Los Alamos County, N.M., wants a federal review board to reverse a December decision by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency saying the county’s stormwater discharges contribute to pollution of the Rio Grande River.
In a petition filed Jan. 17 with the EPA’s Environmental Appeals Board, Los Alamos County seeks to overturn the Dec. 16 decision from the Dallas-based Region 6 office that municipal stormwater discharges carry a significant amount of metals and PCBs from the Energy Department’s Los Alamos National Laboratory into the river.
The EPA regional ruling says the county should reduce the amount of pollutants in the discharge as much as possible in order to lower threats to the river that provides drinking water for Albuquerque and Santa Fe. The office said at least some of the discharges from LANL and the Los Alamos “urban cluster” end up in the river and impair water quality.
Los Alamos County wants oral arguments before the board to argue it case on the Region 6 decision.
Many of the identified pollutants predate the county’s formation in 1949 and originated during the Manhattan Project atomic bomb program of World War II, Los Alamos County Manager Harry Burgess said in a Jan. 14 press release. “To be clear, Los Alamos County fully supports environmental clean-up. … At the same time, we have been very clear with EPA about the need for firm boundaries and limitations regarding the extent of our citizens’ responsibility regarding these legacy wastes.”
It is unfair to saddle local residents with such costs given that 86% of the land in Los Alamos County is controlled by DOE or other federal entities, Burgess said. If the current challenge fails, the county might pursue other avenues of appeal in federal court.
The dispute dates to June 2014 when the Taos, N.M., environmental group Amigos Bravos sued EPA Region 6, saying Los Alamos County’s stormwater discharges contribute to pollution of waters of the United States. Pollutants in the discharges from LANL and the county amount to several thousand times public safety limits, Amigos Bravos said in a Dec. 18 press release.
On Dec. 16, Region 6 Administrator Ken McQueen issued his final decision finding these discharges must be regulated under a National Pollutant Discharge Elimination System (NPDES) permit.
In a Tuesday email, Burgess said the county will not know until the permit is created what physical work and expenses would be required.
The final determination has multiple problems, according to the filing from the county. To start, the EPA regional office decision should have been issued within 90 days of the initial action, while this came more than 2,000 days after the initial Amigos Bravos petition.
The county also argued McQueeen relied too much on only two letters to reach this conclusion: one from the New Mexico Environment Department and the other from a water authority for the city of Santa Fe and Santa Fe County.
