Pueblo road closure is no mystery

Neighbor Bob Widdicombe wrote a letter to the editor of the Santa Fe New Mexican.

Why has the tribal council of Santo Domingo (Kewa) Pueblo decided to make the lives of my neighbors and me more difficult by blocking the road that we have been using for more than 40 years to get to Interstate 25?

I live in a small community of about 30 people living off the grid on land near Kewa Pueblo. We bought our property over 40 years ago and my wife and I built a house by ourselves. It is our home. We use the Galisteo Dam Road, constructed by the Army Corps of Engineers in the 1960s to shop, work and visit family and friends.

The tribal council has closed the road, blocking us from using it and also to block services such as propane delivery and emergency vehicles.

I am 77 years old and last year I fell off of a ladder and broke five ribs. An ambulance was called to take me to the hospital. If the road had been blocked I would have been in serious trouble. We have neighbors in their 80s who have to count on being able to get medical help if needed.

The tribe has told us that we have to now use an extremely rough dirt road that takes us to Highway 14 south of Madrid. Using that route will add an additional hour to get to Santa Fe. 

Why?

One reason they gave us was that they wanted to protect sacred sites. Yet the tribe has allowed movie crews to use the road for film productions, bringing in many trucks and other vehicles.

Tribal leaders have given permission to the Boy Scouts to have a jamboree on land adjacent to the dam road. They also lease land to an asphalt distribution facility with many large trucks coming and going.

Further, they run cattle all over the land along the road. Sacred sites don’t seem to be so well protected. The occasional car from our neighborhood would not seem to be much of a threat. So why would we not be allowed to use the road?

Why?

Robert Widdicombe is a 40-year resident of Baja Waldo Road, now shut and severely affecting our lives.

An interested party responded. 

There are no mysteries here: the Pueblo has been planning this road closure since at least 2020 during the Covid pandemic then built formidable vehicle barriers when their offer to purchase four tracts equalling 937 acres failed. The listing real estate agent told me that the tribal governor and council are "a bunch of bullies" who would do anything to seize those parcels.

At least three residents including the owner of the property on which I am living, told me that when they were building even forty years ago tribal representatives routinely drove onto private land and swore they would ultimately take all the property within the Juana Lopez Land Grant when given the chance. Those chances came in 2010 and again in 2012 when the feds endowed the Pueblo with the financial resources to make it happen.

The road into the asphalt plant is on Pueblo trust land so there must be an easement and/or an existing Corps ROW connecting it to 16. The Corps built that road to build the dam from that side of the Galisteo and miners trucked gypsum out of there for decades afterwards. Access to the asphalt plant is over the Pueblo and through Sandoval County but the facility is in Santa Fe County on Corps of Engineers property.

"First announced around 1959 with active production starting in 1960, the facility processed massive amounts of crude gypsum—initially targeting an output of 120 million square feet of gypsum wallboard annually. Decades of industrial operations left behind heavy environmental and reclamation responsibilities. Because the site impacts tribal lands, addressing these mining legacies required structured, multi-jurisdictional cooperation between the Santo Domingo Pueblo (Kewa Pueblo) tribal leadership, federal regulators like the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), and the state via the New Mexico Energy, Minerals and Natural Resources Department (EMNRD). On a broader corporate scale, these legacy environmental liabilities, combined with tens of thousands of asbestos-related lawsuits stemming from its historical building products, pushed Kaiser Gypsum to file for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in 2016. The resolution of its liabilities eventually led to a major legal reorganization, culminating in a landmark 2024 U.S. Supreme Court case, Truck Insurance Exchange v. Kaiser Gypsum Co."

Just to be clear, Mr. Widdicombe is not wrong: the road closure is hardest on the folks who live on his road so it fell on me to improve the only way out and hoped donations for diesel fuel could sustain the effort. So, my thanks to those who support my decision and despite the detractors using it, Red Rock is in pretty good shape.