Sierra County residents have a lot riding on spaceport

“I think it is really cool that we have the spaceport here in New Mexico,” said Marquez, who plays trumpet and plans to study at New Mexico State University in Las Cruces.

A lot of adults in Truth or Consequences agree, and they’ve supported the spaceport since the first discussions began in 1991.

The economies of town and of Sierra County were built on mining, hot springs and the state’s largest water reservoir. Spaceport America is being developed on visionary technology, taxpayer dollars and promises.

But some of the spaceport’s supporters think the New Mexico Spaceport Authority isn’t honoring promises it made early on to the town.

The Spaceport Authority’s executive director, Christine Anderson, said everyone just needs to keep being patient and recognize the immense challenge of building this complex and inherently dangerous project in the Jornada del Muerto desert.

Mixed feelings

Spaceport America wouldn’t exist without the support of Sierra County residents, most of whom live in Truth or Consequences. Both Sierra County and Doña Ana County approved a 0.25 percent gross receipts tax on goods and services to help pay for the spaceport’s construction. The state Legislature required two counties to approve the tax before the spaceport could move forward. The Spaceport Authority promised an economic boom for the two counties in return for the investment.

Two decades have passed, however, and the first commercial passenger flight into space by Virgin Galactic, with company founder Sir Richard Branson and his family on board, is still at least a year away. Until those flights start and full-service visitors centers are built, the spaceport can’t wholly fulfill its economic promise.

Some people wonder if the economic boom will ever happen. “Over a period of 10 years, we’ve been promised a lot of stuff. To date, we have seen none of it, not for the little people here in town,” said Bobby Allen, a former city and county commissioner, who has attended meetings about the spaceport since 1991.

Others worry the boom will benefit a few, not the many. The new hotels and fast-food restaurants going up are near Interstate 25, skipping the town’s historic downtown hot springs district altogether.

“Many of the benefits are already being diverted to a small group of people,” said Hans Townsend, president of the joint Truth or Consequences and Sierra County Chamber of Commerce, which boasts 80 members who supported the tax for the spaceport. “We are happy the spaceport is here, but we didn’t help set this table so a few people could eat while the rest of us are told we can have the crumbs.”

Others have invested in Sierra County land and new businesses, betting that the Spaceport America promise will be fulfilled. “I don’t think many people realize the huge impact the spaceport can have in the county and all over New Mexico,” said Randy K. Ashbaugh, who owns the land in Truth or Consequences where a Spaceport America visitors center will be built.

If Spaceport America is successful and becomes a destination for tens of thousands of visitors a year, laid-back Truth or Consequences is likely to change in ways no one can anticipate.

Visionaries

Sierra County is no stranger to visionaries or promises. From 1598 to the 1880s, merchants, soldiers, dreamers and outlaws traveled the 1,600-mile El Camino Real de Tierra Adentro from Mexico City to Santa Fe. The route took a shortcut across the dry and deadly Jornada del Muerto and the heart of Sierra County. Archaeological evidence suggests that long before the Spanish traveled the trail, Mesoamerican peoples used the route to go back and forth to the Southwest. “The ideas and technology coming up the El Camino Real from Mexico changed New Mexico,” said Sherry Fletcher, a Truth or Consequences native, historian and retired educator.

In the late 1800s, Sierra County miners and mine investors, including the poet Walt Whitman, watched their fortunes rise and fall.

Then a few enterprising entrepreneurs realized the hot springs bubbling up from just below the ground could build the economy of a fledgling town called Hot Springs. Over the next couple of decades, motels sprang up around the mineral springs. People came from across the United States to soak and heal in the clear, hot water.

In the early 1900s, engineers built a marvel called the Elephant Butte Dam, a concrete dike 301 feet high and 1,674 feet long, to back up the Rio Grande and store water for hundreds of farmers in Southern New Mexico and West Texas. When it was completed, only the Aswan Dam in Egypt was larger. The reservoir became the new big draw for visitors to Hot Springs and launched the lakeside town of Elephant Butte. Boaters and anglers started coming in droves.

