Sent to Santa Fe City Councilors Renee Villarreal, Signe Lindell, Michael Garcia, Carol Romero-Wirth, Chris Rivera, Roman "Tiger" Abeyta, Jamie Cassutt-Sanchez, JoAnne Vigil Coppler, and Mayor Alan Webber, CC to Kyle Mason, and Brian Williams

March 29, 2021

Dear Councilors and Mayor --

First, I would like to thank Councilor Villarreal for her cogent questions and comments during the March 17 Quality of Life Committee meeting. Those principled and well-informed remarks truly embodied the spirit of democracy, in our view. We also appreciated the duty of care exhibited by the Committee in the sheer fact of their deliberation. This is not at all a trivial matter. Approval of the JPA at this time in history embodies great risks for the City and the region. As we said below, and as we have been saying for 10 years, the RCLC was designed to subvert local democracy, not to provide "seats" at any "table."

The RCLC has not had, and will never have, any appreciable effect on Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) cleanup funding. The dominant influences on that funding are:

• Department of Energy (DOE) cleanup funding overall;
  
• the New Mexico senators and governor;
• any legal enforcement action by the State of New Mexico which might be undertaken; and
• Los Alamos County and its DC lobbyist, who is literally the same person that heads up the Energy Communities Alliance.

The tribes could be powerful actors but they are not.

The representation that RCLC helped restore LANL cleanup funding for FY21 is false. The senators did that. It was a foregone conclusion in any case; the proposed cuts were only a gesture to partially balance out the optics of the proposed Weapons Activities increases. The cuts had no possibility of being retained by the energy and water subcommittees or the wider appropriations committees.

The RCLC thinks it is influential but -- to put the best light on the situation -- that is a naive view. I say this as a person who has led more than 500 briefings on Capitol Hill in the past 12 years, many of which were with funding and authorizing committee staff.

On another issue, I do not understand how the City could pay $20,000 to the RCLC on October 5, 2020, $10,000 of which was for RCLC dues for the new FY2021 fiscal year, when the City had not approved the new, applicable JPA. It appears that the City Manager acted too hastily in that regard. It would be good to claw some of those funds back if possible. I trust that no per diem or other taxpayer-funded expenses have been paid to support an organization that doesn't actually have a clear legal basis at this point.

There is no reason to consider that any positive value will result from that "investment," so sunk costs should not bias your decision. That $10,000 is really pocket change in comparison to the valuable City time and attention the RCLC wastes and misdirects, and the identity damage it entails. How much does the City pay to promote a positive environmental image of itself? The time and attention of each of you, the City's leaders, is truly precious.

Keeping the City's identity associated with LANL is a horrendous mistake. LANL needs Santa Fe, but Santa Fe definitely does not need LANL.

It is no wonder that on March 17, David Israelevitz could not tell the Quality of Life Committee how many members the RCLC actually had. So how many have endorsed the new JPA, and how many not? I don't know. Is the RCLC operating on two JPAs at once? Apparently. Can the RCLC, or any organization, just slowly and gradually glide from one incorporating  document to another as accessions are made by member governments, sort of a decision process that lasts for months with an ambiguous RCLC legal basis in the meantime?

It seems to me that the City of Santa Fe is not, as I understand the situation, a full member of the RCLC until it approves the organization's current operating JPA. It therefore seems that the members of the RCLC Board are serving in their respective private capacities unless and until the City approves the current foundational RCLC JPA.

It is not clear to me that the City's delegate to the RCLC, or any other delegate, has the power to commit their respective governments to the new JPA or to entail expenses associated with membership and participation in advance of the decision on your agenda for this coming Wednesday.

Returning to more basic issues, is it really the business of the City of Santa Fe to be making a technical and managerial decision as to how much money the LANL cleanup contractor -- currently N3B -- should be granted by Congress? I don't think so. That's why the RCLC is derided by congressional staff -- it looks like, and is, pure greed. I was in charge of LANL compliance for the New Mexico Environment Department, and later worked as a hydrologist advising the cleanup of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, and later on other industry cleanups. In my judgment, more money is not necessarily what is most needed in the LANL cleanup. In my view, funding is adequate right now. What is never adequate is Department of Energy (DOE) management focus and contractor performance, costs, and accountability, and the priority given to cleanup over new missions and new waste generation and management.

If the City of Santa Fe wanted to be influential in Washington DC as regards LANL -- or as regards anything else -- the City would be more powerful speaking for itself. The City's voice in DC is being channeled through LANL, with a loss of integrity and agency.

