When I awoke this morning I heard this terrible news. Our heart felt condolences go out to the Trujillo Family.

Police: Las Campanas man drowns in golf course pond
By Dennis J. Carroll | For The New Mexican

2/21/2010

A 62-year-old Las Campanas man apparently drowned Sunday when he fell through the ice as he was trying to retrieve his two young dogs that had run onto the pond at the luxury development’s golf course, state police reported.

Joseph B. Trujillo was walking with his wife, Marcelle, 62, and their two terrier pups along a cart path above the pond shortly before 11 a.m. when the dogs took off and headed across the frozen water, said Lt. Eric Garcia.

The couple called out to the dogs but they did not respond, and Trujillo pursued them for about 25 yards onto the pond. However, a large section of the ice gave way, and Trujillo fell through.

“He was completely engulfed in the frigid water,” Garcia said.

A state police search and recovery diving team pulled Trujillo’s body from the pond about 3 p.m.

Garcia said the water was about 8 feet deep and 36 degrees.

After seeing “only a glove floating on the water,” Marcelle Trujillo also stepped onto the ice, Garcia said, but she turned back because of the risk from the cracking ice. She called 911 from a nearby home, and she and the neighbor returned to the pond, but there was no sign of her husband other than the glove.

Marcelle Trujillo was taken by ambulance to Christus St. Vincent Regional Medical Center, Garcia said, adding that she was suffering from trauma but was expected to recover.

He said the dogs, believed to be Jack Russell terriers or similar dogs, returned from the pond and were safe at a neighbor’s home.

Garcia said the Trujillos were Las Campanas residents, but their street address was not disclosed.

Joseph Trujillo’s body was taken to the state Office of the Medical Inspector in Albuquerque to rule out foul play, but none is suspected.

Here is the link to the Original Story from the New Mexican

Contact us

We get asked that question a lot at here at HomesinSantaFeNM.com. And our most honest answer is “We’re not sure”. However, we are also positive that Las Campanas will recover and will remain a highly desirable place to live in the Santa Fe area.  With unparalled views and amenities, Las Campanas offers what no other Santa Fe subdivision does. The community will not only survive, it will also continue to thrive and prosper.

The Santa Fe New Mexican published the following article in Today’s (December 27th, 2009) newspaper.  It’s an interesting read, and it outlines the challenges that Las Campanas has faced. 

ARTICLE

Life isn’t supposed to be so trying at Las Campanas.

For nearly 20 years, the gated enclave west of the city limits has represented the pinnacle of genteel country living in Santa Fe. Its two Jack Nicklaus-designed golf courses, soaring clubhouse, 20,000 square-foot spa and baronial equestrian center, nicknamed “the horse Hyatt,” set it apart from every other affluent neighborhood in town.

But with the developer now in default, nearly one-fourth of the land still unsold and a looming bill for a multimillion-dollar water system, Las Campanas is in the midst of a troubled transition, its fate now in the hands of residents whose confidence has been shaken by recent events and who are being asked for the first time to shoulder the entire cost of the development’s signature services and amenities.

“We are in a challenging new era, no question about it,” said Bob Buddendorf, a retired Dallas business executive who chairs the committee of residents that is assuming control of The Club at Las Campanas, which includes the golf courses, the clubhouse, food services, the spa and the equestrian center.

Heavily subsidized by the developer, Las Campanas has been struggling to find its own footing and reclaim its reputation as having one of the best clubs in the Southwest, said Mark Silbert, who is working with Buddendorf. After developer Lyle Anderson lost control to Lloyd’s Banking Group in 2008, Silbert said, key personnel were let go, the quality of the food service slipped and building maintenance was deferred. The sale of the club to its members, originally scheduled for 2011, was advanced to stop “the attrition of members,” said Silbert, a retired Exxon oceanographic engineer who moved to Las Campanas from Houston three years ago.

Buddendorf and Silbert believe that sales of both land and homes will pick up as the recession eases, but other forces may be at work.

“Las Campanas introduced a new market segment to Santa Fe that was not being served. The question now is whether the depth of that segment has been plumbed,” said former Santa Fean Christopher Lienberger, a land-use consultant and scholar who chaired a commission involved with planning the Santa Fe Railyard and whose firm once counted Las Campanas among its clients.

Lienberger, who is a visiting fellow at the Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C., believes that, nationally, the market for exurban development like Las Campanas has been saturated. For all of its amenities, Lienberger said, “Las Campanas represents a prettier form of sprawl. … The demand has shifted back toward a preference for close-in, walkable urban space.”