Gov. Clyde Tingley pegged Hot Springs as the perfect place to build a state-of-the-art hospital for New Mexico children in the 1930s. The Carrie Tingley Children’s Hospital remained there until 1979.

The military eyed the county during World War II. It bought out ranchers and created the White Sands Missile Range, home of the Trinity atomic bomb test site.

One of the most controversial changes came in 1950, when radio personality Ralph Edwards challenged a town to adopt the name of his popular Truth or Consequences show to commemorate its 10th anniversary. Most of the Hot Springs voters said yes. Voters miffed about the name change moved down the road a few miles and founded Williamsburg.

A coffin left at the town’s cemetery marked the death of Hot Springs, N.M., on March 31, 1950. Inside the coffin, someone left a pile of bones, a joker from a deck of cards and an envelope addressed to the Hot Springs next of kin, according to a history of Truth or Consequences written by Fletcher and Cindy Carpenter.

Now Spaceport America is the latest, and perhaps most ambitious, in a string of new ventures in the county. “The biggest change to the area since 1917 is from outhouses to outer space,” said Fletcher’s mom, Maxine Fletcher, 94, a longtime resident of Truth or Consequences.

The edge of change

The town was once a place where bars lined the main street, gambling was common and anglers hauled out huge catfish from the nearby reservoir. “Gambling sustained a sense of no rules, no laws in the early days,” said Sherry Fletcher, whose mom was fond of dice herself in the 1940s.

Longtime barber Joe Silva recalls that Edwards, true to his word, brought film stars and bands to celebrate the town’s name change every spring during an annual fiesta that for four decades drew people from all over the state.

Today, Truth or Consequences sports 19 churches, two bars and a couple of restaurant lounges. The fiesta isn’t what it used to be, although a group has been trying to revive it. The town has a big drug and alcohol problem and no drug treatment facilities.

“I don’t know what drove the problem, but I know what keeps it going,” said Lucille Benda, a recovering addict who is studying to be a massage therapist. “The kids grew up watching their parents. It’s multigenerational.”

The county consolidated 26 rural school districts into one district housed in Truth or Consequences that now buses in students from more than 4,000 square miles. It has an all- volunteer fire department that serves the entire county.

The county, with an estimated population of 11,895, has a per-capita income of $17,000. Truth or Consequences’ per-capita income is even lower. About a third of the residents live below the poverty level. Most of the newcomers are senior citizens.

“That means a lot of retired people on fixed incomes, Social Security,” said City Commissioner Steve Green, a former New York businessman who moved to the town a dozen years ago.

Tourism drives the economy. Elephant Butte Lake boaters and campers swell the population by an estimated 60,000 to 80,000 people over summer weekends, according to Rolf Hechler, southwest district manager with New Mexico State Parks. Elephant Butte Lake State Park typically has 900,000 to 1.1 million visitors a year, he said.

The biggest employers in town are the New Mexico State Veterans’ Home, the local hospital, the school district and Wal-Mart.

“We need jobs. We need business opportunities,” Green said.

That’s why the community worked hard to pass a gross receipts tax in support of the Spaceport.

Truth or Consequences has a downtown half-filled with empty buildings. But the other half is a lively mix of art galleries, shops, museums and restaurants. A group of business owners are working to rebuild Main Street. One proprietor of the Passion Pie Cafe started the Young DaVincis Club, which helps fledgling artists learn how to market themselves.

The town has attracted an eclectic assortment of people, in part because it’s cheap to live there. Some natives, like Sherry Fletcher, left the town as soon as they graduated from high school, only to return after seeing a bit of the world. Other residents made their fortunes or left high-stress jobs elsewhere and came to the small town to reinvent themselves.

Black Cat Bookstore owner Rhonda Brittan and her partner, Jay Ellerbrock, settled in the town in 1997 after traveling the country in an Airstream trailer. They could park their trailer in an RV space there for $65 a month, including electricity. “I think you can still get a house for $30,000 to $35,000 here,” Brittan said. “You’ll be working your butt off to repair it, though.”

