Political Intelligence - November, 1998 - Clinton Nukes Texas.
On September 20, Bill Clinton signed the Texas/Maine/Vermont Radioactive Waste Compact bill (HR 629) into law, dashing the hopes of dump opponents in West Texas who lobbied for a veto, and violating both the letter and the spirit of his own 1994 Executive Order on Environmental Justice. Under the terms of the Compact, Sierra Blanca (an impoverished, majority Hispanic border community about eighty miles from El Paso) could begin receiving parts from decommissioned nuclear power reactors and other radioactive waste from Maine, Vermont, and other states, perhaps as early as 1999. The Compact releases $55 million to dig the atomic dump, which lies in Texas's most active earthquake zone, directly above a fault line. Clinton's 1994 Environmental Justice order prohibits federal agencies from supporting projects that result in discrimination. (Although Sierra Blanca is a state dump, the Department of Energy, the EPA, and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission have all been involved in this project.)

News of Clinton's signature traveled fast in Texas, but one person who apparently missed the significance of it was Secretary of State Madeleine Albright. According to an AP report filed September 28, Sierra Blanca came up in a recent meeting Albright had with Mexican Interior Secretary Rosario Green. Albright was seeking to reinstate armed U.S. drug enforcement operations in Mexico, a subject which Green apparently had no interest in negotiating. Green was more interested in talking about the Sierra Blanca dump, which Mexico has staunchly opposed from the outset because of its proximity (only sixteen miles) to the Rio Grande, making it a clear violation of the La Paz Agreement - a 1985 agreement between Mexico and the United States, pledging to end the practice of dumping toxic waste along the border. Albright reportedly promised to do everything she could to get the dump moved to a more interior location in Texas. Just how she would pull this off -only a few days after her boss removed one of the final obstacles to the dump's construction in Sierra Blanca - is unclear.

Although the compact was a major victory for the nuclear industry, the dump still has a few hurdles to clear. On October 22, the commissioners of the Texas Natural Resources Conservation Commission will meet in Austin to hear final arguments on the permit, and to decide whether to uphold, reverse, or remand the decision of their own administrative law judges, who recommended denying the license in July. (The Waste Authority is reportedly drilling holes near the site in anticipation that it will be allowed to enter more evidence about the underground fault.) The meeting is open to the public.

For more information, contact the Sierra Blanca Legal Defense Fund: (512) 472-0855.


Political Intelligence - October 1, 1999 - RadioAddictive?
It seems like all the news from Hudspeth County is bad. First there was the MERCO sludge dump: the "shit ranch" that receives hundreds of thousands of tons of New York City sewage sludge each week. Then came the Low Level Radioactive Nuclear Waste Disposal site, which was denied a license a year ago. That was good news for some in the county seat of Sierra Blanca. But not for everyone. Once the town of 3,400 was no longer a dumpsite, the flow of state dollars stopped. All that's left of the local economy except farming and ranching is the train from New York, the school district, and the Border Patrol.

But Hudspeth County Judge James Peace argues that the county is still owed $2.5 million in funds because Maine, Vermont, and Texas signed a federal compact designating Sierra Blanca the dumpsite. The $3.5 million the state already paid to Hudspeth County was used to build, among other things, a solid waste landfill, a new county barn, a park, a library, and a better football field. (There's also an If-you-build-it-they-will-come clinic, which cost $125,000 but has no doctor and no ambulance, leaving local anti-dump activist Bill Addington wondering who was in charge of writing the checks. "There's no doctor there, there's no clinic," said Addington.)

County Auditor Eva Tarango has written a few checks and is still angry about the state's denial of the radioactive dump license Ð finally rejected because of a geological fault beneath the proposed dumpsite. The dump was also in violation of the La Paz treaty, under which the United States and Mexico agreed that neither company would place hazardous waste sites on the border corridor. Tarrango is not buying that. "Mexico doesn't care about us," she told the Odessa American. "If Mexico cared about us, they would take care of their own people and we wouldn't have all of these people coming in, these illegal aliens."

Like Tarango, Judge Peace (there was a Judge Love, who sold the county on the sludge ranch, and came to be known as Judge Sludge) wants his money. The county received its final $951,000 check in August, which the judge says will be used to continue projects started with dump money. He has to know continued funding is unlikely Ð if for no other reason that there is no more Low Level Radioactive Waste Disposal Authority. State Senator Buster Brown killed it in May, in an effort to pave the way for private companies to build elsewhere the rad-waste dump the state refused to allow the Authority to build in Sierra Blanca.


Political Intelligence - November 12, 1999 - Waste In The West
Reeves County Commissioners in Pecos allocated $20,000 for a court fight to keep nuclear waste out of neighboring Ward County, and Rick Jacobi is pissed. Jacobi, vice-president of operations for Envirocare, a Utah-based waste disposal company trying to move into Texas, attacked Reeves County Judge Jimmy Galindo, complaining that the judge opposes waste in all forms. "He was opposed to [a nuclear waste site in] Sierra Blanca. He was involved in opposing a sludge disposal operation scheduled for Reeves County. I think he just kind of reacted without thinking," Jacobi said.

