By Kevin Hendricks, The Paper.
Part 4 of 4 in “Rio Rancho’s Economic Playbook,” a series on the city’s economic development strategy.
Every day, 47,000 Sandoval County residents drive out of town for work — and take $3.1 billion in annual payroll with them. Rio Rancho Regional Chamber of Commerce President Jerry Schalow says that number is both the city’s biggest economic problem and its clearest opportunity.
Schalow, who has led the chamber for a decade, told the Governing Body at a June 16 work session that Rio Rancho is roughly 1,600 businesses short of what a city its size should support. He attributed the gap directly to workforce leakage: when residents commute to Albuquerque, Santa Fe or Los Alamos, they spend their lunch money, dry cleaning dollars and after-work cocktail budget near where they work, not where they live.
“By getting those economic-based jobs here, that’s the big driver,” Schalow said. “That fixes retail, and that fixes the challenges around that.”
A chamber with receipts
Schalow made the case that the chamber — founded in 1980, before Rio Rancho was even incorporated, and now one of the top 10 largest chambers in the U.S. — has already moved the needle more than once.
He pointed to Shop on Southern, a chamber-led campaign during Southern Boulevard construction that he said made the project the first road construction site in New Mexico history to add businesses rather than lose them. He credited the chamber with rescuing Country Club Plaza from conversion to indoor storage and recruiting Turtle Mountain Brewing as an anchor tenant — arguing the brewery’s success made The Block at Enchanted Hills possible. The chamber also claimed a role in pushing the school board to adopt career and technical education, which became RioTECH, and in recruiting Market Street, which Schalow began pursuing in 2017 after seeing the concept in Lubbock, Texas. Market Street is now the top-grossing grocery store in New Mexico, he said.
Discover Sandoval and what’s coming
Schalow said the chamber’s Discover Sandoval initiative uses geofencing to recruit talent from out-of-state markets — including targeting laid-off tech workers from California — to help Rio Rancho employers compete with the national labs for skilled workers.
He also said Trader Joe’s is actively studying a west Rio Rancho location but has hesitated because statewide population data doesn’t yet reflect the city’s growth. The chamber has been supplying Rio Rancho-specific data to counter that narrative.
And he teased something bigger: “There’s a large job announcement around the corner.”
The ask
Schalow closed with a concrete proposal: a formal memorandum of understanding with the city covering business retention and expansion, workforce development and business recruitment — paired with an increase in the city’s chamber membership fee, currently $250 and unchanged for 16 to 18 years. He proposed a $20,000 city investment with a firm condition: none of it goes to chamber operations.
BY THE NUMBERS
- 1980 — year the Rio Rancho Regional Chamber was founded
- 1,100 — current chamber members
- 47,000 — Sandoval County residents commuting out of county daily
- $3.1 billion — annual payroll leaving with those commuters
- ~1,600 — businesses Rio Rancho is estimated to be short of comparable cities
- $250 — city’s current chamber membership fee, unchanged for 16-18 years
- $20,000 — proposed new city investment under a proposed MOU
Rio Rancho Regional Chamber of Commerce:
- Website: rrrcc.org
- Governing Body work session agendas and recordings: rrnm.gov/agendacenter
This concludes “Rio Rancho’s Economic Playbook,” a four-part series on Rio Rancho’s economic development strategy. Read all four parts at riorancho.news.