Andrea Romero (D), once forced out as chief of a group to support communities around the Department of Energy’s Los Alamos National Laboratory, easily won a second term Tuesday in the New Mexico legislature.
Romero won 77% of the vote to win re-election in District 46 of the state House of Representatives, according to figures posted online by the New Mexico Secretary of State’s website.
“From the bottom of my heart, THANK YOU HD46!!” Romero said in a Wednesday Twitter post. “I’m here to serve you.”
In November 2018 Romero easily won her general election race, five months after defeating the then-incumbent in a Democratic Party primary. The primary victory came months after the Regional Coalition of LANL Communities (RCLC) decided not to offer Romero a new contract as executive director of the organization in February as a result of a public dispute over thousands of dollars in questionable expense reimbursements.
Romero, who said the situation was overblown by political foes, would eventually repay roughly $2,600 in questioned expenses involved meals and entertainment. While the state and Department of Energy probes later pointed to lack of international financial controls and sloppy bookkeeping, no legal charges arose from the controversy.
The Los Alamos community group is again seeking a new executive director. Chicanos Por La Causa New Mexico, a community development corporation, which employed Eric Vasquez as RCLC’s director, informed the Regional Coalition in late July it would not seek another two-year contract. According to the RCLC website, the group discussed a draft request for proposals at its latest meeting on Oct. 16.
The Regional Coalition was founded in 2011.
The Fluor-led management and operations contractor at the Savannah River Site sometimes plays fast and loose with its analysis of nuclear safety issues at the Aiken, S.C. site, DOE’s Office of Enterprise Assessments Office said this week.
That’s according to the report titled “Assessment of Issues Management at the Savannah River Site SRNS Facilities.”
The internal Department of Energy watchdog identified instances where the contractor allowed personnel to limit corrective actions to prevent a specific failure mode, rather than identifying the root issue of the failure. The office looked at incidents in: the analytical F/H Laboratory; the 235-F building, which handled plutonium, including the Pu-238 isotope for spacecraft; the H Canyon chemical separations facility; the K Area Complex where DOE stores weapon-usable plutonium slated for disposal; and L Area, where DOE stores spent nuclear fuel.
