Regional Coalition of LANL Communities must disband

Erich Kuerschner’s outrage is well justified that some of the regional coalition’s town and county representatives were wining and dining on the public dime.

The state audit of the Regional Coalition of LANL (Los Alamos National Labs) Communities showed “improper” spending of $50,000 by the group. The RCLC is a coalition of nine New Mexico communities impacted by LANL. Taos town and county each have a representative on this board, which has an annual budget of around $250,000 for the purpose of lobbying Washington for more funding for LANL. $100,000 is from the DOE (no conflict-of-interest here).

The brouhaha over the indiscretions of imbibing liquor, eating $1,800 meals and purchasing Major League Baseball tickets with taxpayer dollars has inspired 50 articles in the

the and others. Even

and the weighed in on the fray. A $28 shot of Whistlepig whiskey rankles us.

Over the past seven years, the coalition has repeatedly stated its purpose was acquiring more the funding for cleanup at LANL of the massive amounts of indescribably toxic wastes buried in unlined pits in Area G and elsewhere on site. These radioactive and hazardous materials are vulnerable to fire, much of it in barrels sitting above ground under canvas tents.

RCLC was reportedly established to acquire more funding for cleanup. But what have they actually accomplished over the past seven years on that front?

When constituents have asked time and again to remove support for LANL’s mission (production of nuclear warhead bomb cores) from its founding document, why does the mission statement still include lobbying for nuclear weapons production? The many requests that dedicated citizens have made while attending their meetings over the years have resulted in absolutely no response.

While RCLC has spent at least $1.4 million, primarily for their executive director and for hobnobbing with Washington officials, the coalition has succeeded in bringing in a mere one-time $42 million increase for cleanup. The year Taos joined the coalition (2012), the requested budget amount for cleanup shrank from $360 million to $255 million.

Now it’s down to $188 million/year (down by nearly half) while nuclear bomb production funding has gone up (FY2018) to

$1.73 billion (69.8 percent of the

$2.48 billion LANL budget). The RCLC has not accomplished significantly increased funding for cleanup. Meanwhile, they have lobbied for the glorification of nuclear weapons with the now-approved Manhattan Project National Historical Park and have lobbied for re-opening Yucca Mountain, a weapon storage facility that has been proven untenable.

But here is the true outrage: The coalition was fashioned after a similar enterprise initiated and formed by the Energy Communities Alliance at Rocky Flats, Colorado. The Rocky Flats Coalition of Local Governments, founded with a joint powers agreement identical to the RCLC’s founding document, was composed of seven governments from cities around Rocky Flats.

In fact, the RCLC original executive director was the very same executive director of the Rocky Flats coalition. Similarly, this group was told they would have input into cleanup decisions at Rocky Flats. They were completely ignored and lied to.

The Rocky Flats nuclear bomb pit factory near Denver produced 70,000 plutonium pits. Then, in 1989, it was investigated for environmental crimes by the FBI. In 1992, pit production was terminated.

DOE estimated that cleanup of Rocky Flats would take approximately 65 years and $37 billion. However, despite protestations by the Rocky Flats coalition, the contractor did cleanup on the cheap ($7 billion in 10 years) and was granted a $560 million bonus for finishing early.

Only $473 million was spent on actual soil and water cleanup at the site. The most highly contaminated buildings were imploded to the basements and covered. The remaining threefourths of Rocky Flats lands was transferred to U.S. Fish and Wildlife to be used as a public Wildlife Refuge, with much contamination still in place.

Here is the true agenda of the Energy Community Alliance as it covertly orchestrates our own regional coalition:

• Make local officials complicit in the decisions made by LANL, promising them input regarding cleanup, while denying true input;

• Placate the public by pretending the RCLC is protecting us from harm while endorsing cleanup on the cheap and leaving contaminants for local officials to deal with in perpetuity;

• Transfer contaminated lands through sale or favor, such as the children’s park given to the town of Los Alamos with documented residues of radioactive gamma-emitter americium present.