of locker rooms, a concession area, office, storage space, lobby, spectators’ deck, and outdoor courtyard. Members of the Las Cruces City Council have now given their official approval to the construction of the pool, to be built at the site of the busy Las Cruces Regional Aquatic Center at 1401 E. Hadley Avenue. Funding for the project is coming through a combination of more than $9 million in city gross receipts tax revenues, and some $8 million in New Mexico gross receipts tax revenue. Upon its completion, most likely in late 2019 or early 2020, the pool is expected to not only prove an attraction to Las Cruces residents, but also high school swimming teams in competition from across New Mexico. By Garry Boulard More than two years after a company specializing in casks for spent nuclear fuel rods submitted a letter of intent to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to open a storage facility near Carlsbad, questions continue to linger regarding the project’s safety.
The Camden, New Jersey-based Holtec International has said it wants to build a facility on some 500 acres to the east of Carlsbad that would store thousands of tons of spent nuclear fuel. The facility, as outlined by Holtec officials, would house at the very least 500 casks containing the spent fuel for a period of up to 40 years. Opponents of the plan, including the New Mexico Cattle Growers Association, have raised questions regarding the facility’s size and potential for a nuclear waste accident. Now, New Mexico State Senator Jeff Steinborn has issued a statement saying he wants to know more about the project, noting “It is critically important that the residents of New Mexico get substantive information needed to make an informed decision about whether to allow this highly controversial project to go forward.” Steinborn, who chairs the Interim Radioactive and Hazardous Materials Committee, has specifically called on Governor Susana Martinez to release all available details to the public regarding the project. Noting that the committee is running up against a deadline of July 31 for environmental impact information, Steinborn said that only through an airing of such information could the project proceed. State officials, in response, have contended that that information is currently being reviewed by the NRC, a process that may take another two years. By Garry Boulard Legislation that will substantially change the way highway construction and upgrading projects are funded has been introduced in the U.S. Senate.
Senate Bill 3190, otherwise known as the Transportation Empowerment Act, is designed, according to its sponsors to give states more authority for “taxing and spending for highway programs and mass transit programs, and other purposes.” If passed, the bill would incrementally decrease the amount of money going into the federal government’s Highway Transportation Fund by reducing the current gasoline fuel tax of 18.4 cents a gallon. Over a scheduled period of four years, between 2019 and 2023, that tax would be reduced to 3.7 cents, doing away with 70 percent of the funding making up the Highway Transportation Fund. Utah Senator Mike Lee, one of the sponsors of the legislation, contends that the Highway Transportation Fund is, for all purposes, broke. “And another year of band aid funding is not going to fix it,” said Lee in a statement. Instead, Lee contends that state and local governments should be left to fund transportation projects on their own, adding that those states would respond with “customized transportation policies without the interference of politicians, bureaucrats, and special interests in Washington.” The legislation has received harsh criticism from various transportation industry organizations, including the Highway Materials Group, which, also in a statement, contends that even if the states are able to raise fuel taxes for needed transportation projects, “the diversion of funds to non-highway purposes is more extensive in many states than it is under the federal-aid program.” According to the American Road and Transportation Builders Association federal funds currently provide 52 percent of state department of transportation funding for highway and bridge projects. The figure in Arizona is 49 percent; in Colorado, it’s 64 percent; and in New Mexico, 70 percent of transportation spending comes from Washington. By Garry Boulard It may have been a surprise when the Socorro Independent School District in the fall of 2017 asked local voters to approve an unprecedentedly large facility bond of more than $448 million. What wasn’t a surprise was that those voters, responding to a SISD public information campaign, would show enthusiasm for one aspect of the bond program: the planned $135 million upgrading and renovation of the Socorro High School. That facility, located at 10150 Alameda Avenue, has long been sentimentally regarded as the flagship school in a district made up of nearly fifty high schools, middle schools, and elementary schools, a fact that in no small part accounted for the bond passing with more than 60 percent of the vote. Working subsequently with community groups, the SISD, along with the Fort Worth-based VLK Architects, has been putting together a plan to modernize a structure completed in 1965 and praised at its opening by the El Paso Times for the “distinctive native rock walls” decorating its corridors and “accenting other rooms.” Plans now call for expanding the size of the facility, modernizing its classroom and lab spaces, and creating a new vehicle pick-up space for students on land adjacent to the school. SISD officials have also talked of keeping intact, but updating, the school’s auditorium, fine arts area, and gymnasium, while perhaps also adding another floor to the building. A centerpiece of the building’s modernization is the quest for more space. With a current enrollment of roughly 2,400, SISD officials want a facility that will be able to comfortably accommodate up to 3,000 students. It is expected that the design phase for the high school, located about 18 miles southeast of downtown El Paso, will be completed in early 2019, with construction beginning shortly afterwards. By Garry Boulard A project to open a pozzolan mine some 12 miles west of Prescott, Arizona is about to take another step forward with a comment period set to expire this fall.
