After months of delay because of a once-missing document at the Bureau of Indian Affairs, Santa Fe County is now moving ahead with plans to develop a 3-acre community park in Nambé.

The Pojoaque Valley School Board voted last summer to sell about an acre, the site of the Pojoaque Bible Church along N.M. 503, to the county for $285,000.

However, closing on the property stalled when a title document showing the chain of ownership could not be found at the BIA, school officials said.

The document, which proved that the Nambé Pueblo sold the site to Cyrus McCormick in 1929, was located several weeks ago, said schools Superintendent Art Blea, allowing the closure of the sale May 19.

The McCormick family sold the site to the then-Santa Fe County school system in 1933. The Pojoaque school district eventually built an elementary school on the property, and later leased the land and its two buildings to the church.

Paul Olafson, director of the community projects division of the county Community Services Department, said the county is in negotiations with Meade and Robin Martin, owners of a small adjacent property, for rights to incorporate that land into the plans for the park.

Robin Martin is owner and publisher of The Santa Fe New Mexican.

Olafson said the county also needs access and parking easements from the school district because it still controls another section of land occupied by a building used for Head Start and other early childhood programs.

He said talks to acquire those easements are under way.

Once all three parcels can be joined as a unified plat, possibly by the end of this summer, the county will hold community hearings on how the park should be developed.

As proposed, the county's project would consist of a walking trail around the property, a refurbished basketball court and play yard, a tennis court, picnic tables and prefabricated shelters with benches.

That would be the first phase and could possibly be completed in about a year, Olafson said. The second phase would involve how the two buildings previously used by the church could be incorporated into the proposal, possibly as community multipurpose buildings.

Olafson said the county has obtained about $25,000 from the state Legislature to develop the park, in addition to the purchase price. That does not include the cost of refurbishing the two buildings.

Contact Dennis Carroll at 986-3091 or dcarroll@sfnewmexican.com.