No environmental board for Kirtland AFB

Base cites a lack of interest in community

The absence of “sufficient and sustained community interest” was cited this week as the reason the Air Force will not establish a Restoration Advisory Board, or RAB, to provide additional community input on a host of environmental issues on Kirtland Air Force Base.

The memorandum from Kirtland Commander Col. Eric Froehlich says that a town hall meeting was held Jan. 26 “to outline the scope and responsibilities associated with forming and serving on a RAB, and where the public was invited to share their opinion regarding establishment of a RAB.”

Thirty people representing various local and state government agencies attended, most of whom indicated that “a RAB was not necessary at this time,” according to the memorandum. Also in attendance were 21 members of the public, of whom eight indicated they’d be interested in serving on the RAB and three of them were affiliated with the nonprofit environmental watchdog group Citizen Action New Mexico.

Jim Fisher of KAFB’s public affairs office said a RAB would be ineffective unless it had broad representation from all stakeholder constituencies.

Of 57 environmental restoration projects at Kirtland, the only one that extends beyond the boundaries of the sprawling base is the much publicized underground plume of jet fuel that leaked from a fuel storage facility. Public meetings are held twice a year, during which time updates are provided on all restoration projects and public comment is sought, Fisher said.

“We strongly feel that the public’s interest is better served via the current dedicated public information and feedback processes,” he said.

Dave McCoy, executive director of Citizen Action New Mexico, wasn’t buying any of it. Triggered by the public’s sustained interest in the jet fuel spill, his organization in March 2016 submitted the petition to establish a Restoration Advisory Board.

“They kept postponing meetings and sat on this thing for months after they got the petition,” he said. The recent town hall meeting was held on one of the coldest nights of the year and the community was not given adequate advance notice or adequate explanation of what the RAB was intended to do, he maintained.

The memorandum, however, says that, in October 2016, interest surveys were sent out to 1,000 email addresses for various government stakeholder agencies and personnel, and hundreds of homes in neighborhoods north of the base were part of a door-to-door survey. The subsequent town hall meeting was widely publicized via the same survey channels, social media and local newspaper stories, according to the memorandum.

Only 46 survey respondents said they’d be willing to serve on a RAB and provided their contact information, but only five of them showed up at the town hall meeting, the memorandum said.

If the Air Force were truly committed to establishing the RAB, said McCoy, it could have assembled the board from among the 46 names provided during the survey, regardless of their attendance at the town hall meeting.