The couple had seen a lot of towns in the country with dead downtowns because new businesses were built along interstates. Truth or Consequences was different. It had the Rio Grande, the lake, mountains, hot springs and friendly people.

“We could see that this was not dying. It was a lovely, walkable downtown,” Brittan said.

That’s what downtown business owners want spaceport tourists to see, if and when they start coming to the town.

A spaceport is born

The spaceport is not Sierra County’s first courtship with space endeavors. In 1959, the U.S. Navy chose a spot north of Engle, near Elephant Butte, as one of six sites for a space surveillance station to keep tabs on satellites and meteors. The U.S. Air Force took over the space surveillance stations and operated the program until September, when the sites were shut down.

The idea for a commercial spaceport was launched in the early 1990s, when some space enthusiasts, including Stanford University engineer and investment entrepreneur Burton Lee, formed the Southwest Space Task Force. With more than $1.4 million in federal funds and the backing of then-Sen. Pete Domenici, R-N.M., they developed a spaceport plan.

The state opened an Office for Space Commercialization in 1994 and a few years later, then-Gov. Bill Richardson got behind the project. A 27-square-mile parcel of state trust land was pegged as the perfect place for a spaceport. It had uncongested airspace controlled by the U.S. Army, low population, great weather and two nearby universities with aerospace research interests.

In 2008, Branson signed a 20-year lease at the spaceport for Virgin Galactic, thought to be a key to the spaceport’s success.

The state Legislature approved $225 million to build the spaceport, but only funded a portion. The rest came when Sierra and Doña Ana County residents approved the tax. A total of 75 percent of the tax collected goes to the spaceport. The rest goes to the counties for science and technology programs. The total contribution to the spaceport since 2009 from the two counties has been $79 million.

But the spaceport’s promises kept getting delayed. Construction on buildings didn’t begin until 2009. The New Mexico Spaceport Authority, formed in 2005, went through a series of executive directors before Anderson, a longtime civilian contractor with the U.S. Air Force, took the reins three years ago.

Branson’s Virgin Galactic has delayed the official launch of the first passenger spaceship at least three times in the last few years, said Tony Archuleta, a Truth or Consequences native who has covered the spaceport since its beginning as a reporter for The Herald News. It’s understandable, given the gravity of what they’re trying to accomplish, he said. Engineers are testing and retesting designs in the Mohave Desert. Getting the launch right is critical if the endeavor and the spaceport are to survive. But “every time they give a launch date, I add two years,” Archuleta said.

Gov. Susana Martinez wasn’t a big spaceport supporter when she took office in 2011, but when it was in danger of losing its main tenant, Virgin Galactic, she supported a limited liability bill that extended protections to spacecraft manufacturers and parts suppliers that they were seeking.

The spaceport has competition for commercial spaceflights from Florida, Virginia, Texas, Colorado and California. But New Mexico’s spaceport has a strong foothold with Virgin Galactic and Space Exploration Technologies Corp., also known as SpaceX, as tenants. In addition, NASA and other groups have launched 20 vertical payload rockets from the spaceport. The U.S. Air Force, working with the privately owned UP Aerospace, has launched four research and development flights from the spaceport.

From utilities to roads, launchpads, a gateway building and a new operations center with emergency services just completed in October, the spaceport team has brought the project close to its final stages. Archuleta said the construction alone in the last couple of years has kept hotels full in Truth or Consequences.

Fees for the launches, landings, building leases and photo ops for companies like Nike have paid two-thirds of the operating costs as well as state employee salaries at the spaceport for the last three years, according to Anderson. Virgin Galactic began paying $1 million a year in January to lease its gateway building at the spaceport.

The spaceport’s goal is to become self-sustaining through partnerships with private companies.

Building the visitors centers — one at the spaceport and one in Truth or Consequences — and improving the 23-mile southern access road to the spaceport from Las Cruces are the primary projects left. “Our plan is to complete those projects in about 18 months,” Anderson said. “Our definition of operational is when Virgin Galactic begins flights for customers and when the two visitors centers are up and running. Up until then, we really are still in construction.”

