The Board has initiated a project to remove elm trees from the right-of-way (ROW) along Paa-Ko streets. There is no consistent ROW distance in our community, although ten feet is most common. Utility and drainage ROW distances can extend from five feet to over 50. Our project removed elms within our community right-of-way and we hope residents will tackle removal of elms on their property as required by covenant. Siberian Elms (& Russian Olives) are non-native, highly invasive, and disallowed by covenants in both sections of Paa-Ko. This project was initiated when the county changed their “trimming/tree removal” support along their East Mountain ROWs.

BERNCO used to respond to requests for site-line thinning and hazardous tree removal but now consider those tasks the responsibility of homeowners. Siberian Elms are “water hogs” and definitely compete with our native trees. We encourage all residents to completely remove elms from their property. We have received our fourth grant from Ciudad Soil and Water Conservation District to fund our last planned chipping event this November along the streets north of Moccasin Trail to Paa-Ko’s north end. You can include elm trees along with thinned and dead native tree material for this chipping event. More information
to follow.

taken out of our community in an effort to beautify Paa-Ko’s roadways. This project was a six-day event.

FROM EMWPA:

This coming Saturday, March 1, EMWPA will be holding our third educational outreach program. We will be updating the fire weather outlook for the 2025 wildfire season, and we will be holding an updated repeat of the very popular FREE emergency
'GO' Bag program. This will take place at the Sandia Ranger Station meeting room, starting at 9:00 am and scheduled to last until about 12:00 pm.  FYI, for those that already have the bags, you are welcome to attend. It never hurts to review this information. We only have enough GO bags (maximum 50) for 1 per family, so your RSVP is critical. We encourage you to bring your kids, since they should be aware of how to use this emergency bag.

As previously reported, we placed Molzen Corbin to produce a Preliminary Engineering Review PER for the entire Paa-Ko Communities Sewer Association system. This was based on a State Grant of $50,000 for the work. The bids were greater than the amount of the grant and Molzen Corbin was at $111K. We decided we could afford the additional monies and that this planning was badly needed so we put Molzen Corbin under contract last November. We appointed our board member Scott Verhines to manage the project as he has spent his entire career doing this kind of work. The project is going quite well, and we expect completion sometime this summer.

Earlier this year we contacted the State to see if they might help with the additional money required. The State came back to us with an offer of an additional $9K as a grant and $60K as a 20-year loan for 1% annual interest.

To be continued!

Here is the link to check out all the road conditions in New Mexico

NM ROAD CONDITIONS