The Rio Rancho City Council convened on November 17, 2025, to approve previous minutes and receive extensive updates from department staff regarding ongoing bond projects, park maintenance, aquatic center renovations, and upcoming community holiday events. The meeting featured a full agenda of staff reports with no public testimony or major legislative votes taken, resulting in the approval of September minutes and administrative progress updates.
The first item on the agenda is approval of the September 15, 2025 minutes. I make a motion that we approve the minutes. I'll separate the motion. All right, I'll take roll call. Commissioner Romero, do you approve? Yes. Commissioner Herrera. Yes, if we Commissioner Edder. Commissioner French Barger. Approved. Commissioner Greeting. Approved. Commissioner Marsh. Approved. The September 21st, 25, 2025 minutes are approved. Thank you. Next item is staff presentations, reports, and comments. First, we have Diane Sonye projects update. She's the project division division manager. Good evening, Chairwoman French Barger and Commissioners. Currently we have quite a few good projects that are underway. You've been hearing about some of them for over a year, so I'm glad they're finally rolling out. If you were to go by our Vista Cendia Park, you would see the contractors started to demolish the existing playground. They will be replacing the playground, the two to five year old child playground structure and the five to twelve playground structure. They're removing the old wood chips, they'll be replacing the wood chips as well as the play structures and adding poured in place accessible surfacing to a portion of the playground, and they will also be adding some additional concrete pad near the playground and a 10 by 30 shade structure. So we're hoping that that greatly improves the usability of this playground and park and make it much more enjoyable for the neighborhood that uses it. This is one of our two former bond projects, the 2024 Geobond projects. The other one was the Star Heights basketball courts, which have been completed already. We have one for the main Haynes pool and recreation center parking lot that is currently under design. So we're glad that those are underway. They are under construction, and the hope right now is to be at substantial completion by or before the end of January 2026. It will be interesting to see what the outdoor programming space or that terrace can be used for for adult for senior recreation going forward. We also have a couple of items related to the community development block grant, former COVID funds, and one of the projects was to install shade systems at the Broadmoor Senior Center on the terrace, and that is already underway. And the other project was to install a 30 by 30 metal shade structure over a concrete pad with benches and tables at the Star Heights Park adjacent to the recently renovated basketball courts that I just mentioned a few moments ago. And that material or materials for that shade structure should be delivered next week to our contractor's yard. And as soon as the work is completed at Vista Sandia, I believe they will begin the installation of that shade structure. They just happen to be the same contractor and they don't have very large crews, so our hope is to have that work also completed before the summer of 2026. There's definitely other small projects going on. There's things that we are going to start procurement for, but as those get underway, we'll give you more information about that. I did want to let you know about a few grant uh grant applications that the department through, I guess our I guess it's our grants administrator or grants coordinator who is contracted to the city. We submitted grant applications for the design of a I'm gonna call it a pickleball complex at the Sierra Norte Park. Um earlier this year we mentioned how we had requested funding for that from the city funds, but it's also eligible for certain types of state funding. And what's nice about this is it would create basically a uh for us a regional pickleball facility at the Sierra Norte Park by adding and constructing six to eight pickleball courts with kind of a dedicated parking area. Um the hope would be that if we couldn't afford to uh I guess construct them in total, we could either phase that or we could then pursue additional state funds to not only do the design phase first but then come back and do construction. If for some reason we get design funding, the existing city budgeted funds could also then go towards construction. So one way or another we will be moving forward with that project, and we should find out about the award of that grant within the next two weeks. Another project we applied for state funding for was the design for phase one of the Rio Rancho Multi-Generation Center. Um, this is something that we may not hear about other than it's on the list until the next legislative session. Um, and then the next item that we had applied for for construction, the remaining construction funds for was to complete phase three of sports complex north. We pretty much have design.