Anderson had $13 million left from money approved by the Legislature, and she carved out $8.1 million of it for the first phase of improving the southern road. The road wasn’t part of the spaceport’s original budget or plan, she said.

“It is extremely important to have this road,” Anderson said, because “the majority of people [spaceport staff and contractors] will probably live in Las Cruces.”

Meanwhile, Anderson is courting private investors for loans to build the two visitors centers. When they open and Virgin Galactic is merrily shooting people off into space, the spaceport expects up to 200,000 visitors a year.

Promises made

When the New Mexico Spaceport Authority was courting Sierra County for support, many Truth or Consequences business people thought that, in return for the town’s support, they would get a downtown visitors center and that tour buses would bring people to the historic district — which isn’t visible from the interstate.

The city made a bid to put the center on a parcel it had on the southwestern end of town near the interstate. The road from there to the spaceport comes right through downtown. But a New Mexico Economic Development Department attorney nixed the idea, saying the land didn’t meet all the state criteria.

 Instead, Ashbaugh, a businessman whose family roots in the county stretch back to the 1880s, sold 8.3 acres, right on Interstate 25, to the Spaceport Authority for $1.6 million for a new Spaceport America “welcome” center. Ashbaugh, who owns a title company, a construction company and convenience stores with gas stations in Truth or Consequences, is primed to take advantage of the spaceport’s economic potential. The visitors center will nestle into a spot between the Holiday Inn Express and the Wal-Mart Supercenter, all built in the last two years on land Ashbaugh owns as part of his Hot Springs Retail Center development.

The site is a couple of miles from downtown, and visitors can reach the spaceport without driving into town.

Ashbaugh believes the spaceport will eventually bring tourists, manufacturing jobs and other opportunities to the county and the state. “This is not about the downtown competing with uptown or Elephant Butte,” he said. “We compete with Las Cruces, Albuquerque, Phoenix and Santa Fe for tourist dollars.”

Spaceport tours are conducted by Follow the Sun Tours under an interim contract with the New Mexico Spaceport Authority. The company, owned by Mark and Rose Bleth of Albuquerque, is well positioned to vie for the permanent tour contract when the spaceport opens. They know the spaceport’s history, they have their own guides and buses, and they’ve taken about 3,000 visitors out there in the last 18 months. The tours cost $25 per person for Doña Ana and Sierra County residents; all others pay $59 per person.

The couple opened an office in Elephant Butte on an acre of land that will be big enough to house the 10 large tour buses the spaceport estimates will be needed to handle future crowds. They hired local staff. Rose Bleth said they looked for a space in Truth or Consequences for the office but couldn’t find one that would meet all the state regulations for parking and tour bus storage needs. She said they hand out packets promoting local businesses, including those in Truth or Consequences.

Currently, the tour buses pick up passengers at the Holiday Inn Express just off the interstate, stop by the Elephant Butte office to fill out forms and head out to the spaceport. The tours skip downtown altogether.

Townsend, Green and others don’t fault the tour company. Going through downtown is out of the tour company’s way. But they say the Spaceport Authority promised that tours would go through downtown and should require it in future contracts.

The Chamber of Commerce sent a letter to Martinez and the Spaceport Authority in October expressing its concerns and asking to meet about the issue.

Juan Fuentes, the city manager, agrees. “The commitment was done at the very outset of the project,” Fuentes said. “The spaceport committed to downtown and the city that they were going to be a partner. The idea was to showcase the hot springs and the downtown. We’re not asking for much. We have a downtown loop.”

Fuentes and Green believe the town will find some resolution with the Spaceport Authority. “We just want to have a win-win for the city and the county and everyone that supported the spaceport,” Fuentes said.

Anderson said the Spaceport Authority can’t dictate where Follow the Sun Tours goes under the current contract. “They’re a small business,” she said. “We’re not going to tell them which route to take.”

But the permanent tour contract could specify that buses travel through downtown, she said.

Contact Staci Matlock at 986-3055 or smatlock@sfnewmexican.com. Follow her on Twitter @stacimatlock.