A federal district court in New Mexico has set a Nov. 17 settlement conference for federal and state agencies to bridge their differences surrounding a 2016 consent order on cleanup of legacy waste around the Department of Energy’s Los Alamos National Laboratory.
U.S. Magistrate Judge John Robbenhaar issued a May 18 order scheduling the formal settlement conference six months into the future, as agreed upon by the New Mexico Environment Department (NMED) and the DOE.
Between now and then, discovery will go ahead in the case, which barring settlement is not expected to go to trial before 2023, according to the order filed with the U.S. District Court in New Mexico.
After a dispute resolution effort ended in January, the New Mexico Environment Department filed a complaint with a state court in February seeking to terminate the 2016 consent decree and replace it with one with a “robust” schedule for cleanup of legacy contamination. In March DOE filed a motion to move the dispute into federal court.
Advocacy groups and other critics say the 2016 consent order, negotiated during the administration of then-Gov. Susana Martinez (R), is a weak replacement for a 2005 negotiated order. Naysayers argue that the most recent agreement turned over too much control of cleanup milestones to Congressional budget writers and gave up too many firm deadlines from the 2005 accord.
Defenders of the 2016 order say it prioritized the most urgent remediation needed at Los Alamos, the birthplace of nuclear weapons during the Manhattan Project in the 1940s, at the height of World War II.
NMED Cabinet Secretary James Kenney, appointed by current Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham (D), said in a February press release he seeks court-supervised negotiations to renegotiate clean-up terms under the consent order.
During an interview this week with Weapons Complex Monitor, Kenney said that any new agreement with DOE must be “functional.”
“We have to have a final date by which cleanup will occur,” Kenney said. “We have to have real milestones that aren’t based on appropriations by Congress or the inability or ability to spend money, and we have to have enforcement-based outcomes from missing deadlines.”
“There are aspects of the existing consent decree that fulfill those goals, and there are aspects that don’t,” Kenney added.
Staff Reporter Benjamin S. Weiss contributed to this article.