The Scottsdale-based Kirkland Mining Company has been trying for several years to secure all the needed approvals to open the mine on a 90-acre site in Yavapai County’s Skull Valley. The mid-sized quarry operation would mine for pozzolan, an ingredient used as a supplement in commercial concrete production. Located on property owned by the Bureau of Land Management, the mine has been out of commission since 1985 and is surrounded by open space used by hikers and walkers. Although the BLM earlier this spring released a report indicating that there is currently no asbestos or erionite contamination at the site, opponents of the plan have expressed concerns about the impact of hazardous dust particles floating in the air should the mine be re-opened. By Garry Boulard An unconventional measure of the current healthy national job market, according to a recent report issued by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, is the number of people who are voluntarily leaving their jobs.
That number is at its highest level since 2000, and, according to the BLS, shows a national confidence in current economic conditions, with most of the people going on to better-paying positions. Altogether, more than 3.5 million people quit their jobs in May, up from 3.3 million the previous month. The quit rate is now at 2.4 percent, which is also the largest number seen in nearly 18 years. Those numbers, reports the BLS, come at a time when more than 900,000 new jobs in construction, manufacturing, mining, and logging have been added since January of 2017. The Bureau is also reporting that so far for all of 2018, some 215,000 new jobs have been added per month, with the largest employment increases coming out of the education, business services, manufacturing, and health services sectors. The report, The Employment Situation—May 2018, also notes that the unemployment rate had dropped to 4.0 percent this spring. Even an unemployment sector that has mostly gone unchanged since the Great Recession, the number of people classified as “discouraged workers,” or those who have given up searching for work because they believe no jobs are available to them, has dropped by 155,000 this spring. “The remaining 1.1 million persons marginally attached to the labor force,” notes the report, had not searched for work due to “school attendance or family responsibilities.” The Bureau of Labor Statistics is an arm of the federal Department of Labor, tasked with collecting and analyzing job data for the American public, Congress, and a host of federal agencies. By Garry Boulard After three previous failed attempts to pass a bond in a Commerce City school district that would be used to pay for a new elementary school, funding has come through at the state level for what will be a nearly $34 million project. Officials with the Adams County School District have long been concerned about the declining condition of the one-story Alsup Elementary School, built in 1959. Those concerns have not only centered on the kind of aging wiring, lighting, and sewerage system issues to be expected in a 59 year-old building, but also the fact that the building was not secure, with a front entrance not visible from the main office. Now, plans to build a replacement school at the site of the district’s abandoned high school, about a mile to the south of the Alsup building, have won funding through Colorado’s Building Excellent Schools Together. That $19.6 million grant will be matched with $14.2 million from the Adams County School District 14, half of which will come from the district’s owns funds, and the rest through the issuance of certificates of participation. According to plans, the new school at 4525 E. 68th Avenue will measure just over 76,000 square feet and will be built to accommodate 600 students. The new building will house collaborative space classrooms, a library, music room, art room, gymnasium, and offices. District officials have said they may establish a local parents’ committee to help guide the project along, with work on the building hopefully beginning later this year. A general construction schedule is calling for the facility to be completed in time for the fall 2020 school semester. By Garry Boulard A project that is seeing the consolidation of three elementary schools in the Milagro Hills neighborhood of El Paso is expected to see work begin in September.
Paid for out of a $668 million bond approved by voters in 2016, the combined new construction and demolition project will cost $28.5 million to complete. Officials with the El Paso Independent School District, after a series of public input meetings, decided that rather than updating and modernizing three existing elementary schools it would be more cost-effective to combine them at one site. Those schools are the Crosby Elementary School at 5411 Wren Avenue; Dowell Elementary School at 5249 Bastille Avenue; and the Schuster Elementary School at 5515 Ruth Avenue. The project, as designed by the architectural firm of Vigil & Associates, which has offices in Las Cruces, will see the Dowell site both updated and expanded. That one-story structure was opened in 1959, in a growing northeast section of town just then experiencing rapid suburban home construction. The new two-story school will put an emphasis on collaborative space and will go up on the western side of the Dowell site. The facility will be named the Coach Archie Duran Elementary School, in honor of Arcadio “Archie” Duran, an EPISD track coach who died last year as a result of a school bus accident. The project has now gone through the schematic design and design development phase. EPISD officials have said that they are committed to seeing all 2016 bond projects completed within a 5-year time frame. By Garry Boulard |
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