Commentary: How Much More Can the Mountains Take? Why Regional Collaboration is Important

Fire, flood, a dark racetrack, a soon to demolished observatory and now a fence around Bonito Lake. Our mountain towns are losing their attractions one decision at a time, no one is keeping the regional ledger, and Alamogordo is downstream of every loss.

Otero & Lincoln Counties, New Mexico- There is a shop owner in midtown Ruidoso whose wholesale warehouse filled with floodwater last July. He told a public radio reporter this spring that his business is done between June and September, and that it is done with the racing crowd. This summer there was no racing crowd. For the first time since 1947, the grandstand at Ruidoso Downs sat empty on Labor Day weekend, and the All American Futurity, the richest quarter horse race in the world, was run in Albuquerque.

That is one business in one town in the region. Multiply it across two counties, and you begin to see the shape of what has happened to the Sacramento Mountains economy since June 2024. The region has taken a beating that no single mayor, commission, agency or business owner can see whole, because each blow has landed from a different direction and been decided by a different set of hands.

The ledger nobody is keeping

Lay the losses end to end and the picture is sobering.

In June 2024, the South Fork and Salt fires burned roughly 17,000 acres and about 1,400 structures and forced the evacuation of the entire village of Ruidoso at the start of peak season. The burn scars have driven every flood since.

In July 2024 and again in July 2025, those burn scars sent floodwater through the village. On July 8, 2025, the Rio Ruidoso crested at a record 20 feet; three people died, including two children, and emergency crews carried out 50 to 60 swift-water rescues. Ruidoso was placed under nearly a dozen flash flood emergencies in 2025 alone. According to the village's own financial reports, lodgers' tax revenue fell almost 30 percent from fiscal year 2024 to fiscal year 2025, and taxable receipts for accommodation and food service fell about 19 percent.

On January 19, 2026, Ruidoso Downs announced there would be no horse racing this year, the first time in more than 80 years. An engineering study concluded the site cannot be adequately protected from flooding even with the mitigation work proposed, on-site and upstream. Village officials say the track supports hundreds of jobs. Midtown merchants say their June-to-September season is the racing crowd.

On January 5, 2026, liquid mercury was discovered inside the Dunn Solar Telescope at Sunspot, eighteen miles south of Cloudcroft. On February 25, the National Science Foundation announced it will remove the mercury, demolish the tower and restore the site. The visitor center is closed indefinitely, ending a destination that drew science tourists and school groups up U.S. 82 for more than fifty years.

And on August 25, 2026, Alamogordo's city manager Robert Stockwell asked the Alamogordo City Commission to end public fishing access at Bonito Lake and spend up to $1 million on security fencing, two summers after a twelve-year closure finally ended. The Commission tabled the item to September 22. It is the only entry on this list that is a choice rather than a disaster.

There is some good news mixed in, and it should not be ignored. Ruidoso's retail sales held roughly steady through the last fiscal year. Lodgers' tax collections through the first eight months of this fiscal year ran a few percent ahead of last year's depressed numbers. Contour Airlines began flying Ruidoso to Denver in May. Ruidoso was named the country's best small-town cultural scene by USA Today readers for the second year running, and the XTERRA World Championship has committed to the village through 2028. People in Ruidoso are not quitting. Their retail is down seven or eight percent, one civic leader said this spring, not fifty or sixty.

But seven or eight percent, sustained for three summers, on top of a lost racing season, on top of a demolished observatory, on top of insurance premiums and rebuilding costs and a monsoon season that the village spent the spring preparing residents for with flood workshops and a redrawn floodplain map, is not resilience. It is attrition. A community and a region can absorb one disaster. It cannot indefinitely absorb a disaster and then a series of quiet closures that each seem reasonable to the people making them.

Alamogordo is not a bystander

It is tempting, from the Tularosa Basin floor, to view all of this as Lincoln County's problem. It is not. Alamogordo is the gateway to these mountains. U.S. 70 and U.S. 54 carry the families from El Paso, Las Cruces, Lubbock and Midland who make up the region's visitor base, and the vast majority of them pass through this city to get there. They fuel up on White Sands Boulevard. They eat breakfast at Our Country Kitchen on New York Avenue and shop at Our Little Country Store, Victoria and Roadrunner Galleria and they eat dinner on White Sands Blvd while in town. They stop at the Museum of Space History and White Sands National Park on the way in and buy pistachios on the way out. When Ruidoso has a bad summer, Alamogordo's restaurants, motels, gas stations and downtown merchants have a bad summer with it. It is a quieter one, harder to see in any single ledger, but it is real, having owned businesses downtown this journalist has seen first hand the ebb and flow tourism can have on a financial ledger.

Cloudcroft sits in Otero County, not Lincoln, and Sunspot was on our side of the line. Every visitor the Dunn telescope drew for half a century drove through Alamogordo twice. Cloudcroft's leaders are now asking the federal government to at least slow the demolition of the remaining buildings while they look for a new use. They should not be doing that alone. 

See related article at Sounds of Silence from Sunspot by ATN Science and Space Reporter David Dooling

Every closure on the list was decided by people who were not asked to weigh what the region had already lost.

