LANL signs lease for downtown Santa Fe office

• By Scott Wyland swyland@sfnewmexican.com
• Feb 10, 2021

Los Alamos National Laboratory has signed a 10-year lease for office space in downtown Santa Fe that will house up to 75 employees — a deal that marks the lab’s first operation in the city in 58 years.

The lab is leasing a 28,000-square-foot building at North Guadalupe and West Alameda streets that includes the Dorothy McKibbin Conference Center on the ground floor.

The facility will provide space for meetings, events, conferences and teleworking, lab spokeswoman Tricia Ware said, adding the date for the office’s opening has not yet been determined.

She said no hazardous work will be done there.

“The lab has been looking for the potential to have a downtown Santa Fe office for a while,” Ware said. “We need more space.”

Previously, the lab proposed opening office spaces on the city-owned midtown campus on St. Michael’s Drive as part of a massive redevelopment still in the planning stages. But the proposal wasn’t included in the most recent plans for the site.

Ware said this office will be much smaller than the complex proposed at midtown.

Wide-open areas people see when they drive through Los Alamos are deceptive, she said — the lab is wedged between federal lands and pueblos, with little room to add offices.

Last year, she said, the lab advertised it was searching for commercial space within a 50-mile radius of its main facilities.

A mix of employees will work in the Santa Fe office, Ware said, including a “community partnerships” team that works with officials in public schools, colleges, local governments, nonprofits and high-tech industries.

Communications and government relations also will have offices in the building.

Most employees will move from a Los Alamos office, Ware said, opening space on the Hill for the lab’s graphic teams.

“Santa Fe has played an important role in the history of the Laboratory since our inception, and we’re delighted to have a presence in the City Different again,” Los Alamos National Laboratory Director Thom Mason said in a statement. “This building will act as an additional entrance point for the laboratory, just as Dorothy McKibbin’s office at 109 East Palace in Santa Fe did decades ago.”

Mason was referring to the onetime downtown headquarters for the secretive Manhattan Project. McKibbin worked at the office and became a liaison between the Santa Fe and Los Alamos communities.

City of Santa Fe officials welcomed the lab’s upcoming office.

“As we look to recover economically from the pandemic, having LANL as a contributor residing in Santa Fe will be a great boost to our entrepreneurial community,” Rich Brown, the city’s economic development director, wrote in an email. “LANL’s many agencies bring specialized business assistance in a variety of ways to our community.”

But not everybody cheered the lab’s future presence in downtown Santa Fe.

“We see this development as quite problematic,” wrote Greg Mello, executive director of the nonprofit Los Alamos Study Group, in an email.

“Santa Fe is the ‘Royal City of the Holy Faith of Saint Francis.’ His prayer echoes down to the present day, ‘Lord, make me an instrument of your peace.’ LANL’s prayer is different,” Mello continued. “It says, ‘Send us money to make weapons of mass destruction.’ ”

Mello vehemently opposed the lab’s effort to create an office and education complex at the midtown campus, saying a nuclear weapons manufacturer doesn’t belong in the city.

About 2,900 of the lab’s 12,000 employees live in Santa Fe County, though it’s unclear how many of those area residents will work downtown.

The Santa Fe office makes more sense for employees who do community outreach, Ware said.

In short, it increases the lab’s accessibility.

“The laboratory wants to be more collaborative with the community, and that’s difficult to do in a geographically isolated location,” she said.