Chaparral has grown into New Mexico’s largest unincorporated community, but the borderland town just north of El Paso still has no city government, no single county home, and — according to residents and officials — not nearly enough public services to match its size. The community straddles Doña Ana County to the west and Otero County to the east, a split that has left roughly 16,500 residents, by the 2020 census, without the kind of local oversight most towns take for granted.
State Rep. Sarah Silva, a Democrat from Las Cruces who represents Chaparral directly, has said the community could actually be home to as many as 30,000 people today. As reported by the Santa Fe New Mexican, Silva described the town as “bursting at the seams.” Chaparral was established around 1960 and has never incorporated, leaving it without a local government to oversee zoning, infrastructure, or public safety even as its population has swelled far beyond what census figures capture.
Residents have long dealt with a lack of law enforcement and infrastructure, junk accumulation, animal-control problems, flooding, and delayed emergency response, according to the same report. The Doña Ana County sheriff’s substation in Chaparral has been closed since 2022, and the community’s private water utility, Lake Section Water, serves more than 5,500 connections on its own, separate from any municipal system.
A Push for a Public Safety Facility
Otero County Sheriff David Black has proposed a $10 million public-safety facility in Chaparral that would include a sheriff’s office substation and ambulance bay, with space for fire, animal-control, and road-maintenance crews, according to an opinion piece Black wrote in the Santa Fe New Mexican. Black wrote that the closest ambulance to Chaparral can currently be anywhere from 14 to 40 miles away, and that Doña Ana County shuttered its substation in 2022. The facility’s first phase, a sheriff and fire/EMS building, is budgeted at $5 million, with the full project reaching $10 million once completed…