Outgoing New Mexico Environment Secretary Reflects on His Run

By Dan Leone

Outgoing New Mexico Environment Secretary Ryan Flynn says he’s going to have a late-morning coffee and a midafternoon beer after his three-and-a-half-year tenure in Gov. Susana Martinez’s (R) Cabinet officially ends on Aug. 12.

There’s a nap planned, too, the 38-year-old, soon-to-be former Cabinet secretary told Weapons Complex Monitor Tuesday in a brief farewell telephone interview. Flynn joined the New Mexico Environment Department as general counsel in 2011 and ascended to the top spot in 2013 amid a small shakeup in Martinez’s Cabinet. His deputy, Butch Tongate, will take over as secretary on an acting basis.

Flynn was New Mexico’s top environmental regulator during the underground radiation leak that closed the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) near Carlsbad, N.M., and the point man on subsequent settlement negotiations with the Energy Department over the accident, which in January netted New Mexico nearly $75 million to put to rest alleged violations of DOE’s state-issued WIPP operating permit. The Martinez administration says it is the largest settlement the agency ever paid a state.

“That was the most difficult decision for me to make about leaving right now,” Flynn said. “I wanted to be here when the WIPP is reopened, and I believe it will be reopened soon. It’s within reach.”

Flynn said he would like to see WIPP reopened before Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz leaves the department. Moniz has publicly hinted he is not keen to stay on the job for long after his boss, U.S. President Barack Obama (D), leaves office in January after two terms.

As much as Flynn put WIPP in the forefront of his farewell interview, his signature accomplishment as environment secretary is more closely tied to the Los Alamos National Laboratory, the point of origin of the improperly packaged container of transuranic waste that leaked underground at WIPP in February 2014 and forced the mine to close.

On June 24, by which time Flynn had already privately given Martinez notice of his planned departure, New Mexico and DOE agreed to a new legally binding consent order that completely overhauled the rules for cleaning up the 70-year-old nuclear weapons lab, which is known throughout the complex as LANL. Across LANL’s 37 square miles is stored some seven decades’ worth of legacy nuclear waste generated before and during the Cold War arms race.

To give an idea of the scope of the job, it took DOE three years to remove just over 3,000 cubic meters of transuranic waste from the 63-acre Area G waste processing facility, and that accounted for only a fraction of one type of waste stored in one of the lab’s 24 material disposal areas.

The new consent order — Flynn called it “my consent order” — runs to 192 pages, including six appendices. Not one of those pages lists a deadline for finishing site-wide cleanup of LANL’s legacy nuclear waste.

For that reason, the document has drawn howls of opposition from the Santa Fe-based citizens group Nuclear Watch New Mexico, which filed a lawsuit in federal court that seeks to vacate the new cleanup rules. Flynn has dismissed the lawsuit since the group, known as NukeWatch, threatened it, calling the litigation a frivolous distraction from real progress on the stalled cleanup.

The new consent order, Flynn and New Mexico believe, divides the sometimes-daunting task of cleaning up more than half a century of nuclear waste into bite-sized groups of similar tasks called campaigns. So while the state tells DOE and its contractors what to clean up (and sometimes, by when) it does not tell them how to get each job done — only that the department should follow a process established by the Environmental Protection Agency when selecting a cleanup remedy.

Last, and perhaps most crucially to the consent order’s critics, the new cleanup rules allow DOE to annually revise the schedule New Mexico has set for some cleanup campaigns, based on unexpected changes in funding from Congress, and unexpected challenges at the cleanup sites themselves. NukeWatch says this renders the consent order eternally mutable and effectively toothless.

“Maybe addressing LANL’s Cold War nuclear waste one year at a time with the budget crumbs that DOE throws our way is a better way to cleanup,” Scott Kovac, NukeWatch’s operations and research director, said Thursday by email. “Only time will tell. But Ryan Flynn will be long gone by then.”

Flynn and his staff sparred early, often, and sometimes in these pages with NukeWatch over the consent order. The soon-to-be ex-secretary never changed his tune: the old consent order, with its mandate to complete the bulk of cleanup by December 2015, failed. Its rigid deadline did not persuade Congress to lavish funding on the project, and the work didn’t get done.

DOE thinks it will take until 2035 to clean up most of the remaining legacy nuclear waste at LANL, at a cost of roughly $3 billion. Flynn, based on his department’s own parsing of DOE’s LANL life-cycle cost estimate, thinks it will be more like $5 million.

By 2035, even allowing for a gap year, Flynn’s youngest daughter will be in college, or at least college-bound.

“If you have funding and you have the right leadership in place, we can easily beat that deadline for the Department of Energy,” Flynn said. “There’s no doubt in my mind. We could get the work done and do it the right way for New Mexicans. But I can’t control what the funding is.”

‘Time for You to Move On’

Flynn said Tuesday he decided to leave public service “three or four months ago.” The decision, he told Weapons Complex Monitor, was “100 percent” personal.

Pressed on the issue, the outgoing secretary stuck to the spirit of the prepared quote he gave Martinez for her press release about his resignation: that he would like to spend more time with his two young daughters, one of whom is about 3 years old, and one of whom is a newborn.

Flynn also spoke of the “major financial sacrifice” he made when he left a private law practice to join the Martinez administration — a sacrifice, he suggesged, that is more keenly felt now that his domestic circumstances have changed so drastically.

“I live this job every minute of the day,” Flynn said. “I literally am working at least 80 hours a week. I’m thinking about it, I’m dreaming about it.”

This spring, Flynn was dreaming about being done with it. Hearkening back to his Crimson days as a sometimes-quarterback-sometimes-wide-receiver, Flynn compared his decision to quit the New Mexico Environment Department with the decision he made in his junior year at Harvard to quit football.

“I played football in college,” Flynn said. “And once you get to a point where you’re running down the field and you’re thinking about getting hit, and you’re just thinking about the violence and the hitting and the toll it takes on your body, once you’re worried about that, it’s time for you to move on.”

Earlier this year, Flynn said, he started to feel the same pressure bearing down on him in Santa Fe.

“I just reached a position where I decided, ‘I have a wife and two little girls at home. And this job, you can’t do it.’”

As far as what’s next, Flynn said he has hasn’t even thought about it. The short-timer short-circuited the obvious follow-up to his mention of financial sacrifice, asserting he doesn’t have a new job lined up, and that he hasn’t even gone on any interviews.

“Once I’m formally separated from government service, I’d like to take a little bit of time just to kind of decompress,” Flynn said.

Not that suitors haven’t come calling.

“I’m flattered that I have a number of different options with very different types of roles that have been presented to me over the last week or so, when word started leaking that I was going to be moving on,” Flynn said.

Asked whether he would someday consider another stint in public service, the not-yet-40-year-old Flynn was tantalizingly noncommittal.

“I’m going to take time and figure out what’s best,” he said. “I haven’t closed the door on anything, whether that means working in government or running for a leadership position.”

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Outgoing New Mexico Environment Secretary Reflects on His Run