New Businesses in Portales NM: Highway 70 and Beyond

Drive US-70 through Portales this month and you'll pass at least four active construction sites clustered along the same stretch of frontage road. A Circle K is going up in front of Walmart. A Maverik station sits a little further down. Somewhere in between, crews are framing a new Cannon Federal Credit Union branch and an HTeaO tea shop. City officials confirmed all four projects to the Eastern New Mexico News back in June, and said at the time that they expected the two gas stations to be finished by fall.

That's a real, countable wave of new construction, and if you live here, you've probably already noticed it without needing a news story to point it out. But none of it is the thing residents will describe to someone new in town when they're asked what makes Portales feel like Portales. That distinction belongs to a five-acre plot of grapevines two miles off the highway, at the corner of 3rd and Kilgore, that's been quietly doing its own thing since 2018.

What's Actually Filling In on the Highway

The four projects on US-70 share a logic even if nobody planned them together. Circle K and Maverik are both gas station and convenience store chains, and the Circle K location specifically needed council approval for an off-premises liquor license before it could break ground, which is why it showed up in a public hearing rather than just appearing overnight. HTeaO is the Texas-born iced tea chain that's been opening drive-thru locations across New Mexico and Texas at a fast clip this year, and the Cannon Federal Credit Union branch gives Portales a second banking option along that corridor.

Here's the pattern worth naming: every one of these businesses needs highway traffic counts to make its numbers work. A gas station lives or dies on drive-by visibility. A drive-thru tea shop needs cars passing at a certain volume per hour. None of these are neighborhood businesses in the sense of being destinations people plan a trip around. They're convenience infrastructure, and convenience infrastructure goes where the road is widest and the traffic is heaviest.

City leaders were candid that the timeline is a target, not a guarantee, but as of this fall the frontage along US-70 looks busier than it has in years.

The Other Kind of News This Year

While the highway fills in, a different kind of growth is happening on the other side of town, and it has nothing to do with retail traffic. Navitas Global, an ethanol production company, was awarded $800,000 in state economic development funding to reopen a shuttered plant in the Portales industrial park that's been sitting inactive since 2012. The facility was originally built in 1984 to make ethanol, and Navitas plans to convert whey derivatives, a byproduct of dairy processing, into biofuel and high-protein animal feed. The state's economic development department says the project should create 31 new jobs with an estimated annual payroll of $1.9 million and up to $42 million in capital investment, with completion targeted for the end of 2026.

Portales Mayor Mike Miller called it a chance to see that property occupied again after more than a decade sitting empty. It's not the kind of project you drive past and immediately notice, since it's tucked into an existing industrial building rather than fronting a public road, but it's arguably the more consequential piece of economic news this town has had all year. Convenience stores and a tea shop change how you run errands. A reopened plant with 31 payroll jobs changes who can afford to stay.

The One Address That Isn't on the Highway

None of this year's highway construction is where you'd point if someone asked what's distinctive about living in Portales. That answer still lives at 2102 E. Third Street, near the corner of 3rd and Kilgore, where Enchantment Vineyards has been operating since the winter of 2018.

The Merrick family, along with daughters Megan Hamilton and Cassidy Self, planted five acres and five grape varieties on the property back in 2015, spending years working out the licensing and legal groundwork before ever pouring a first glass. When they opened, NewsChannel 10 reported that the Roosevelt County Chamber of Commerce called it a chance to help the town "crack into that tourism market a little bit better," framing the winery as something durable in a retail environment increasingly squeezed by online shopping. That's a fair description of what it's become. It's still, as of this year, the only vineyard and tasting room in Portales, and one of the first in Eastern New Mexico.

In a July report, NewsChannel 10 quoted taste room manager James Idsinga, a Portales native, calling the winery "something totally new for our area." The family has said they'd eventually like to expand from five acres to somewhere between ten and twenty, depending on how the vines perform, but there's no fast-tracked construction timeline attached to that plan the way there is for a gas station. It grows at the pace of a vineyard, which is to say slowly, and that's part of what makes it feel different from everything currently going up on the highway.

The location matters as much as the business itself. Third and Kilgore is a residential collector street, not a highway frontage road. The winery is on the family's land, and the tasting room, the patio, and the fire pits followed the vines rather than the other way around. A gas station needs to be seen from the road. A vineyard mostly needs to be found.

Why the Split Is Worth Noticing

Put the two stories side by side and a pattern shows up that neither story tells on its own. Portales is growing in two directions at once this year, and they don't overlap. The highway is filling in with businesses that live and die by drive-by visibility, the kind of convenience infrastructure every growing small town eventually needs and mostly stops noticing once it's built. Away from the highway, the industrial park is quietly bringing back payroll jobs in a building that sat empty for over a decade, and a family vineyard that's been pouring wine on a residential street since 2018 is still the answer to what makes this town its own place rather than a stop between Clovis and Lubbock.

None of this is a coincidence so much as it's how a small town's growth tends to sort itself. The businesses that need traffic go to the traffic. The vineyard has taken a different path.

If you've lived in Portales a while, you already knew both halves of this. What's easy to miss, driving past four active construction sites in one afternoon, is that the fall's biggest visible change and the town's most distinctive gathering spot aren't pulling from the same well at all.

Tammy Waters and The Waters Group have spent years watching Clovis, Portales, and Texico grow one corner at a time, and we're always glad to talk through what a stretch of road or a new plant opening means for the neighborhoods we work in. If you're curious about how any of this shows up in property values or what it might mean down the road, reach out any time. No pressure, just a local perspective when you want one.