There has been a discussion (cf. Kyle Mason memo of 5 February 2021) of whether RCLC membership could be reconciled with positions the City has taken on nuclear weapons (in favor of disarmament, against new warheads) and (against) plutonium warhead core ("pit") production. It cannot. The RCLC JPA is diametrically opposed to several resolutions the City has passed, because the JPA supports LANL missions and funding and those missions and funding are almost entirely devoted to the development and production of nuclear weapons (see below).

If the RCLC were to adopt a lobbying position against pit production and against any further expansion of LANL's nuclear weapons mission, or if it required contracting that mission back to the level it was at the time of those City resolutions, the Governing Body could then support the JPA without contradicting its own positions.

The Mason memo doesn't really answer this question, but rather changes the subject to the "consensus" view that accelerated cleanup is widely supported and the RCLC works for that. As noted above, the RCLC is powerless to advance that goal, both because the RCLC is basically powerless and because lack of money is not the problem. The fact is that changing the mission to weapons production at LANL is already starting to create more transuranic (TRU) waste. At least as far as ridding LANL of its dangerous inventory of legacy TRU, the creation and disposition of new TRU waste from plutonium programs is the dominant problem.

It doesn't really matter what the JPA actually says about what it will "lobby" for. The RCLC is perceived, and will always be perceived, as a LANL support entity aimed at increasing the overall LANL budget.

For reference, observe that the nuclear weapons portion of LANL spending increased dramatically from last year to the present fiscal year. (From Presentation to the NM Radioactive & Hazardous Materials Committee, Sep 9, 2020, slide 6):

Sources for above table:
https://www.lanl.gov/about/facts-figures/index.php (retrieved 8/20/20)
https://www.lasg.org/budget/FY2021/doe-fy2021-laboratory-table.pdf

Subsequently the proposed increase was approved by Congress (includes longer-term picture): Unprecedented Increase in Warhead Spending Approved by Congress; Los Alamos increase largest by far, primarily to establish plutonium factory complex for warhead cores, Dec 22, 2020.

Finally and most fundamentally, I wonder why the City wants to orient itself in support of weapons the world overtly rejects (see for example Historic milestone: Nuclear Weapons Ban Treaty to Enter into Force, Oct 25, 2020).

Thank you for your attention to this serious matter,

Greg Mello, on behalf of the Los Alamos Study Group

Dear Councilors and Mayor --

It may be prudent to bring this prior note to your attention before tonight's meeting. I no longer live in Santa Fe but hundreds of our members do, and they do care about this issue. I know some of them have written you. I am not reminding them to do so again. We all get enough email!

We have been collecting articles about the scandal that is the RCLC here. To us it's incredible that any governmental body would want to be associated with it.

I don't have anything to add to what was said below.

God willing, we are going to be intensifying our outreach locally and nationally about the new plutonium factory complex that MIGHT be built upwind of Santa Fe. It is by no means a sure thing, thankfully.

We were able to put up another billboard on I-25, this one pointing toward what we need as well as what we don't need:

(For more information, see "Second billboard opposing nuclear bomb factory near Santa Fe installed", press release, Mar 15, 2021.)

Please feel free to contact me if you have any questions, and best wishes in your critically-important work today and always,

Greg Mello, a 23-year Santa Fe resident now living and working in Albuquerque

(email of March 3, 2021, 5:35 pm)

Dear Councilors and Mayor --

Thank you for your work on behalf of Santa Fe.

I hope the City will sever its connection with the "Regional Coalition of LANL Communities" (RCLC) altogether and end its financial contributions to this organization. The RCLC exists to suborn local governments and serves as a lobbying arm for the LANL management and operating contractor, currently Triad LLC, and its environmental contractor, currently N3B. Triad's contract is worth tens of billions. The cash-strapped City of Santa Fe has no business subsidizing the RCLC lobby shop.

I suppose the City Attorney has examined the issue but it is hard for me to see why the state's Anti-Donation Clause does not apply in this case, barring contributions to this private lobbying entity. At best, the RCLC occupies a gray middle ground, and has struggled to define itself legally.

As you know the RCLC has been mired in scandal off and on for some time and has had difficulty meeting Open Meetings Act requirements, or even attracting anyone who wants to be its executive director. Funding is not assured.

The reasons the RCLC has been so troubled are fundamental. They do not so much arise from this or that person in charge as from the squirrelly mission and core activities of the coalition.

The RCLC only really exists to formally align local governments with whatever the two LANL contractors want to do, i.e. to undercut independent representative government. It makes sure northern New Mexico is "all in" as a nuclear weapons colony, to whatever degree the contractors and their federal facilitators wish. They are the ones choosing what LANL does and the RCLC supports, not the City.

Thank you for your attention,

Greg Mello