Otero County Backs Southeast Colorado Regional Transit Hub for Las Animas

A long-vacant bread factory on Bent Avenue in Las Animas sits at the center of a federal funding request that could reshape how seniors, veterans, and low-income workers across six southeast Colorado counties reach doctors, jobs, and classrooms.

The Board of County Commissioners for Otero County formally backed the plan in a letter to U.S. Rep. Lauren Boebert on March 10, urging her to support a Community Project Funding request filed the same day by Southeast Colorado Enterprise Development (SECED) and the Southeast Transit (SETran) partnership. The request asks Congress to fund the conversion of the former Sara Lee bread facility at 306 Bent Avenue into a centralized Southeast Colorado Regional Transit Hub, connecting communities across Baca, Bent, Crowley, Kiowa, Otero, and Prowers Counties.

SETran serves a wide and sparsely populated region where residents without personal vehicles depend on transit for access to medical appointments, workforce opportunities, and education. The proposed hub addresses the system's operational fragmentation directly: vehicle storage, administrative offices, dispatch, and ADA-accessible passenger waiting areas would all operate from a single site, replacing resources currently scattered across the region.

Consolidating those functions at 306 Bent Avenue would cut so-called "deadhead" miles, the non-revenue driving that accumulates when buses travel without passengers, while improving on-time performance and reducing maintenance downtime. SECED and SETran's case to Congress emphasizes the cost efficiency of reusing an existing industrial building over new construction, arguing it would stretch limited local transit dollars and allow SETran to prioritize service expansion and reliability rather than what backers describe as "patchwork fixes."

In their letter, the Otero County commissioners told Boebert the project represents "a high-impact investment in rural mobility, economic opportunity, and quality of life" and pledged continued partnership with SETran and SECED through committee work on policies, procedures, and operational standards. "We are committed to supporting this project through our continued partnership with SETran and SECED to ensure that the citizens of southeast Colorado have access to affordable, dependable public transportation," the commissioners wrote.

The CPF process requires federal review and congressional appropriation action, and no project cost figure has been publicly disclosed. With the funding request in Boebert's hands, her decision to champion or bypass the Bent Avenue hub will determine whether the six-county region gains a consolidated, ADA-accessible transit center or the scattered operations that proponents say inflate costs and suppress reliability continue unchanged.