Lifestyle in jeopardy

Spread across 4,700 acres of high desert, with telescopic views of the Jemez and Sangre de Cristo mountains, Las Campanas began selling lots in 1992. It quickly became the top selling luxury golf development in the country. However, by 2003, well before the current recession, lot sales at Las Campanas began to slow. Of 1,700 parcels, about 400 remain unsold.

A new era dawned at Las Campanas this fall with the announcement of a jolting 50 percent hike in monthly club dues. The increase was necessary, said Buddendorf, after the developer stopped paying about $2.5 million a year to maintain The Club at Las Campanas.

The loss of that annual subsidy led to a temporary shutdown of the club in September, the furloughing of 178 employees, and the sobering realization that if resident and nonresident members did not step in, the future of Las Campanas, or at least of its lifestyle, could be in jeopardy.

“The price premium Las Campanas has enjoyed is clearly tied to the reputation and viability of its amenities,” said Lienberger. “Whatever can be done to maintain them is a smart idea, whether it means raising fees or cutting costs.”

Club membership has fallen by about 15 percent with more than 100 memberships up for sale. An auction is planned for early next year, with the bidding tentatively set to start around $30,000 for golf memberships, which previously sold for $90,000. The bidding for social memberships, which exclude golf privileges, could start at $20,000, a 60 percent discount from their customary price.

Club members don’t have to own property at Las Campanas. Nor does the price of property necessarily include the cost of a membership, although it often does.

Image problem

The average sale price of a house has also fallen by 20 percent over the past year to just over $1 million. Prices did not fall as hard as they did in Tesuque, for example, but the rate of decline was steeper than in the city’s pricey northeast foothills.

Las Campanas is still doing its part to hold up the high end. One home on Mustang Mesa is going for just under $5 million. Another nearby estate, featuring a 12,000 square-foot house on 2 acres, is on the market for $8.2 million.

At the other end of the spectrum, you can find a 1,900-square-foot, three-bedroom house for $440,000, less than the amount owed on its existing mortgage, according to the real estate agent who represents it. Known as a “short sale,” the listing is a sign of the times. Buddendorf worries that it also may reflect a negative perception fostered by Las Campanas’ recent troubles. “We clearly need to alter that perception,” he said.

Las Campanas has struggled with an image problem almost from the outset. Fairly or unfairly, it has been branded as a wealthy wastrel, especially when it comes to water use. In 2002, in the midst of a drought, the city of Santa Fe filed a lawsuit to compel Las Campanas to abide by city water-use restrictions. Located outside the city, Las Campanas nonetheless took its water from one of the city’s main sources of supply, the Buckman well field, which was being drawn down at an unsustainable rate.

The fact that Las Campanas was using Buckman water to irrigate its golf courses during a drought was particularly irksome to city residents who were forced to cut back on household consumption.

Las Campanas agreed to abide by municipal water-use restrictions as part of a settlement of the lawsuit. But this past fall, the two sides were back at the negotiating table after Las Campanas scaled back its role in a partnership with the city and county to build a $200 million project to replace the Buckman supply with surface flow from the Rio Grande.

With the developer no longer able to participate in the project, Buddendorf and other residents were left to figure out how to pay the $4 million cost of a pipeline that will convey river water to their two golf courses. And as it scales back its investment in the Buckman Direct Diversion project, Las Campanas is again on the defensive as it seeks to assure rate payers elsewhere that they won’t be footing the bill for any of the development’s water.

“Are we paying for the sins of the developer?” mused Mark Silbert during a recent interview. “We didn’t get what the developer promised — a stand-alone water treatment plant that would have made us independent of the city and county. And we’re short $4 million.”

‘Epitome of divide’

Others say the years of wrangling over water masked a deeper resentment of Las Campanas and other gated enclaves that sprung up about the same time. Such developments were seen as an affront to a cherished image of Santa Fe as a place largely without class and ethnic distinctions, where wealth was camouflaged behind crumbling adobe walls.

“Las Campanas marked the beginning of the differentiation between rich and poor in this town,” said attorney Owen Lopez, the executive director of the nonprofit McCune Foundation, who has lived in Santa Fe since the 1960s.

“When we moved here, we lived on Otero Street across the arroyo from our landlady,” he recalled. “In those days, mansions were next door to hovels. The rich didn’t live behind walls with pass codes to get in.”

Yet Lopez himself was not immune to the appeal of Las Campanas. “I’m a big golfer. I have a lot of friends with places out there,” he said. “At one point, I told my wife we could get a deal on a house on the golf course. She said: ‘Are you nuts?’ That was the end of it.”