Decided in isolation, felt together

Here is the pattern. The National Science Foundation weighed the cost of a mercury cleanup against the value of a telescope superseded by a newer one in Hawaii, and chose demolition. A racetrack owner weighed an engineering report against another flooded season, and chose Albuquerque. A city manager weighed a parks fund against complaints about mud in a parking lot, and chose a fence. Each decision was made by someone with a narrow mandate and a specific balance sheet. Not one of them was made by anyone whose job it was to ask: what does this region look like when all of these things are gone at once?

No one holds that job. That is the real problem, and it is the one the mountain communities and the basin city can actually fix.

The one closure that is a choice

Of everything on that ledger, Bonito Lake is the only item that is not a disaster, a federal decision or an act of God. It is a recommendation, from a city manager Robert Stockwell to seven elected commissioners, that can be declined.

The lake reopened to anglers in August 2024, after twelve years and more than $8 million in restoration, under a prepaid agreement with the state wildlife department that stocked it with trout. The Legislature approved $250,000 this spring, at the city's own request, for shoreline and day-use improvements. Fencing it now, at a cost of up to $1 million, would take one more attraction off the regional map in the same year the racetrack and the observatory came off it, and would do so by choice, with state money on the table to keep it open.

The city manager's argument is that Bonito's visitors spend their money in Lincoln County, not Alamogordo. Read in isolation, that has a certain accounting logic. Read against this year's ledger, it is exactly the thinking that has hollowed out the region: every jurisdiction protecting its own column while the shared economy that feeds all of them shrinks. Alamogordo cannot expect Ruidoso to send visitors down the hill if Alamogordo will not keep its own lake open on the hill.

What collaboration would actually look like

The Sacramento Mountains and the Tularosa Basin are one tourism economy divided among two counties, four municipalities, a sovereign tribal nation, a national forest, a national park and an Air Force base. Visitors do not experience those boundaries. Our governments should stop acting as though they do. Concretely:

• A standing regional tourism and recovery council
  — Alamogordo, Ruidoso, Ruidoso Downs, Cloudcroft, Tularosa, the Mescalero Apache Tribe, and Lincoln and Otero counties — meeting monthly, with a single shared ledger of attractions lost, attractions at risk and attractions to build.
• Pooled promotion — a joint marketing fund and one visitor calendar, so that a family drawn to XTERRA or the Bred Sale in Ruidoso is also handed a reason to stop at White Sands, Cloudcroft and downtown Alamogordo. State tourism recovery money has flowed to Lincoln County; the corridor should be applying for it together.
• A lodgers' tax fix that follows the visitor — the legislation House District 51 candidate Nick Paul has proposed, letting Alamogordo dedicate visitor-generated revenue to the lake it owns across the county line, is a model for treating regional assets as regional.
• One voice in Santa Fe and Washington — on flood mitigation for the Downs and a 2027 racing season, on a future for the Sunspot site beyond the telescope, on watershed restoration in the burn scars, and on keeping Bonito Lake open. Two counties asking separately get two small answers. A corridor asking together gets heard.
• Small-business triage across the line — the SBA disaster-loan window for Ruidoso businesses closed in April. Alamogordo's own downtown and hospitality businesses were never counted as disaster-affected at all. A regional council could document the downstream losses and make the case for relief that reflects them.

The question for Sept. 22 and beyond

How much more can the local economy take? The honest answer is that no one knows, because no one is counting. The racetrack owner counted his flood risk. The NSF counted its mercury. The city manager counted his parks fund. The merchants in midtown Ruidoso and on New York Avenue are counting the empty tables, and they are the only ones counting the whole thing.

Alamogordo's commissioners will vote on Sept. 22 on the one item on this year's ledger that is still within local control. They should keep the lake open — not only because the money is there and the plan is adopted, but because a region that has lost this much in two years cannot afford to hand away anything else voluntarily. And when that vote is done, someone in this city and someone in that village should pick up the phone and start building the regional table that should have existed before the first fire.

That table gets its first test tonight.

Join the conversation tonight

The Alamogordo Town News Kalhradio.org Voices of Alamogordo community forum on the future of Bonito Lake is tonight, Tuesday, September 1, at 6 p.m. at Otero Arts, 1118 Indiana Avenue, Alamogordo. The panel will include City Manager Robert Stockwell, a sitting city commissioner, a former mayor, a former city manager, representatives of businesses near Bonito Lake, and representatives from the Village of Ruidoso. For the first time since the fencing proposal surfaced, the people who own the lake, the people who manage it, and the people whose livelihoods depend on it will be in the same room.

The forum is free and open to the public. Bring your questions. For those who cannot attend in person, the event will be streamed live on the Alamogordo Town News Facebook page and on the KALHRadio.org YouTube channel.

More News from Alamogordo

• Sounds of Silence from Sunspot U.S. Forest Service and the National Science Foundation are declining comment a continuing series by David Dooling ATN Science & Space Reporter...
• City Manager Stockwell and Others to Join Community Forum on Bonito Lake Fencing Proposal Tuesday at Otero Arts A panel discussion on the future of Bonito Lake Tuesday September 1st 6 pm Otero Arts