ABQJOURNAL OPINION/GUEST_COLUMNS: Stop Dumping on Sunland Park

Saturday, January 01, 2011

Stop Dumping on Sunland Park

By Bill Addington
El Paso Group of the Rio Grande Chapter of the Sierra Club
          Why care what happens in Sunland Park?
        Located on the U.S.-Mexico border, and among New Mexico's most impoverished communities, the colonia of Anapra, New Mexico, may have sought prosperity when it rebranded itself as Sunland Park in 1983. But Sunland Park has become far from an oasis; instead, it is the site of New Mexico's largest state-sanctioned landfill.
        Hundreds of truckloads of commercial waste, mostly from Texas, are dumped daily at a 480-acre privately-owned site located top-gradient at the center of town.
        Rather than cultivate prosperity on the wings of El Paso's growth, Sunland Park residents instead contend with stunted economic potential and absorb the humiliation of a polluted dream.
        Imagine their anxiety: Is the air safe to breathe when spring winds scour the unvegetated landfill, whose non-hazardous permit was breached with illegal toxic dumping? How to attract newcomers, and the business they would spur, when landfill odors spill through Sunland Park in summer heat?
        And how to feel more than cut-rate when literally hundreds of trips are made daily by out-of-state garbage trucks through the center of one's hometown?
        In the 1980s, Sunland Park, in its air and soil, was recognized as the most heavily lead-contaminated community in New Mexico due to nearby smelter emissions. Now residents cite the obvious risk of dumping waste above the Mesilla Bolson, the Rio Grande aquifer that supplies Sunland Park and the 1.5 million residents of El Paso and Juarez just downstream. Part of the landfill was never lined, and the liners in other sections have a finite life.
        What will happen to water when the liners inevitably fail?
        Furthermore, the landfill — whose southern boundary is also the international border — affects day-to-day life not only in Sunland Park, but in the twin colonia of neighboring Anapra, Chihuahua, Mexico.
        What kind of border security can be expected in a region treated literally as a dump?
        In 2007, these concerns prompted New Mexico Secretary of Environment Ron Curry to call for an administrative hearing, which in turn led to legal volleys between the landfill operator and its opponents. Acknowledging community concerns, Curry granted just a one-year permit so that risks could be better assessed. The landfill successfully challenged this limitation, but El Paso, fearing the loss of the disposal site for its commercial trash, last September adopted a Flow Control policy to process its waste at its own sites.
        In November, the New Mexico Environmental Law Center filed a motion with Curry to reopen the case based on El Paso's new policy, which would eliminate 90 percent of the trash now sent to Sunland Park. Presented with this golden opportunity to reassert the concerns that led him to grant the one-year permit, Curry's only public action was been to give himself successive one-month extensions to act on the motion.
        Last July, Curry, speaking in Washington, D.C., to the Blue Ribbon Commission on America's Nuclear Future, noted that "when you offer someone a permit from an environment department, you are quite literally giving them permission to pollute."
        Curry's point is apt in Sunland Park, where any justification for further pollution has dissolved.
        The Sunland Park and El Paso city councils have done their parts to help Sunland Park toward a better future; local governance has led the way. Now it's New Mexico's turn to act with courage and commitment to the principles of environmental justice.

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