March 30, 2021

Please contact the Santa Fe City Council TODAY, before tomorrow's critical meeting, and spread the word: don't endorse the revised agreement supporting the "Regional Coalition of LANL Communities"

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RCLC background and talking points

Dear friends --

We hope you are well in every way.

Once again all of us here at the Study Group are urgently asking you to write or call the Santa Fe City Council ("Governing Body") and Mayor regarding the Regional Coalition of LANL Communities (RCLC), and to get all your friends and families to do so as well.

Demand that they NOT ENDORSE the revised legal basis ("Joint Powers Agreement," JPA), for the RCLC.

The Santa Fe City Council will meet tomorrow, Wednesday, March 31 at 4:00 pm MDT (agenda with links to Zoom coordinates, and YouTube) to decide whether or not to endorse the revised JPA.

This issue will come up in the afternoon session, in which no public participation is allowed.

In addition to writing and calling the councilors and Mayor directly, you can also provide a written (email) comment up to 1:00 pm Wednesday before the decision (see p. 10 for how) or you can make live comments from the floor during the evening session (after the decision) starting at 6:00 pm (see p. 10 again for how to do that).

Here are the emails of the councilors and Mayor in a convenient form for block pasting into your email program:

rdvillarreal@santafenm.gov, silindell@santafenm.gov, mjgarcia@santafenm.gov, cromero-wirth@santafenm.gov, cmrivera@santafenm.gov, rrabeyta@santafenm.gov, jcsanchez@santafenm.gov, jvcoppler@santafenm.gov, mayor@santafenm.gov

Some of you have received notes from officials -- or gotten a call, as we did yesterday, which was revealing -- asserting that this vote is NOT a vote as to whether or not to remain in the RCLC. Formally, this is debateable but that doesn't matter too much because actually, that is exactly what it is -- as City staff more or less admitted to us. (More on this below.)

The implication of the position advanced by City staff and some councilors is, don't worry your pretty little heads about it.

Please do worry. This is not just a formality. Far from it. Please do whatever you can to prevent the City from endorsing the revised RCLC JPA. It's very important!

If you have written or called already please do so again.

Contact the Santa Fe councilors even if you do not live in Santa Fe, because no matter where you live in New Mexico, you have a stake in the future of northern New Mexico. The stated purpose of the RCLC is to "act on behalf" of its member governments as regards ALL regional planning and development in the LANL region (see below). While the RCLC is highly dysfunctional in all its stated goals, it is highly functional in its unstated goal of preventing any government action which is not centered around and supportive of LANL and Los Alamos County (LAC). It's in the name: our communities are by law "LANL communities" if they endorse the JPA.

Without Santa Fe participation, the JPA as written (text, pp. 796-802, which explicitly includes the City of Santa Fe as a contracting party) cannot be approved by the New Mexico Department of Finance and Administration (DFA). Without DFA approval the new JPA (which by May 2020 had been endorsed by all the other RCLC members with the possible exception of Jemez Pueblo) does not enter into force. What then would be the legal status of the RCLC? What is its status now?

The Study Group has consistently opposed the existence, not just the mission, of the RCLC since its inception (see for example "DUKE ON THE HILL, Local governments shell out for LANL coalition," Santa Fe Reporter, Dec 8, 2010). It was transparently corrupt from the day it was set up. The ensuing 11 years have more than proven this out. By 2018, the shady purposes of the RCLC had manifested in overtly corrupt practices. A chorus of voices came to agree with us:

• Pull the plug on regional coalition — it’s time, Santa Fe New Mexican Editorial, Sep 8, 2018
• LANL Coalition Remains Huge Taxpayer Waste, Rio Grande Sun Editorial, Aug 23, 2018
• LANL Coalition is what’s toxic in our governments, Albuquerque Journal Editorial Board, Aug 18, 2018
• Time to Pull the Plug on the Regional Coalition, Albuquerque Journal North Editorial Board, Aug 10, 2018
• Drinking on the public dime, Santa Fe New Mexican Editorial, Feb 26, 2018

At this point, I hope that nobody is trying to "reform" the RCLC or look for some "win-win" solution. The RCLC is all about handing over local sovereignty and pretending that local governments have some "seat" at some make-believe "table" paid for and administered by the contractors and minions of the national security state. There's no "win-win" solution. It's a pretend tea party the federal parents have set up for the kids in the yard so they can be supervised.

Those who say that the City of Santa Fe has not gotten any bang for the $100,000 or so the City has invested in the RCLC are incorrect, even though none of the so-called recent "accomplishments" attributed to the RCLC are actually true (for a list, see pp. 44-52). The actual purpose of the RCLC is to suborn local governments. All the rest is for show. The City has been paying to join the LANL cult, but the exit door is open. 

While the City says to us and others that tomorrow's vote on the JPA will not affect the City's participation in the RCLC, the City's own documents say otherwise. On February 25 of this year, City staff wrote "The purpose of this [JPA] is to renew the City of Santa Fe's participation in the [RCLC]" (see p. 803 in the agenda packet for tomorrow's Governing Body meeting).

