Follow the Dirt Road in Your Soul to Humbug Mountain

A Beautiful Bunker in the Neighborhood

By Carol Mell, 5-05-08

April’s been blustery, that plastic bag caught in the tree time of year with restless winds blowing all sorts of detritus into the neighborhood.

This season another sort of plastic appeared out of nowhere, one of those yellow signs signaling new construction, this time from Kit Carson Electric Cooperative and the Town of Taos, with a date for a variance hearing with the planning and zoning commission.

Yellow signs spell trouble, even when placed on commercial land on Gusdorf Road across from Saint James Episcopal Church, behind the Masonic lodge and the Quality Inn. After a call to the town reassured me they just wanted to build a command center to coordinate emergency communications, I didn’t attend the meeting on April 2.

Turns out I missed a doozy as Albuquerque architect Don May justified two variances, the first from the town’s architectural style code because of the “functionally driven” nature of the building and the second, a request to double the 6-foot wall height limit. That’s right, they want a 12-foot wall.

What the town hadn’t mentioned was that the new command center was also a homeland security center and would have to be built, according to May, to withstand TNT and bullets. I wonder, did he consider the threat from middle school kids that cut through that lot, the hungry who come to the church for food on Thursdays, not to mention those dangerous worshippers on Sundays, as well as the mongering hordes that park on the streets to get into the lodge’s pancake breakfasts before the maple syrup runs out?  Is twelve feet high enough?

Video of the meeting is available on the Internet. All I could download was audio.

“We’re asking for relief from stylistic decoration,” May told the commissioners. “The building is intended to be invisible, built for stealth.”

The commissioners asked about the need for the wall.

“We’ve done exhaustive work on hardened first responder facilities,” answered May. “In this case these are secure perimeter walls with blast protection and bullet resistance. The lodge, hotel and church help hide us away. You won’t see much but the walls. It’s not as if we want to create a bunker in a neighborhood. We try to stay away from the ‘bunker’ mentality. We are using the design criteria we need on your behalf. Our intent is this is pueblo revival style with an earthen wall.”

“That’s a stretch,” remarked one commissioner.

Another said, “It will look like a landscaped prison.”

Still another said, “Even the Armory doesn’t have a wall like that.”

I went around my neighborhood with copies of the plan. Most laughed. “Homeland security,” one questioned, “why can’t we get some help with graffiti?”

I think it would be nice if we could get those plastic bags out of the trees but no matter where May meandered the commissioners kept returning to the wall like a bad lunch. 

One commissioner wondered if the wall was prescribed by Homeland Security funding.

“I don’t know the answer to that question,” May responded.

Luis Reyes, CEO of Kit Carson wouldn’t return my calls but alluded to the funding arrangement at the meeting.

“Kit Carson brings $3 million and the property,” he said. “This is a business venture to Homeland Security initiatives that the Cooperative has to undertake for its facilities because of the electric and propane services it offers.”

So, in a neighborhood where we frequently neglect to lock our doors, our government needs walls, gates and cameras to protect us from terrorists? I get it. If we had an emergency and our best and brightest gathered at the command center, a terrorist might think that the best time to drive up with a car full of explosives.

In a strange twist on “if you build it they will come,” our local graffiti artists will have a field day. As one commissioner put it, “that wall is quite a canvas. You do realize that Taos is an art colony?” Bomber practice, anyone?

Heck, that secretive federal architecture might make someone think it is Donald Rumsfeld’s house. His neighbors have had plenty of trouble with protesters marching over and throwing litter on his lawn. 

A 12-foot wall is not only an affront to the neighborhood but yet another misuse of tax dollars. Our government has made great strides in the science of building walls but is there any wisdom behind their application? With all these expensive barriers going up in Iraq, on the border and around the corner why don’t I feel any safer? 

Town of Taos Planning and Zoning will take up the issue one more time, May 7. Can we get a needed command and dispatch center without the wall? If not, is there some better place for it?

You are so danged if you do and danged if you don’t so you might just as well.

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