Lienberger has a similar take on Las Campanas. He compared Santa Fe’s demographic profile to a camel with two humps, one bulging with older, upper-middle-class Anglos and the other with a younger, poorer Hispanic populace. “Las Campanas became the epitome of that divide,” he said.

The last census illustrated his point. In 2000, the city’s median household age was 41, its median income $48,000. The citywide population was 49 percent Hispanic. At Las Campanas, where the population was split between two census tracts, the median age was about 55. The median household income was well over $100,000, and the population was 12 percent Hispanic.

The 2010 census may paint a different picture: As home prices come down at Las Campanas, there is likely to be more diversity among its residents.

“We have a growing segment of moms, dads and kids,” said Rosa Silbert, Mark’s wife, who heads a committee that is working on strategies to market Club memberships. “We’ve instituted junior programs in golf, tennis and equestrian. I’d say 20 percent of our memberships are young families. I think you’ll find that things are changing, that we’re more a reflection of the city.”

And yet it’s hard to shake the sense that Las Campanas is Santa Fe on steroids. It’s an impression reinforced by the mammoth vigas atop the great hall of the clubhouse, by the cavernous “horse Hilton” that provides 90 room-sized stalls for its tenants, at least one of which is valued at $100,000, and by the volume of water needed to sustain the golf courses — enough to supply more than 2,000 families.

Most of that water is effluent or gray water and not potable. But in the arid Southwest, even the demand for effluent is growing. As recycling technology improves, the potential for converting effluent into drinkable water is becoming a reality. In New Mexico, in the meantime, gray water nourishes farm fields and replenishes rivers and acequias. At Las Campanas, the golf course water serves the seasonal wants of a part-time community. “The golf courses are underutilized,” Buddendorf conceded.

In fact, many of the 700 homes are empty much of the time. Buddendorf and Silbert estimated that about half of Las Campanas residents live there year-round. During the winter months, the empty golf courses blend in with the surrounding landscape that lends Las Campanas its pastoral charm.

Charitable works

Many residents work hard to dispel the image of their community as a haven of carefree consumption in a poor state. Las Campanas every year opens its coffers to the disadvantaged and its gates to people with disabilities. Its Las Campadres program offers free riding, swimming and art lessons, and its community fund has contributed $18,000 to $20,000 annually to local nonprofits for the past few years.

“A number of our members serve on the boards of the opera, the Lensic and the Santa Fe Community Foundation,” Buddendorf said. “I think our efforts have made a difference in terms of how we are perceived by people in Santa Fe.”

But the good works have also relied on the deep pockets of the developer who donated $50,000 a year to the community fund. Those contributions won’t continue, said Buddendorf, unless The Club at Las Campanas raises the money on its own.

Whether residents will agree to raise their contributions along with their club dues is an open question, Buddendorf said.

“Las Campanas has played a significant role in this community, and I don’t think anybody wants to see it reduced. But the issue is now up to the members, and the key to the future is building membership.”

Frank Clifford | For The New Mexican

The range is from a quarter acre to over 5 acres, averaging about 1.5 acres. The prevailing architectural styles are Pueblo Revival and Territorial with variations that expand the range from contemporary to western rustic to Mediterranean influence. One story homes are the norm with flat rooves that allow for positive pitch for drainagage. The flexibility of the design guidelines allows for your personal expression.

The Estancias at Las Campanas is an area where the design guidelines have been expanded to include log homes, pitched roofs and second stories. Here the topography with its unlimited views and canyon vistas over looks open federal land and slopes gently to the Rio Grande.

Surrounded by adobe walls reminiscent of the old East Side of Santa Fe, Club Estates enjoys a superb location within walking distance of the Clubhouse and Spa and Tennis Center.

Directly across from the Spa and Tennis Center are the 12 homesites of Silver Mesa sited on 3 cul de sacs. Here semi custom homes built by Roger Hunter for Senterra Corp. are available for purchase, several sitting high above the golf course.

Lining the golf course, the Club Casitas are the ultimate in lock and leave convenience, being the closest homes to the Clubhouse. They range from 2100 square feet to 3665 square feet and all offer golf course and mountain views, with some overlooking the spectacular lake between the two 18 finishing holes. All feature outdoor portals with fireplaces for enjoying the serene landscape.

High atop Trailhead Dr. with magnificent views of both golf course and mountain ranages sit The Pueblos, 37 homes surrounding a park and behind their own gate. They vary from aproximately 2800 square feet to 4200 square feet in size, some featuring guest houses.