Part of what is at stake here is apparently the appropriateness and perhaps legality of a $20,000 payment from the City of Santa Fe to the RCLC by City Manager Jarel LaPan Hill on October 5, 2020. This payment was made for 2020 and 2021 RCLC membership dues even though:

1. the City had not joined the revised JPA;
   
2. the question of whether to do so was actively being examined by City Council committees (beginning with the Quality of Life Committee on July 1, 2020, which had sent the issue to the Finance Committee without an endorsement);
3. the RCLC had no executive director at the time and thus no way of providing its dubious "services" to Santa Fe;
4. the future of the RCLC was (and still is) very much in doubt.
   

In fact on February 25 of this year the City called its pending "agreement" with the RCLC "contractor" an "after the fact procurement...Services rendered [meaning, dues paid] prior to agreement" (p. 803).
Even now, none of the three City Council committee meetings on this subject have resulted in a recommendation for the Governing Body to endorse the JPA. It is something of a political football, as the background provided in the agenda packet shows (pp. 788-803).

So we believe the City Manager acted inappropriately, as we wrote to the City Council yesterday ("Letter to Santa Fe City Council re: Regional Coalition of LANL Communities (RCLC), Mar 29, 2021).

Covering up this inappropriate expenditure may be one reason why the City wants to characterize tomorrow's vote so narrowly. Another is to keep the RCLC alive with Santa Fe in it, as long as possible. They want to avoid citizen outrage.

These questions aside, it is clear that by making this payment during the pendency of City Council approval of this controversial issue, the City thumbed its nose at its citizens.

That's what the RCLC is all about -- thumbing its nose at democratic due process. There is absolutely nothing democratic or fair or transparent about it.

There is more, unfortunately.

The JPA legally entitles the RCLC to act "on behalf of" member governments and tribes "with respect to the subject matters of this Agreement" -- which are a) extremely broad and b) under the control of the LANL contractor, the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA), and the Department of Energy (DOE). The RCLC has zero real input, actually. Meanwhile Los Alamos County (LAC) -- which is more or less entirely dependent on these federal agencies and LANL -- also provides more money to the RCLC than all the other governments and tribes put together. With that money comes control. What all the controlling parties have in common is a desire to keep local governments supportive of LANL and compliant with its needs.

What are the powers the City would be granting to the RCLC in this JPA? These:

2. Authority of the Regional Coalition. The Regional Coalition shall have the authority to exercise the following powers common to the Parties in accordance with New Mexico state law with respect to LANL and LANL-related activities and issues:

A. Promotion of economic development, including:

(i) promotion of new missions for LANL that the citizens of the Coalition Members support;

(ii) advocacy of long-term stable funding of LANL missions;

(iii) promotion of new and diverse scientific endeavors at LANL, focusing on employment and educational opportunities within the Coalition Members' jurisdiction;

(iv) support of business incubation and business development on nonfederal lands;

(v) support of workforce training and development; and

(vi) promotion of awareness of LANL and its contributions toward and impact on the region.

B. Promotion and coordination of environmental protection and stewardship, including:

(i) clean-up activities and site maintenance to ensure consistency with community values and future use goals;

(ii) planning activities to address future use goals, stewardship needs and obligations, and prevention of future contamination;

(iii) evaluation of cleanup planning, implementation and oversight for protection of workers and neighboring communities.

C. Participation in regional planning, including:

(i) evaluation of policy initiatives and legislation for impacts on Coalition Members;

(ii) development of long-term relationships between local, state and federal officials and LANL officials;

(iii) coordination of regional planning with LANL strategic initiatives and other advocacy organizations and initiatives.

D. Evaluation of policy initiatives and legislation for impact on the Regional Coalition, including:

(i) Participation in public comment and outreach initiatives to influence decision-making concerning LANL activities;

(ii) Advocacy in state and federal legislative process and administrative proceedings.

This list of authorities and goals should chill you to the bone.

A lot of people apparently harbor the fantasy that LANL does "science," that it can be "converted" to "peaceful" research, or "cleanup," or other malarkey.  Please disabuse yourselves of those fantasies. LANL is a bomb lab and would-be production site. That is what all this is about. See this letter sent yesterday to the City Council and this press release for some recent data on what LANL actually does.

The above purposes directly conflict with numerous resolutions the City of Santa Fe (and other local governments) have passed, which in various ways and to various degrees stigmatize and oppose nuclear weapons and plutonium warhead core ("pit") production. The JPA is aimed at negating independent (i.e. non-LANL) values and political expressions.

Finally, as we read in today's Santa Fe New Mexican, LANL's vision of an "innovation triangle" encompassing Santa Fe (LANL video) is also being advanced by well-heeled capitalists like John Rizzo. Their capital is impatient.

Where governments no longer serve the people, and good people do too little, carpetbaggers like Rizzo and his Wall Street backers will move in and take over. Colonial decline is cumulative and synergistic, just like green social policies could be IF we put our hearts and souls into them.

Stay tuned for more. We are just ramping up. But for right now, get rid of the RCLC by preventing Santa Fe from endorsing this JPA.

Greg Mello, for the Study Group