A landmark environmental justice regulation proposed in Albuquerque — undoubtedly the most important of its kind in generations — has so frightened the business community here that it has gone to preposterous and disgusting lengths to undermine and destroy it.
Westside City Councilor and conservative Republican Dan Lewis, a petroleum businessman and pastor, introduced two bills in mid-October that would not only undermine the health of impoverished communities in Bernalillo County but would also deepen the county’s abysmal air quality record. The American Lung Association puts us in the top 25 most polluted metro areas in nation.
The bills, it seems clear to me, are aimed at preventing efforts of the Mountain View Coalition and the New Mexico Environmental Law Center to have their proposed regulation — called the Community-initiated Health, Environment and Equity Impacts (HEEI) rule — even heard by the Albuquerque/Bernalillo Country Air Quality Control Board, created by the state Legislature in the 1978.
Lewis’s bills — described by its opponents as an “obscene perversion of the role of the City Council” — would go so far as to dismantle and dissolve the current state-sanctioned Air Quality Control Board and replace it with a handpicked board of its own. And it would do so just before the proposed HEEI regulation is to be heard by the Board. In the over 50 years I’ve been a reporter in New Mexico, I’ve never seen anything even approaching such a blatant and detestable political movida as this.
To make it worse, this “obscene perversion” is at the expense of the most polluted and overburdened part of our metroplex. The Mountain View Neighborhood is in the South Valley between Broadway and Second Street, and Woodward Avenue and the Isleta curve on the interstate. The area has long been an environmental nightmare. The well at its elementary school was so polluted it was shut down in the 1980s. It has two Superfund sites, and perhaps three or four other sites that deserve to be so designated. It contains the majority of the county’s brownfields, the vast majority of the metro area’s smoke stack industries, huge petroleum storage tanks that spill over from time to time, multiple other hazardous waste sites, including at least 25 auto junk yards, two concrete companies, a solid waste landfill, the area’s waste water treatment plant, a fertilizer factory, and a rail spur that’s been known to store tank cars full of deadly chlorine.
Beleaguered Mountain View residents have been waiting for decades to get some kind of relief and just when there’s a chance to at least keep some future contamination at bay, the Pollution Industrial Complex goes to absurd extremes of environmental injustice to try and crush the effort.
Everything comes to a head, as far as I can tell, at the November 8th City Council Meeting when Lewis’s bills will be voted on. HEEI is scheduled to be heard by the Air Board in December. If the Lewis bill wins and it isn’t vetoed by the mayor, HEEI will be consigned to permanent limbo.
HEEI has got the business “community” so riled up because it stands in the way of polluting businesses, including military subcontractors, from taking advantage of politically disempowered and impoverished neighborhoods, “in the furtherance of environmental justice.” Before a potential new polluting business is granted a permit to operate in an area, HEEI would require that it be evaluated for the “cumulative and disparate impacts of air emissions, including the social, environmental, and economic context that affects the vulnerability of communities to health harms of air pollution, such as race, poverty, and existing pollution burden…” If it would harm or further harm the health of residents living within the radius of a mile around the facility it would not be permitted.
The thought of causing no harm is apparently so appalling to the supporters of Lewis’ bill that they are willing to go to virtually any sneaky and ludicrous means to stop it. An additional subtext, of course, is about making sure that regulations curtailing greenhouse gas emissions will always be stillborn.
Lewis’s bill is filled with an avalanche of Whereases. A couple of them imply foolishly that because the Air Quality Board was created by the state legislature it somehow “may not be answerable to elected officials and, consequently, the electorate.” I hope that the Board will always be comprised of experts on public health and air quality who make decisions on the rationality of arguments and hard data, not on demands or proclivities of the politicians who appoint them.
Lewis is a former and possibly future mayoral candidate, his bills should permanently disqualify him and be opposed by all clear thinking people of good will who value the health of real children and their families — whatever their ethnicity and financial condition — above the cold blooded abstraction of “the economy.”
*Nullius in verba: take nobody’s word for it
The importance of this column resides in the fact that it focuses on a local problem with specific characteristics in a particular location. Today, this is perhaps where citizens have the most power to stop policies that will damage our lives. Creating solutions to local problems may be our most direct route to dealing with the larger more complex problems in a world where all problems seems increasingly unmanageable and daunting. Such rehearsals can lead to more successful resistance overall.
Thanks V.B.
Thanks V. B.
Great points! Lots of us spoke at the meeting tonight but I’m doubtful that we have the votes. Ike is not there and I think supporters are already in the usual minority. Air quality health impacts get so little respect, and justice/equity? … Most of the arguments in support tonight were about those folks in the Valle having too much voice on this issue. They want a new body that is ‘more fair’ . It would be funny except it’s not!
A really important post.
I assume that the Cochiti Dam and others have significantly reduced, but not eliminated, the threat of floods. It would be an interesting and useful analysis. The prospect of major bosque fires scare me more!