Galindo thinks he's thinking. "This issue is not about opposition," he told the Odessa American. "It is about environmental hazards. If you talk to ordinary people in West Texas, the overwhelming majority of them will respond the same way I do. We don't want West Texas to become a dumping ground. We don't want our home to become a dumping ground for the nation." For Jacobi, who attacked the Judge for his "knee-jerk reaction" to Envirocare's waste dump proposal, the problem is education. "If he could learn more about it, he could support the project," Jacobi said. "We've talked at length. His inclination is just to be opposed to it." Jacobi, a former executive director of the Texas Low Level Radioactive Waste Disposal Authority, left the agency to work for Envirocare after the Sierra Blanca project was canned. Envirocare was scheduled to announce its preferred Texas site on October 1, but delayed its announcement until it further studies the results of test wells drilled in Ward County.


Nuke Undead Awake.
Everyone knows you can’t keep a good man down. More perplexing is the remarkable resilience of the ungood — like former Texas Low-Level Radioactive Waste Disposal Authority executive director, Rick Jacobi. Last fall, when the T.N.R.C.C. officially killed the Sierra Blanca dump he had promoted for over a decade, Jacobi was looking for a personal dump to hide in. But the vampire’s coffin had a silver lining — Jacobi’s Hudspeth County bungling had boosted the Andrews County hopes of two private waste companies (one of which, Envirocare of Texas, has re-incarnated Rick as its new vice president of operations, effective February 8). Envirocare head Norm Sunderland told Political Intelligence that Jacobi, whose duties will include lobbying the Legislature, brings “a wealth of experience in low-level waste disposal in Texas.” Indeed, by our accounting, Jacobi’s been at it for seventeen years — and over fifty million dollars — although he hasn’t disposed of anything yet (other than the state agency he worked for).

Jacobi wasn’t the only nuclear player traded in the legislative off-season. Roy Coffee, formerly of the Governor’s Office of State and Federal Relations (where he helped lobby for federal passage of the Texas-Maine-Vermont Waste Compact last year), has landed a contract with Envirocare’s competitor, Waste Control Specialists. Meanwhile, Bruce Darling, the U.T. geology grad who worked on the ill-fated Sierra Blanca license application, has been retained as a consulting hydrologist for Envirocare. (Darling’s unpublished dissertation supported the Sierra Blanca site, which sat over an aquifer; Western Andrews County, location of both private sites, also sits above an aquifer formation, so Darling’s dubious hydrology remains in demand.) On the utility front, Eddie “Munster” Selig, of the nuke industry front group Advocates for Responsible Disposal in Texas, has kept his crack lobbying team intact. Formerly boosters of Sierra Blanca (and therefore de facto opponents of privatization), the pragmatic Advocates were recently spotted in Andrews County touring both competing facilities.

To head its lobbying team, Envirocare has assembled an all-star former Speaker squad, with both Billy Clayton and Gib Lewis on board. The company’s top attorney is Vinson & Elkins’ Molly Cagle. For sheer firepower, however, it’s hard to beat the team put together by Waste Control Specialist owners Kent Hance, Ken Bigham, and Harold Simmons. Top flak Bill Miller, of the Austin P.R. firm Hillco Partners (formerly MEM-Hubble), is the latest addition to a team that includes former state senators Carl Parker, Bill Sims, and Bill Haley, and former Bush aides Reggie Bashur and Cliff Johnson.

Johnson actually represents the Andrews County Industrial Foundation, the group that brought Waste Control Specialists to town four years ago and has been the company’s biggest booster. Members of the Foundation recently traveled to Maryland, where they helped Waste Control woo the U.S. Enrichment Corporation, which is considering locating a new uranium enrichment facility on Waste Control’s current site, to be operated by both companies. Envirocare, which has worked hard in the past to scuttle Waste Control’s plans, has gotten the cold shoulder from the Industrial Foundation (though it is pushing ahead with the permitting process, despite being several years behind W.C.S.).

In the early handicapping at the Lege, Waste Control seems to have the inside track as well. Envirocare lobbyist Billy Clayton has suggested that Pete Gallego’s waste bill (H.B. 674) unfairly favors Waste Control. This would come as no surprise, since according to one insider, Waste Control actually wrote portions of the bill.


Rad Waste For Everyone
H.B. 674 (Gallego, D-Alpine)

No one has ever called the Texas Low Level Radiation Waste Disposal Authority a fair and efficient state agency. After all, it has spent more than $55 million trying to locate a nuclear waste dump in three unsuitable sites in Hudspeth County, and only last October finally got word from the T.N.R.C.C. that there would be no dump in Sierra Blanca. Pete Gallego, who represents Sierra Blanca, has come up with a great idea for reform: no Authority. Gallego proposes contracting out disposal to private companies, which would pay a skeleton-crew at what remains of the Authority a small fee to dump radioactive waste. The bill also eliminates the agency's executive director's position, and therefore would require Rick Jacobi to go back to work directly for the industry (some say he never left). But along the way, Gallego wipes out sections of the health and safety code, and eliminates any consideration of waste reduction technologies and alternatives to dumping. It's no secret that the Waste Control Specialists is looking at a new "private" dumpsite in Andrews County, but existing state law doesn't allow private companies to dispose of radioactive waste. Gallego's bill is a step in that direction..