Southwest Public Safety Center nearly completed in Albuquerque
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That station is just one part of a newer experiment for Albuquerque, making its first regional public safety center with space for firefighters, police officers, and Albuquerque Community Safety. It was March of last year when they broke ground, and now, the Southwest Public Safety Center is just months away from opening its doors.
'Starting in August, we will open this station with an ALS engine. So it'll be an engine, fire engine that carries the water, the hose, all of that. And then it'll also be staffed with one paramedic and then three firefighters that have our EMT basics so that we can provide paramedic coverage and fire suppression coverage,' said Albuquerque Fire Rescue Chief Emily Jaramillo.
The new hub will serve the Southwest Mesa, one of the fastest-growing areas of the city that's only expected to get bigger. AFR said it's planning for that growth by building extra space for more fire engines expected to call Station 23 home over the next decade.
One of the biggest benefits will be faster response times for AFR in that area. 'We've really relied on our automatic aid agreement to meet response times in this area of the city with Bernalillo County fires. So right now, Bernalillo County Fire is covering quite a bit of this area for us to make sure that we are meeting response times. However, now, AFR being here, this is all city jurisdiction. We're going to be able to meet those response times with our own apparatus,' said Jaramillo.
The center will be one of two planned spaces for ACS on the Westside. 'We're going to have an admin staff here. The thing with our responders is that they're always responding to calls. And so, this will be a nice touch point for them to be able to come in and finish a report. But it'll be a nice space for everybody to collaborate. We can receive referrals from our counter departments here, and we're really excited to be here,' said Jodie Esquibel, director, Albuquerque Community Safety.
Phase one of the project should be open by August. Eventually, the city is also hoping to transit center and a community center on the property.
Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
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'I actually have experienced a reduction in force,' he said. 'Although I think today is even worse.' That's because he watched staffing numbers and budgets decline over the years while park visitation steadily increased. In the 1990s, 'most of us felt the budgets were too small to handle the responsibilities that we were given and given to serve the public,' Francis said. 'So every year, every budget was passed, we saw small reductions. But cumulatively, those reductions became pretty huge.' In the early 1990s, the parks had between 255 million and 274 million visitors a year. Last year, the parks had their largest number of visitors ever with 331 million people. Yellowstone National Park just recorded its busiest May ever. From Francis's perspective, the National Park Service begins each year in a 'huge deficit' because of dollars not allocated the year before (the deferred maintenance issue). Since the start of his career, 'we've continued to see deficits as enlarging. So given where we are today — where the idea is to cut the National Park Service employees by some 30% or so — that's on top of having to absorb the costs of the past.' NPCA's Garder said staffing requirements had steadily eroded since 2010, under a Democratic administration. 'The workforce capacity fell by over a fifth in the last 10 years,' Garder said. The 'collateral duty' Fritzke described is rather ubiquitous and far-reaching, Garder said. 'You have archaeologists who are cleaning bathrooms because they lost their janitorial staff. You've got law enforcement officers who are parking cars because they've lost their visitor services people,' Garder said. 'People who are working two, sometimes even three jobs, because the parks didn't have the funding to hire the colleagues that they used to have.' According to Garder, it means park employees are all working in visitor-facing roles to keep up the facade that the parks are not experiencing any impact from staffing or budget cuts. What is the National Park Service's mandate? The first national park was Yellowstone, founded in 1872, but it was not until 1916 that the National Park Service was officially formed. The Organic Act of 1916 — which was cosponsored by Utah Sen. Reed Smoot — gave the NPS the mandate 'to conserve the scenery and the natural and historic objects and the wildlife therein and to provide for the enjoyment of the same in such manner and by such means as will leave them unimpaired for the enjoyment of future generations.' That 'unimpaired mandate' is something national park employees reference as a guiding principle. It requires that parks or historical sites must be conserved and maintained for future generations, and that through that conservation, they provide enjoyment for Americans. But in the midst of the staffing and budget cuts this year, Burgum signed a secretarial order on April 3 titled, 'Ensuring National Parks Are Open and Accessible.' The order makes it clear that parks are to prioritize being available to visitors, stipulating that any park closure or change of operational hours would require director-level review. It sent the parks scrambling to make sure visitor-facing elements were fully operational and staffed. Even if that meant back-office personnel whose jobs were to support visitor services and maintain conservation efforts were not doing their primary roles. 'National parks are the best idea we ever had. Absolutely American, absolutely democratic, they reflect us at our best rather than our worst,' said Wallace Stegner, the late novelist and conservationist. We may not know exactly what the job-related stress points are at the national parks, but, according to Fritzke, it is a good time to emphasize gratitude toward national park employees. 'People need to be patient because I think the morale of the National Park Service has never been great, but now it is in the toilet,' she said. 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