Across Trailhead Dr. is Park Estates which isby golf course and centered by a park. Lot sizes range from .6 acres to 1.85 acre homesites which are suitable for custom building. Resale homes are also available for purchase here.

The Terrazas, developed by Westman- Browning and built by Tierra Concepts. They range in size from 2390 square feet to just over 2500 square feet. Offering a variety of views from golf course, to open land, all have a mountain backdrop and enjoy a convenient location close to the core of the community and its amenities.

Aptly named, the Ranch Estates is a unique enclave bordered by ranch land and incorporating the Equestrian Center. Here 27 lots are zoned to include a home, guest house and barn to accomodate two horses. An interior trail connects each homesite to the Equestrian Center and the main trail to the BLM (Bureau of Land Management) which afford you 68,000 acres of riding terrain.

Surrounded by golf course, Los Santeros features a variety of lot sizes and home sizes from large estate homes to smaller patio homes. Neighborhoods with the area include the Villas, Puertas, Ventanas, and Las Melodias.

The remaining neighborhoods are called Estates and are identified by numbers corresponding to the order of their development. Here existing and undeveloped homesites are situated behind gates and offer a variety of topography and views.  Home sizes must be a minimum of 2500 square feet but can be as large as the developable area will allow. Guest houses are permissible.

http://homesinsantafenm.com/listing/906041/

The action is another important step in the Aamodt case filed 43 years ago to settle the water-rights claims by Nambé, Tesuque, Pojoaque and San Ildefonso pueblos. The pueblos, the state, the city of Santa Fe and Santa Fe County in 2006 reached a settlement that needs congressional approval. This year, Congress has steadily advanced legislation to ratify and fund the settlement, but no final act has been passed. Some of the nonpueblo landowners in the valley with domestic wells have fought against the settlement for years and continue to oppose portions of it.

Meanwhile, the federal district court must finalize the priority dates on acequias in the valley as part of the settlement. Priority dates were given by the state to more than 70 streams in the area and people with water rights had an opportunity to ask for a change in the date.

Priority dates on irrigation ditches are a critical part of New Mexico’s water law and the wheeling and dealing by cities and developers over water rights. New Mexico follows a “first in time, first in right” approach to water — the first person, or ditch, to use water beneficially has the senior claim on the water. The ditches with the oldest priority dates receive their water first off a stream.

The pueblos are recognized as the first people in the valley to use water for farming and other uses, so they have first rights to water.

Priority dates on the acequias in the Pojoaque Valley range from 1728 within the Rio Tesuque to 1907 on parts of the Rio en Medio. Gerald Peters, for example, believes the priority dates on several irrigation ditches fed by the Rio en Medio should be older than the those given by the state. The state gave the Questa Ditch a 1907 priority date; Peters believes it should be 1899.

According to a legal notice published Friday in The New Mexican, people who have challenged their ditch’s priority date and those who want to challenge any changes have until Dec. 31 to file notice they intend to participate in the court proceedings. They must also attend a pretrial conference Jan. 13 with the special master reviewing the priority dates. This is the only opportunity people with surface water rights will have to participate in the adjudication of priority rights, according to the state. Anyone who doesn’t participate won’t be able to object later.

Staci Matlock | The New Mexican

 The 15-year FRM this week averaged 4.43 percent with an average 0.6 point, up from last week when it averaged 4.37 percent. A year ago at this time, the 15-year FRM averaged 5.72 percent.

The five-year Treasury-indexed hybrid adjustable-rate mortgage (ARM) averaged 4.40 percent this week, with an average 0.6 point, up from last week when it averaged 4.38 percent. A year ago, the 5-year ARM averaged 6.06 percent.

The one-year Treasury-indexed ARM averaged 4.54 percent this week with an average 0.6 point, down from last week when it averaged 4.60 percent. At this time last year, the 1-year ARM averaged 5.23 percent.

“Following bond yields, long-term mortgages rates edged up slightly this week,” said Frank Nothaft, Freddie Mac vice president and chief economist. “Although rates for 5/1 ARMs and traditional 1-year ARMs are around half a percentage point below 30-year fixed mortgages, consumers appear to be seeking the stability of fixed-rate mortgages. According to the Mortgage Bankers Association, ARMs averaged only about 6 percent of the number of mortgage applications in September and October thus far.”

“The housing market is still trying to recover in the second half of the year. The Federal Reserve reported in its October 21st regional economic review that housing market conditions improved in recent weeks, primarily from a pickup in sales of low-to medium-priced houses. However, residential construction activity was reported to remain weak in most areas. New construction of single family homes rebounded in September, rising at a 3.9 percent annual rate, but did not erase all of the declines set in August, based on figures released by the Department of Commerce. Moreover, homebuilder confidence, as measured by the National Association of Homebuilder’s Housing Market Index, fell slightly in October and marked the first decline since January of this year.”

