The Idiocy of NM Environmental Department (NMED)

To be honest, I have never held “Enemy-D” above low regard. My attitude extends from when I owned a small home building company and our local builders’ association invited NMED’s senior inspector at the time to explain what they expected to be included in EPA’s newly enforced “Storm Water Pollution Prevention Plan. All he said in the meeting was “If you don’t do it right, We (NMED) will violate you.”

Where I grew up, being violated was a lot different from paying a financial penalty.

Fast forward to our present opposition to NMED’s rubber stamp approval of the Air Quality Permit (AQP) application by Roper Construction to construct a Concrete Batch Plant (CBP) near the intersection of NM48 and NM220, a primarily residential area, which suffers from the same MAJOR problem as the rest of the state:
Our water supply is perilously limited (click).

Yet, the entire focus of NMED to issue their permit, which is the ONLY prerequisite to a Construction Permit, completely ignores the impact on clean ground water, both depletion and contamination.

The ABQ Journal article linked above discloses that it is laziness (not their word) which leads to this astonishingly absurd behavior because comprehensive records of water reserves and their use have never been kept and it is apparently too much like work to start now.

What can we do about it?

Our State Representative is Greg Nibert. He has an advisory role on the Interim WATER & NATURAL RESOURCES COMMITTEE
and I have approached him about this matter, a step I recommend to anyone who is interested in preserving the environment of our neighborhood. You know how it works: One voice can be easily ignored…

— Doug Thompson, Alto resident