Bunch Tongate was confirmed as secretary of the New Mexico Environment Department on Monday, the state agency announced Tuesday.
“Yesterday, Secretary Designate Butch Tongate was confirmed unanimously by the Senate as Secretary of the New Mexico Environment Department,” the department stated in a press release.
Tongate has been acting environment secretary since his predecessor, Ryan Flynn, resigned to take a private gig last year after three-and-a-half years on the job. Tongate joined the department in 1993 and had served as deputy environment secretary since 2011. He worked at Flynn’s side on the $74 million 2016 settlement between the Department of Energy and New Mexico over the 2014 accidents that shuttered the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant for three years, and on the new consent order that phased in last year and rewrote the rules for DOE’s cleanup of Cold War waste at the Los Alamos National Laboratory.
The New Mexico Environment Department is the lead state regulator on the Los Alamos cleanup, and at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant near Carlsbad, N.M. The latter is the only deep-underground disposal facility for transuranic waste generated by DOE and its predecessor agencies during the Cold War arms race.