Attorney: $388,000 due for potable water and $51,000 due for treated sewage effluent

Julie Ann Grimm | The New Mexican

Las Campanas Limited Partnership is current on payments for the joint city/county Buckman Direct Diversion Project, but still owes the city of Santa Fe for past-due water bills, attorneys said this week.

The luxury development, now under the control of Lloyds Banking Group, this summer fell about $1.6 million behind on its share of the Rio Grande diversion project. On Monday, a check delivered to the city took them out of arrears, project manager Rick Carpenter said.

In the case of a separate arrangement with the city’s Water Division, it’s not clear why no one demanded payment sooner on what officials now say is up to $388,000 in payments for potable water — bills that have stacked up for service provided to Las Campanas since 2004 — and about $51,000 for treated sewage effluent billed in August, Assistant City Attorney Marcos Martinez said.

The development uses effluent from the city sewage-treatment plant to irrigate golf courses.

Managers at the luxury development say they don’t agree with the city’s accounting. Michelle Hoeft, a spokeswoman for Las Campanas Limited Partnership, said Thursday that the numbers “are in dispute.”

The issue at hand, she said, is that in 2004 a water cooperative took responsibility for a portion of the water delivered there, and the city began sending bills to both the Las Campanas corporate partnership and the co-op.

“Everybody was making payments,” Hoeft said. “From an administrative standpoint (the co-op was) writing checks and the partnership was writing checks. The process now has been to separate these two entities and try to reconcile what was legitimately paid for by the partnership and the co-op and how those payments got applied.”

The past-due bills came to light after Councilor Miguel Chavez asked for an audit of all the city accounts associated with the financially troubled development, according to Martinez.

The city delivers potable water to the development for irrigation and for domestic and commercial uses there. A legal agreement in place for more than six years stipulates that the city will each year sell up to 322 acre-feet of water to the subdivision until the Buckman Direct Diversion comes online.

That project is being constructed under a three-way deal between the city and county and Las Campanas, who agreed to proportionately split the cost of more than $216 million in shared facilities. The original plan was for Las Campanas to build its own water treatment plant nearby, but the development is in the process of changing those plans.

Just last week, the county agreed to allow Las Campanas to become a wholesale water customer of the county and to share in the cost of a new pipeline to make that possible.

Such an arrangement will likely require alteration of the Buckman contracts, which requires approval from the City Council. Since construction on the shared facilities has been under way for more than a year, project manager Carpenter said the county and Las Campanas have agreed to pay for changes to the Buckman project associated with their arrangement.

Becoming a wholesale water customer of the county does not relieve Las Campanas of its obligation to the Buckman project, estimated at about $11.2 million of the $216 million design-build budget. Including Monday’s payment, Las Campanas has paid about $4.2 million, Carpenter said.

They were spot-on with their prediction of Wednesday’s storm, which dumped several inches of snow in the Sangre de Cristo Mountains, sent water rushing down the Santa Fe River and brought gusty wind problems to the Santa Fe Municipal Airport.

Forecasters had predicted major thunderstorms in the central Rio Grande region, wind gusts of 50 miles per hour or more and up to 7 inches of snow above 7,500 feet in the mountains.

The Santa Fe snowpack telemetry site, near the ski basin above 11,000 feet in elevation, gained more than half a foot of snow Wednesday. But melted down into a cup, the snow at the measuring point only equaled a gain of about an inch of water. Information for the Elk Cabin snotel site east of Santa Fe at 8,200 feet elevation was not available Wednesday evening.

“This was a very wound-up storm with a lot of moisture wrapped in it,” said meteorologist Chuck Jones from the National Weather Service in Albuquerque.

Temperatures in Santa Fe plummeted from the 70s on Tuesday to the 40s on Wednesday, and a steady rain fell in the downtown area.

The National Weather Service issued a winter storm warning for north-central and northeastern New Mexico through Wednesday late afternoon as the storm that formed over California moved across Arizona and into New Mexico. The same storm dumped more than a foot of snow in parts of Colorado and an inch of rain in Albuquerque.

Accuweather predicted snow through Wednesday night in the mountains. Jones said parts of the state, including Santa Fe, would continue to feel the storm’s effects through today with cloudy, cold weather. Mostly sunny skies are predicted through the weekend for the Santa Fe area.

 Staci Matlock | The New Mexican