A new highway that will run through Sunland Park, New Mexico, is another step closer to reality after an engineering firm finalized the route for the so-called Border Highway Connector state road that will likely be built over the next half-decade.
There’s a number of reasons New Mexico is building the new, 8-mile-long state highway, which is estimated to cost $150 million. The new road is expected to slash travel times in half for residents in Sunland Park traveling to the industrial parks west of Santa Teresa or to the Santa Teresa Port of Entry. The road will also provide an alternate path for first responders to travel to emergencies in the area.
The highway could also redirect traffic away from congested El Paso ports of entry, providing an alternative for travelers, particularly semi-trucks as the federal government looks to remove truck traffic from the Bridge of the Americas.
“You can very quickly, with this border connector highway, jump onto Paisano (Drive), and jump onto Loop 375 and go anywhere in our region that you want to go very quickly and unimpeded,” said Jerry Pacheco, CEO of the Border Industrial Association, which recruits companies to the Santa Teresa area.
“We’ll have a second set of major ingress and egress into the Santa Teresa industrial base. That new Border Highway Connector is going to get cargo, it’s going to get employees, it’s going to get support service companies much more quickly into Santa Teresa,” he said.
Construction on the highway will likely start in late 2025 or early 2026. It could be completed in 2028 or 2029, said Bert Thomas, a vice president of the Albuquerque engineering firm Bohannon Huston, which the state of New Mexico hired to plan out the new highway.
Thomas said the Border Highway Connector is expected to see more use from passenger vehicles than commercial semi-trucks. Still, the road will offer a quicker entry into Sunland Park or El Paso than Pete Domenici Highway for some trucks that cross into the U.S. at the port of entry in Santa Teresa.
And long-term, the connector will be in place to serve new residents and future development in Santa Teresa and Sunland Park fueled by job growth at the industrial parks as well as big, new residential developments that are slated to come to the area.
The population of Sunland Park grew by 6% from 2020 to 2023, when the city’s population reached nearly 18,000, while El Paso’s population remained flat over that time. And employment in manufacturing in Sunland Park and Santa Teresa has increased fourfold since 2010, making up over 40% of jobs there, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.
“It’s infrastructure to support economic development,” Thomas said. “There’s a lot of potential growth in this area. There’s a lot of potential increase of economic opportunities, and this will help support that.”
The new highway will start at the intersection of Sunland Park Drive and McNutt Road in Sunland Park, where the road will start heading south and feature a roundabout at an intersection with Anapra Road. From there, the highway will head west, running adjacent to the two nearby elementary schools – Desert View and Sunland Park in the Gadsden Independent School District – before the road crosses over Union Pacific-owned railroad tracks and onto the mesa of undeveloped desert west of Sunland Park.
The highway will end at an intersection with Pete V. Domenici Highway, about 2 miles north of the Santa Teresa Port of Entry.
“You can cross at the port of Santa Teresa, and a couple of miles north of Santa Teresa, you can make a right hand turn east on the Border Highway Connector, (and) boom, you’re in Sunland Park. And then boom, you’re in El Paso,” Pacheco said.
The plan is to build a multi-use trail along the highway. For now, the New Mexico Department of Transportation has secured $79 million in funding from a federal grant out of the $150 million price tag.
The eastern portion of the highway in the developed area of Sunland Park will be fully built out initially. But the western portion of the highway in the undeveloped desert will be just two lanes at first. As development in the area takes place in the coming years, the New Mexico Department of Transportation can expand the highway four lanes and add the multi-use trail, Thomas said.
“As development occurs in that vacant land, it could be easily expanded to four lanes,” he said.
Impact on Borderland ports
The new state highway could improve the flow of traffic near the port of entry in Santa Teresa for trucks looking to avoid more congested crossings such as the Bridge of the Americas or the larger Ysleta-Zaragoza bridge, Thomas said.
“The truck traffic that I would anticipate using this (is) if they’re trying to deliver something to the Sunland Park area, or to one of the facilities within the El Paso area, they may use this as the route to get there instead of going up and around” Pete V. Domenici Highway, Thomas said.
At recent community meetings about the Border Highway Connector in Sunland Park, residents expressed concern about semi-trucks creating traffic problems in Sunland Park and on McNutt Road. They also said there ought to be a physical barrier between the highway and the two schools, as well as adjacent neighborhoods, to block the sound of passing vehicles.
Thomas, however, said a sound barrier is unnecessary based on his firm’s estimates of how much noise the new traffic will create.
“I’m not a fan of trucks coming through there, but I understand this is going to be a state road,” Sunland Park Mayor Javier Perea told El Paso Matters. “There’s not much I can do to stop that. But at least (the Border Highway Connector) does provide us an opportunity to be able to get safety vehicles out there at a much faster pace.”
Perea said he expects the new highway to cut in half the time it takes to get from the southern part of Sunland Park to the Santa Teresa Port of Entry, from 20 or 25 minutes currently down closer to 10 minutes. And he said he expects new growth and development to follow the new highway.
“I’m sure it’ll spark further economic development west of us,” Perea said. “The Border Highway Connector will have a positive impact on the community.”
On average, just over 1,000 cargo trucks cross north and south at the Santa Teresa Port of Entry daily, according to estimates from the El Paso Metropolitan Planning Organization. Only the Ysleta-Zaragoza bridge handles more commercial traffic among the region’s border crossings.
And the Border Highway Connector could make the Santa Teresa crossing more attractive to importers and exporters by cutting the time it takes trucks to get from the Santa Teresa Port of Entry into El Paso, and vice versa, Pacheco said.
Santa Teresa’s port of entry may also see more traffic after the Bridge of the Americas crossing in south El Paso closes for three years while the federal General Services Administration completes a $650 million renovation of that port of entry. Construction at BOTA is expected to begin in 2026.
It’s possible the federal government will ban commercial trucks from crossing at BOTA once that bridge reopens to traffic likely in 2029, a move meant to alleviate pollution from idling trucks in nearby neighborhoods such as Chamizal.
If the federal government bans commercial trucks from BOTA, the crossing in Santa Teresa could permanently see an additional 80 to 90 cargo trucks shift from BOTA to instead cross at Santa Teresa every day, according to the MPO.
And even if cargo trucks aren’t banned permanently from BOTA – a decision the federal government will make in January – Santa Teresa’s port will still likely see an uptick in truck traffic while BOTA is closed for construction.
“Where are those trucks going to go during construction? Or permanently, if they choose. They’re going to go to Santa Teresa. They’re going to go to Zaragoza,” said Eduardo Calvo, executive director of the MPO.
Meanwhile, the city of Sunland Park is continuing work to develop its own international crossing into Mexico.
Thomas, of Bohannon Huston, said his team had to re-route the Border Highway Connector because an earlier path they designed that was further south would have crossed through the property Sunland Park identified as the future site of a new border crossing.
At the Border Highway Connector roundabout that’s expected to go near Anapra Road, Thomas said the city of Sunland Park will be able to add a fourth leg that will lead south to a port of entry site if it’s eventually developed.
The new state highway in New Mexico is one piece of a broader effort to improve the flow of people and goods throughout the Borderland region, Thomas said.
“This is a very important project for the border connectivity,” he said.
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Diego Mendoza-Moyers is a reporter covering energy and the environment. An El Paso native, he has previously covered business for the San Antonio Express-News and Albany Times Union, and reported for the... More by Diego Mendoza-Moyers