A regional group to promote communities around the Department of Energy’s Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico has decided to close up shop.
“We are looking toward officially dissolving by June 30,” Darien Fernandez, the Taos Town Council member and chair of the Regional Coalition of LANL [Los Alamos National Laboratory] Communities, said by telephone Thursday.
The Santa Fe New Mexican reported Monday the Regional Coalition of LANL Communities voted during its May 21 online meeting to start wrapping up operations.
The future of the organization has been in doubt for a couple of months now, Fernandez said. Two of the coalition’s larger member jurisdictions, Santa Fe and Taos counties, voted to withdraw and other communities were also said to be considering an exit, the newspaper reported.
The organization has been without an executive director since last August after Chicanos Por La Causa (CPLC New Mexico), a community corporation that provided day-to-day management through Eric Vasquez, decided not to seek another two-year deal with the regional coalition.
Vasquez and CPLC New Mexico were hired after the regional coalition decided not to renew the contract of the prior executive director, Andrea Romero, now a member of the New Mexico House of Representatives. The coalition lost much of its DOE grant funding in the fall of 2019 pending submission of documents showing federal money was not being used on lobbying or other unauthorized purposes.
The lack of DOE federal grant funding made the odds slim of attracting a new director, Fernandez said. But at the same time the current lack of full-time staff gives the coalition fewer things to unwind, he added.
“We have done what we could to keep it going” in recent months, Fernandez said.
Romero and the coalition came under public criticism over spending on expensive meals and baseball tickets for stakeholders during a trip to Washington, D.C. Romero later reimbursed much of the questioned expenses. While state and federal audits cited sloppy bookkeeping and lax administrative practices under Romero, no legal charges resulted.
The jurisdictions around the laboratory are likely to remain active in efforts to support cleanup of Los Alamos, Seth Kirshenberg, executive director of the Washington, D.C.-based Energy Communities Alliance, said in a Tuesday email. “The group of local government and Pueblo leaders worked well together in the coalition for a long time and were able to accelerate the movement of waste off the “hill” and increase the focus of cleanup, however the last couple of years were difficult after the funding from DOE was cut-off and they were not able to retain the staff to run the organization,” Kirshenberg said.
While the possibility of launching a replacement organization has been mentioned, it is much more likely the local governments will cooperate informally to support Los Alamos remediation and economic opportunities, Fernandez said. Taos is “adamant about cleanup,” he added.
The coalition was founded in 2011. In addition to Santa Fe and Taos, other member jurisdictions listed on its website include City of Española, County of Los Alamos, County of Rio Arriba, City of Santa Fe, Pueblo of Jemez, Ohkay Owingeh and Town of Taos.
