It’s been past time to stick a fork in Regional Coalition of LANL Communities

By Journal North Editorial Board
Sunday, May 23rd, 2021 at 12:02am

For a couple of years now, it’s been time to put a fork in the Regional Coalition of LANL Communities.

But, it is definitely done, slowly cooked to mush in its own juices after a scandal brought some attention to the once-obscure group.

The coalition was always small potatoes. It had an annual budget of about $200,000, half of it provided by the U.S. Department of Energy and the rest by several local governments from the region around Los Alamos. Santa Fe and Santa Fe County have invested $10,000 a year (the County Commission voted to pull out recently and the City Council has a vote on the issue scheduled).

The coalition’s stated purpose was to lobby for money from Congress for the cleanup of Los Alamos National Laboratory’s “legacy” hazardous waste left over after decades of nuclear bomb work and other operations, with the added benefit of creating local jobs through the cleanup work.

Critics, including the Journal North editorial page, wondered what the coalition was doing that couldn’t be done better by New Mexico’s elected members of Congress, who are on the ground in the nation’s capital year round. In any case, federal funding for LANL cleanup has remained stuck at roughly $200 million annually, no matter who does the asking.

Then, we learned in recent years that the coalition’s federal money couldn’t legally be used for lobbying, which pretty much pulled the rug out from under the entity’s reason to be. The coalition had never been a LANL watchdog, as a handful of independent, non-profit anti-nuclear groups in northern New Mexico are. In its early years, the Regional Coalition often seemed to be a cheerleader for the lab – and the billions of dollars LANL brings to the state – as much as anything else.

Everything went south in the coalition’s seventh year of existence, 2018, when a citizen’s group turned up misspending by the coalition and its director, Andrea Romero, now a state representative.

An audit by coalition member Los Alamos County found that Romero owed the coalition more than $2,000 in travel and dining expenses that did not comply with the coalition’s policies, including payments for alcohol at a Washington, D.C., dinner the coalition hosted and tickets for a major league baseball game pitched as an opportunity to schmooze with federal officials.

Romero reimbursed many of the expenses. A subsequent state audit found $50,000 in coalition spending had been “improper” for various reasons.

The controversy has a political angle. There was crossover between the citizens group that exposed the misspending and supporters of former state Rep. Carl Trujillo, against whom Romero was running for northern Santa Fe County’s District 46 seat. But the facts of the financial mess were not “fake news.”

Since then, there have been numerous follow-up headlines on whether the coalition can recoup its federal funding and its efforts to keep an executive director, and stay alive somehow. Romero has been dogged by mentions of the financial controversy. What, if anything, the coalition has accomplished since those receipts for WhistlePig whiskey and National tickets in D.C. surfaced in 2018 is hard to discern.

(There is, by the way, a serious government board – the Northern New Mexico Citizens Advisory Board – that reviews lab operations. It is also low-profile and needs to improve its outreach to invite more public participation.)

Late last week, the Regional Coalition’s board was scheduled to finally take up a resolution to disband.

This entire disturbance was over a group that only a small number of local government types, LANL-connected insiders or nerdy newspaper reporters had ever heard of before the financial scandal broke. Good people, including local elected officials, served on the coalition board, but its budget was always tiny and went mostly toward paying its director.

The coalition, created by the feds as a sop to local involvement in LANL matters, could be – should be – gone soon so we can stop worrying about it. No one should miss it.