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July 17, 2008
Planning for Placitas: The Need to Treat the Placitas Area as a Whole
By Stephen M. Barro
Sandoval County planning authorities have expressed their intention to develop a Community Area Plan for Placitas. This planning exercise could be valuable for Placitas residents and for all Sandoval County, but unfortunately it has started off on the wrong foot in one fundamental respect. The County's long-range planner, Mr. Moises Gonzales, wants to create a plan that covers only a certain portion, or subarea, of Placitas, not the Placitas Area as a whole.[1] This fractional approach, if implemented, would yield a subarea plan of dubious validity and limited usefulness, needlessly throwing away most of the potential benefit of the planning activity.
Other reactors to the proposed approach have already explained that certain attributes of the Placitas Area argue strongly for a plan that covers the area as a whole—e.g., that Placitas is a community with a strong identity, recognized as a coherent unit by multiple official bodies (Census Bureau, Post Office, Sandoval public safety authorities, etc.), and endowed with numerous institutions that serve the entire area. The following remarks address a completely different set of reasons why Placitas needs to be treated as a single unit—namely, that certain physical, technical, and economic considerations make such treatment essential for producing a coherent, sound, defensible, and useful community plan.
Transportation: Highway 165 and other roads
Transportation is one of the key topics to be addressed by any community area plan. The Placitas Area, extending from I-25 to Diamond Tail, is served by a single main highway, NM Highway 165. Development anywhere along this highway will affect traffic conditions, and hence the quality of transportation, facing residents all along its length. For example, more intensive development in the eastern section of Placitas would generate increased traffic flow (perhaps with attendant congestion, noise, accidents, etc.) in the western portion, and more intensive development in the western portion would affect the duration and convenience of trips to Highway I-25 by residents of the eastern section. For this reason, it would be unreasonable to formulate a plan for development along any one portion of the Highway 165 corridor, or along any of its side roads, without taking into account implications for traffic along the entire corridor. Likewise, an assessment of requirements for, and costs of, road maintenance and traffic regulation in Placitas would be of little value if it did not cover the full road network. The usefulness of the transportation component of a Placitas plan would depend strongly, therefore, on the plan's being framed to cover the Placitas Area as a whole.
Retail and commercial activity
Another major component of a community development plan would be (presumably) an assessment of future needs, if any, for further retail and commercial development and the land use (including zoning) implications thereof. The key economic consideration in defining the appropriate area for retail/commercial planning is that separate subareas of Placitas, such as those delineated by Mr. Gonzales, do not correspond to separate markets for goods and services. To estimate needs for further retail/commercial development, it would be necessary to project the potential demand for locally provided goods and services generated by the whole Placitas Area population. For example, to assess the economic viability of, say, additional retail outlets in or around Placitas Village, one would have to estimate prospective demand not just from households in that immediate subarea but also from households in the western section of Placitas and in Diamond Tail. Such an analysis would have to examine the demographic and economic characteristics of households throughout the market area and then link those characteristics to purchasing behavior. An analysis limited to only a subpart of the market area could not generate the requisite information. This, then, is a second reason why only a plan encompassing the whole area could be expected to yield meaningful results.
Water supply
Issues of water availability and water quality invariably come to the fore in any discussion of development in Placitas. Any change in the density or character of development, residential or nonresidential, that would increase water consumption has the potential to affect water supply not only in the immediate area of such development but throughout the Placitas corridor. The aquifers from which we extract our water do not start and stop at political boundaries, and certainly not at the arbitrary boundary between subareas shown on Mr. Gonzalez's map. Drawing more water from wells on one side of the boundary will affect the yield from wells on the other side. Suppose, for example, that a development plan for the proposed eastern subarea were to include provisions for multiple unit housing within the large, currently undeveloped tracts at and around the Placitas fire station and library site—that is, the Cashwell and Grevey-Lieberman properties. Obviously, the impact on water supply would not be confined to those tracts, or to the eastern planning subarea, but would also be felt in the neighboring subdivisions and water districts (most of which Mr. Gonzales has chosen—perhaps a bit too cleverly—to exclude from the subarea containing the aforesaid properties). Given the physical realities, an assessment of water issues covering only a part of Placitas would not qualify as technically sound because it would neglect the wider impacts and attendant costs of the development options under consideration. Thus, there is a third strong reason—the need to deal broadly with water issues—to produce a plan that covers the Placitas Area as a whole.
Public safety services
Existing police, fire, and emergency medical services (EMS) for the Placitas area are designed, organized, and staffed to serve the area as a whole, and this will certainly remain true in the future. No one—certainly not the Sandoval County government—would contemplate establishing separate services for separate planning zones. The question thus arises of whether a plan covering just a fraction of Placitas territory can deal adequately with needs for, and means of providing, these vital services. There are two reasons why the answer is "no." First, there are major economies of scale in the provision of these services. One cannot simply add up the resources that would be needed to serve each subarea separately to determine what is needed to serve the area as a whole. Second, consideration of the locational and land-use dimensions of service provision logically cannot be constrained by the boundaries of a subarea. For instance, if it were determined that additional or enlarged fire stations were needed to serve proposed new developments in the eastern subarea, it would not necessarily follow that such facilities should be located within that zone; the optimal location might be further to the west or along the road to Diamond Tail. But there would be no rational basis for selecting the best locations without enlarging the scope of planning to include all of Placitas. We have, therefore, yet another example of why a broad-area planning perspective makes more sense.
There are other elements of planning that also could be better addressed by covering all rather than just part of Placitas—for instance, planning for recreational, cultural, and social welfare services, for housing development, and for the location of any future public schools—but the foregoing discussion of four selected elements suffices to establish a general conclusion:
A planning exercise covering only the eastern subarea of Placitas would be unable to take adequate account of some basic factors fundamental to planning: underlying physical facts (as in the example of water supply), the capabilities and limitations of our public infrastructure (as in the example of highway transportation), the realities of the local market for goods and services (as in the example of retail/commercial development), and the logic underlying decisions about service provision (as in the example of public safety services). It is difficult to see how a planning strategy deficient in all these respects could yield a valid, useful, or even professionally respectable product. The way to make the planning process worthwhile and to achieve meaningful results is to recognize the Placitas Area for what it is—a physically, geographically, and economically well-defined unit that needs to be treated as whole.
[1] For the purpose of this discussion, "Placitas Area" and "Placitas as a whole" are defined to include all private property accessible from NM Highway 165 east of Highway I-25 and from certain secondary roads north of Highway 165 leading off the Highway I-25 frontage road.
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