Stantec consultants and Los Alamos County staff briefed the Board of Public Utilities on Oct. 22 on a two‑part study laying out a fleet conversion plan for county vehicles and a countywide public electric‑vehicle (EV) charging strategy.

The presentation, led by county project staff and Stantec technical leads, described a step‑by‑step vehicle replacement timeline, a site‑by‑site infrastructure analysis and scenario maps that prioritize county‑owned locations, privately owned shared Level‑2 locations and high‑speed charging along travel corridors. “One of the key drivers for this project is the New Mexico clean car rule,” Stantec analyst Josh Schott told the board, summarizing a regulatory timeline that will increase state EV sales targets over time.

The report matters because it links county operations and community charging to statewide regulations and to an emissions‑reduction target: consultants said the fleet analysis models a full conversion timeline to 2050 and will produce year‑by‑year cash‑flow and greenhouse‑gas projections. The presentation also summarized community outreach: a public visioning session and a survey that drew more than 500 responses and produced a map of preferred charging locations around Los Alamos and White Rock.

Key findings and next steps

Consultants described three phases of vehicle and infrastructure implementation and a dynamic, interactive fleet dashboard that county staff can use to track vehicle attributes, maintenance schedules and replacement timing. Annalie Castillo, Stantec’s fleet technical lead, said the team paired fleet use profiles with market availability to assess whether EV models available today can satisfy operational requirements, including range, duty cycle and specialized equipment.

On the public‑charging side, Josh Schott described how the team layered demand (population density and trip data), suitability (land use, utility infrastructure, flood/zoning constraints) and equity indicators to score parcels for different charging scenarios. “We’re investigating a few different charging scenarios,” he said, listing home charging, county‑owned chargers, privately owned shared Level‑2 sites and fast charging for highway corridors.

Board questions and outstanding data needs

Board members pressed for local calibration of statewide assumptions. One board member said Los Alamos “is not representative of the state” and asked the team to use county‑specific registration and socioeconomic data rather than only statewide trends. Consultants acknowledged that the low‑adoption scenario relied on current New Mexico trends and said they would return with clearer citations and timestamps for vehicle registration data.

Members also pressed on technical scope: whether school buses were included (consultants said public transit buses were counted but that school buses were excluded because school officials had not planned to purchase EV buses), whether parcel‑level garage data had been used (consultants said parcel zoning and unit counts were used and that they would attempt to incorporate garage/parking data where available), and how feeder‑level electrical loads were modeled (Stantec showed feeder maps and said some high‑adoption scenarios could add multiple megawatts of load on distribution feeders over time).

Consultants also described survey results and public comments: priorities included reliability, widespread availability and concerns about public investment in chargers. The team said the public comments were mixed, and that they incorporated pins and comments from both an in‑person visioning session (orange pins) and a survey (blue pins).

Timing and deliverables

Consultants told the board they plan to deliver a draft plan for review in December and a final plan in February (the team described a February final‑report due date and said the draft would be presented to county council and the public for additional comment). The draft will include: a fleet replacement schedule, an infrastructure plan with expected power loads by site, and a financial/ownership tool that models year‑by‑year capital and operating costs and allows sensitivity testing of rate and utilization assumptions.

Board members asked the team to clarify several items in the draft: which comparable communities were used to build adoption scenarios, the timestamp and source for vehicle registration numbers, the number of survey pins placed on the public map, and whether garage/park‑at‑home data could be integrated. Consultants agreed to add timestamps, additional citations and to document methodology and weighting choices in the draft report.

Why the discussion matters

Board members noted that county operations alone account for a small share of local fuel use, and one member observed that “the county could convert to an entirely electric fleet tomorrow, and we wouldn’t even see it in the noise in the data,” stressing that the larger leverage for emissions reductions lies in the community‑side charging network. Several board members emphasized equity concerns (how rates for public chargers will compare to residential charging) and the need to model operational rates for fleet and transit that differ from purely residential time‑of‑use tariffs.

Next steps and public process

The consultants said they will integrate comments from the board and from a county council discussion and return with a draft presentation in December, hold an additional community meeting to gather feedback, and submit a final plan in February for county adoption and public posting.