Federal Officials, Santa Ana Pueblo Announce $251 Million Indian Health Clinic

A dusty 20-acre lot off U.S. 550 on Santa Ana Pueblo land near the State Farm Bernalillo Soccer Complex will become a 235,000-square-foot Indian Health Service outpatient clinic under plans announced Friday by federal health officials and tribal leaders. The $251 million project, to be known as the Albuquerque Indian Health Center West, is designed to relieve the strain on the existing Albuquerque Indian Health Center near the University of New Mexico Hospital, which officials described as undersized and over-capacity.

Santa Ana Pueblo Gov. Myron Armijo, Lt. Gov. Kevin Montoya, and U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Senior Advisor Mark Cruz visited the future site Friday, where the project's scope came into focus. The multi-story facility will offer outpatient clinical support services to Indigenous patients across Bernalillo and Sandoval counties and is projected to employ 536 full-time workers by 2035.

Geoffrey Blackwell, CEO of Tamaya Ventures, the Pueblo-owned economic development subsidiary developing the project, said the clinic's programs will include diabetes care, telebehavioral health, and traditional healing. He also told attendees that building the facility west of Albuquerque will cut driving times by more than half for members of five nearby pueblos, whose closest IHS option is currently the over-capacity clinic in Albuquerque.

The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services has committed $22 million to fund the planning phase, which begins shortly. That allocation will just cover planning costs; the full $251 million project will require additional federal investment. The $22 million is part of a broader $1 billion HHS investment in the Indian Health Service aimed at getting a decades-old backlog of health care infrastructure projects off the ground. Officials said they hope construction will begin in 2027, though at Friday's news conference they declined to commit to a specific timeline.

The scale of that backlog is significant. A Government Accountability Office report found that nine projects remained on the federal priority list as of April 2023, five of them in New Mexico. Completing all listed projects nationwide would cost roughly $8 billion. The four other New Mexico projects on the list are the Gallup Indian Medical Center, the Albuquerque Indian Health Center, an IHS clinic on the Alamo Navajo Reservation near Socorro, and an IHS clinic at Pueblo Pintado in northeast New Mexico.

For Sandoval County, where tribal communities have historically traveled into Albuquerque for federal health services, the announcement marks a concrete step toward bringing that care closer to home, even as the bulk of the funding and the construction timeline remain to be secured.