LANL to bring 500 to work in Santa Fe

• By Scott Wyland swyland@sfnewmexican.com
• Mar 8, 2021

Los Alamos National Laboratory will move 500 employees into an office complex on Pacheco Street — the second site the lab is leasing in Santa Fe — as it establishes a presence in the city for the first time in half a century.

The 10-year lease, announced Monday, is for two adjacent office properties totaling 77,856 square feet at Pacheco and St. Michael’s Drive near Christus St. Vincent Regional Medical Center.

Employees are expected to move into the site in the fall. Most of the positions involve administrative services, including human resources, procurement, finance and information technology. No hazardous work will be carried out there, lab officials said.

“This is the largest job-relocation initiative in Santa Fe’s history,” lab Director Thom Mason, said in a statement. “The laboratory welcomes the opportunity to make a positive economic impact on Santa Fe and be a good employer.”

The employees work for nonprofit Triad National Security LLC, the lab’s managing contractor, and not the federal government, spokesman Kevin Roark wrote in an email. That will make the lab one of the five largest nonpublic sector employers in Santa Fe, he added.

Last month, the lab signed a lease for 28,000 square feet in the downtown Firestone Building, which had housed Descartes Labs at North Guadalupe and West Alameda streets.

The downtown site eventually will house about 75 employees, 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.

Roark wouldn’t disclose what the lab is paying for the two leases, calling the information proprietary.

A longtime anti-nuclear activist who opposes the lab branching into Santa Fe said these leases reflect plans to bolster nuclear weapons production.

Greg Mello, executive director of the nonprofit Los Alamos Study Group, believes the lab must free up space at its Los Alamos complex to make plutonium pits for triggering nuclear warheads.

“Leasing facilities for national security missions is not an efficient use of dollars, unless it’s an emergency, unless it’s temporary,” Mello said. “Under normal circumstances, LANL would provide working space for all its employees, but now they are under the gun to make a lot of pits as fast as possible.”

Under the current plan, known as the 2018 Nuclear Posture Review, Los Alamos lab would produce 30 pits by 2026, and the Savannah River Site in South Carolina would manufacture an additional 50 pits by 2030.

However, Roark gave a different reason for opening Santa Fe offices. Santa Fe was chosen because it has available office space and it’s a convenient location for the laboratory to engage with industry partners, government entities, educational organizations and nonprofits, Roark wrote in the email.

Having Santa Fe worksites also will help the lab recruit from a wider area, Roark wrote.

The lab expects to hire 1,200 new employees in 2021, Roark wrote. In fiscal year 2020, 70 percent of the lab’s 1,000 new hires were New Mexicans, and many of them lived outside Los Alamos County.

Some Santa Fe city officials and business leaders have expressed support for the lab having a local presence.

“Two new offices in two different Santa Fe neighborhoods will diversify our city’s economy and is a natural fit,” David Fresquez, president of the Santa Fe Hispanic Chamber of Commerce, said in a statement.

The lab previously proposed opening office space on the city-owned midtown campus on St. Michael’s Drive as part of a massive redevelopment still in the planning stages. That proposal isn’t included in the most recent plans for the site.