Lights, camera, inaction!
Los Lunas drive-in completed; still closed to the public
LOS LUNAS — The Los Lunas drive-in theater has been completed, but it has yet to open as Valencia County is still currently red under the state’s tiered COVID-19 system.
It’s not that the drive-in theater is inoperable under the current health orders, but the number of cars are limited due to mass gathering restrictions. Currently, when a county is in the red, a maximum of 10 cars can gather — in this case for a drive-in theater.
Los Lunas Parks and Recreation Director Jason Duran, who helped spearhead the project, said the money made from 10 cars at the price the village wants to charge wouldn’t be enough to cover the cost of licenses for movies.
For now, the plan is to open when the county moves to yellow or green, and the test-positivity rate is at or below 5%, Duran said.
“You can only have 10 cars in a place,” Duran said. “And the movie(s) cost us a certain amount of money to play. So that’s what limits us really. But, we also want to keep people safe. So we don’t want to jump the gun on anything. And, you know, the No. 1 concern is keeping the community safe and making sure that we’re abiding by the governor’s orders.”
While prices aren’t set in stone yet, Duran estimated that if the theater were to operate under the 10-car limit, the price for a single car would range from $30 to $40. But if the theater opens up when the county is yellow or green — which has limits of 25 and 100 cars, respectively — ticket prices will be significantly cheaper at just $15 a car.
Nora Meyers Sackett, press secretary for Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham, said drive-in theaters don’t fall under close-contact recreational facilities or outdoor recreational facilities; the former is inoperable under health orders and the latter can operate at 25% capacity. Instead, the drive-in theater falls under “all other businesses” and is “still subject to the mass gathering vehicle limit of each level.”
For Duran and the village, and considering the pandemic’s financial strain on many, the goal has always been to get the price down as low as possible.
“We want to make it as affordable as possible. We’ve tested everything out — we’re ready to go,” Duran said. “It looks amazing. We’re ready to show the movies; we just need the go-ahead.”
The drive-in theater, located at the former Badlands BMX Park on N.M. 314, was completed at the end
of November, several months after its original expected completion date.
Most materials and labor came from the village itself — and with the exception of the screen — so there weren’t many outside expenses, Duran said.
The screen is 40 feet wide and 20 feet high, and cost $40,000, Duran said.
The money used for the screen came from funds budgeted for canceled events the village usually holds through the parks and recreation department.
Originally, the plan was to open the drive-in theater to give people a chance to get out when many places, including indoor theaters, are closed during the pandemic. But health orders changed the plans, Duran said.
When the drive-in opens, the village plans to show not only movies, but also local high school sporting events when seasons begin to start.
Duran said the theater will also be a long-term project for the village.
“This is just the beginning,” Duran said. “I’m looking at possibly installing a playground in the area and bleachers where people can actually, you know, come in and watch a movie on a bleacher outside. … So, there’s a ton of opportunities that we can have with this drive-in theater.”