New Mexico Environment Secretary Ryan Flynn is resigning effective Aug. 12 after more than two years as the state’s top environmental official, New Mexico Gov. Susana Martinez (R) announced late Friday.
Flynn will be replaced on an acting basis by his deputy, Butch Tongate, according to Martinez’s press release. The outgoing secretary is leaving Martinez’s cabinet to spend more time with his family, according to the presser.
“I’m the proud father of two daughters under the age of 3, and I look forward to spending more time with them and my beautiful wife,” Flynn said in the release. His departure ends a five-and-a-half-year run at the New Mexico Environment Department (NMED), during which Energy Department dealt with the first, and so far only, radiation leak at its underground Waste Isolation Pilot Plant near Carlsbad, N.M.
Flynn was confirmed as secretary Feb. 18, 2014: almost a year after Martinez nominated him, and only 4 days after an improperly packaged barrel of radio contaminated material known as transuranic waste burst open in WIPP and shut down disposal operations at the deep-underground salt mine.
The leak was blamed on a barrel from DOE’s Los Alamos National Laboratory some 340 miles north by road of WIPP. The barrel was part of an especially dangerous cache of waste whose shipment from Los Alamos Flynn helped arrange as NMED’s general counsel: a position he held from 2011 until his confirmation as secretary.
After the accidental radiological release at WIPP — which happened fewer than two weeks after an unrelated underground equipment fire at the mine — Flynn was the state’s point man on penalty negotiations with DOE that concluded in January, when the agency announced it would settle alleged violations of its WIPP operating permit by paying New Mexico a roughly $75 million settlement.
Subsequently, the state finalized changes to the massive consent agreement that governs cleanup of legacy nuclear waste at Los Alamos. Approved June 24, the revamped consent order proposes a so-called campaign approach to cleanup that DOE thinks will take until 2035 to complete. The prior consent order, from 2005, directed DOE to spread its efforts across the lab and have cleanup largely finished by December 2015.
Under state law, Flynn’s full-time replacement must be nominated by Martinez — whose gubernatorial term expires January 2019 — and confirmed by the New Mexico Senate, which took almost a year to approve Flynn’s nomination.
