By LESLIE LINKE
Los Alamos

I implore Los Alamos County to install streetlights on Diamond Drive along the golf course.  It is a very dangerous stretch of road.  Instead of spending millions of dollars to reconfigure our children’s baseball and soccer fields and install AstroTurf at exorbitant cost, this money would be MUCH better spent on making our community safer.

About 6:40 p.m. on January 15, 2026, I hit a deer.  I’m the most careful driver I know, and I always go through that stretch of road slowly, watching for the deer.  He was not there, then he was two inches from my front left bumper.  There was absolutely nothing I could do.  I am lucky as it could have been so much worse; my airbags didn’t deploy and I kept complete control of my vehicle.

According to Officer Weiss of the Los Alamos Police Department, someone had already pulled him off the road a couple minutes after I hit him, and he was deceased.

Yesterday I received an estimate, from a shop in Santa Fe, of over $4800 for the repairs to my car and was told to expect that number to increase.  I will be without a car for two to four weeks once they start the repairs.

I think community members would be interested to know how many cars have hit deer through that stretch of road and how much it cost to repair the car damage.  Has anyone conducted such an assessment?

I know we have a severe deer problem in Los Alamos County but creaming them one deer at a time on Diamond Drive is not the way to solve the problem.  Please prioritize projects that address safety within our community over all other projects.

Thank you.