If you spent any part of this spring emailing Bernalillo County or driving down to the Ken Sanchez Commission Chambers, you already know the shorthand version of this story. PNM wanted to build a substation and string 90-foot transmission towers along Tramway. The county said no. Neighbors celebrated. Somebody organized a taco and margarita party at The Homestead Café to mark the occasion.
What that shorthand leaves out is what actually happens next, and it matters more than the vote did. The fight over the North Albuquerque Acres substation didn't end on May 12. It moved into a venue where residents don't get to show up, don't get to speak, and won't get a vote to celebrate when it's finally decided.
The Difference Between Winning and Being Right
Start with what the Bernalillo County Board of Commissioners actually ruled in May. The board voted unanimously to grant appeals filed by three neighborhood groups, including the Sandia Heights Homeowners Association, and deny PNM's application for a 3.5-acre, 66 MVA substation and its accompanying transmission corridor. Commissioners Walt Benson, Barbara Baca, Eric Olivas, and Frank Baca voted yes. Adriann Barboa was absent.
The reasoning behind that vote is worth sitting with, because it wasn't a finding that Sandia Heights doesn't need more electrical capacity. The board's problem was with PNM's homework. The utility never produced load data specific enough to justify putting a facility three times larger than comparable substations in a neighborhood the SHHA's own case materials describe as more than 95 percent built out for years. In other words, the county didn't rule that the infrastructure problem is fake. It ruled that PNM hadn't proven this particular site solves it.
That distinction matters because PNM has been here before. The utility challenged a similar Bernalillo County land use denial in court back in 2021 and lost. This time, the company has already signaled it isn't walking away.
Where the Case Actually Sits Right Now
PNM filed the administrative record from the county hearings in Second Judicial District Court on July 15. That single filing changed the entire shape of the fight, because a district court appeal doesn't run on public comment periods or packed hearing rooms. It runs on paper.
Here's the rough shape of a process that already looks very different from anything residents watched last winter and spring.
| Bernalillo County process | District court appeal | |
|---|---|---|
| Who can weigh in | Any resident, by letter or in person | Attorneys for PNM and the county, SHHA, and NAARC |
| How decisions get made | Public hearings and commissioner votes | Written briefs reviewed by a judge |
| Timeline | Set hearing dates | PNM has 33 days to file its opening brief, then the opposing side has 33 days to respond, then PNM gets a reply |
| Who decides | Elected county commissioners | District Court Judge Dan Ramczyk, on the papers or after a hearing |
PNM's 33-day window to file its opening brief, formally called a Statement of Appellate Issues, closed in mid-August. That means the county, the SHHA, and the North Albuquerque Acres Resident Coalition are now inside their own 33-day window to file a response, a deadline that lands roughly around the third week of September. According to the SHHA's own case tracking, the entire process could take up to a year before Judge Ramczyk rules, and whoever loses that ruling can still petition the Court of Appeals.
None of that involves a hearing room. There's no meeting to attend, no public comment period to submit written testimony to, and no commissioner to email. The Technical Working Group of resident volunteers who have been evaluating alternate substation sites with PNM is a separate, informal track running alongside the litigation, not a substitute for it.
The Predicament That Doesn't Wait for a Verdict
Here's the part that makes this more than a legal footnote. The infrastructure problem PNM says it's trying to solve doesn't pause while the case sits in court.
In July, customers across the far Northeast Heights, including North Albuquerque Acres, started receiving automated voicemails from PNM warning that periods of extreme heat and demand could force voluntary conservation requests between 4 and 9 p.m. PNM has framed this plainly: the existing substations serving the area are running past their normal capacity, and until something changes, the risk of brownouts during peak summer hours isn't going away. That risk exists regardless of who eventually wins in district court, because nothing about the physical grid changes while the appeal works through its briefing schedule.
Longtime opponent Robert Dale Morrison, who has fought PNM's siting decisions in this corridor for close to seven years, isn't the only voice in this story. Some residents in North Albuquerque Acres have told county commissioners they support the substation, reluctantly, because their homes depend on electric well pumps or medical equipment that can't tolerate outages. The neighborhood consensus reflected in the SHHA's public materials and reflected in commissioner votes is real, but it isn't the only opinion held by people living with this grid every summer.
What to Watch This Fall
If you live in Sandia Heights, here's where your attention is actually useful right now, since the county hearing room isn't where this gets decided anymore.
- The county, SHHA, and NAARC response brief is expected to land around late September, roughly 33 days after PNM's opening filing.
- The SHHA's monthly newsletter, GRIT, has been the most consistent source of plain-language updates on both the litigation and the parallel Technical Working Group discussions.
- Watch for any PNM conservation alerts during hot afternoons this fall. Those voicemails are a real-time signal of how strained the existing substations are, independent of the court case.
- The Technical Working Group's search for alternate sites is happening quietly, without a public hearing calendar, so updates will likely surface through SHHA channels before they show up anywhere else.
None of this is a reason for alarm. It's a reason to know where to look. A neighborhood that spent the better part of a year filling public hearing rooms just watched its fight move somewhere those rooms don't exist, and that's worth understanding even if you never plan to write another letter about it.
If you're trying to make sense of what any of this means for a specific property in Sandia Heights, or you just want a straight answer about where things actually stand, Giulia Urquhart has been tracking this neighborhood closely and is happy to walk through it with you.
