Santa Fe New Mexico - Nicholas Gilmore
A major expansion at the city-owned Santa Fe Regional Airport — work that was greenlighted in late 2021 — is now expected to be complete at the end of the year.
The project, which includes new parking lots and a first-phase expansion to the terminal, broke ground in February 2022. Completion was slated for January, then March 1, but Airport Manager James Harris said he expects crews to finish by December. Harris said some “underground issues” discovered during construction of new parking lots have slowed the project down. Workers found abandoned utility lines and cables.
“There were no plans for what’s out there since it’s so old,” Harris said. “We ran into abandoned sewer lines, abandoned water lines, electric lines.”
He added, the unexpected discoveries have triggered remediation processes that weren’t planned for, including an effort to find all the buried lines and create a map of the site.
The $21.4 million price tag for the project has not changed, Harris said.