Perched above the Rio Grande, the high parts of Sunland Park, New Mexico, capture vistas that rival any seen from El Paso's West Side. Standing behind the Desert View Elementary School, Norma Renteria surveyed two mesas rising from the borderlands, one of them marking the 480-acre site of the regional Camino Real Landfill. "This one that God gave us, that's beauty," said the 40-year Sunland Park resident, suddenly glancing up the hill to her right, "not that one."
Describing how her two children spent their formative years at Desert View playing amid bottles and sand blown from the landfill, Renteria said she arrived prepared when picking up the kids on gusty days. "I would either get their jackets, get a blanket or bring a towel to cover their faces," the Sunland Park mother recalled.
With an additional 50 or 60 years planned for the landfill’s life, Renteria speculated that future Sunland Park residents would live in a radically changed landscape. “They’re going to see the landfill instead of the beauty God gave us,” she lamented.
Sunland Park residents like Renteria demand that Camino Real shut down and move elsewhere. The grassroots opposition is supported by Mayor Ruben Segura and the Sunland Park City Council, as well as regional activist groups including Las Cruces' Colonias Development Council and the Albuquerque-based Southwest Network for Environmental and Economic Justice. Now, Camino Real's opponents stand a chance of making the landfill history.
Charged with regulating Camino Real, the New Mexico Environment (NMED) is considering whether or not to grant the landfill a 10-year permit renewal. On Dec. 5, the NMED kicked off a long-delayed public hearing in Sunland Park to gather testimony designed to help it make what will in all certainty be a controversial decision. The sessions are conducted by retired New Mexico Court of Appeals Judge Rudy S. Apodaca, who is serving as hearing officer.
Politically, the Camino Real controversy is a key test of New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson's 2005 executive order that upheld environmental justice considerations when making decisions on landfills and other projects carrying ecological impacts.
So far, the lengthy sessions have raised profound questions far beyond the simple operation of a local dump. Weaved into a local controversy are matters of cross-border economic development policy, environmental justice for low-income communities of color, community identity, rampant consumerism, lax recycling habits, and even 21st Century linguistics. Attendees, for example, learned that crushed auto remains are known by industry insiders as "auto fluff." Camino Real spokesperson Suzanne Michaels termed the hearing a course in "Landfill 101."
For starters, Camino Real currently handles very little garbage from Sunland Park. Most of its trash, transported through the community in hundreds of trucks daily, comes from El Paso or the American-owned maquiladoras in Ciudad Juarez. Owned by the California-based Waste Connections, Inc., a large company which operates more than 100 landfills and other waste-processing facilities nationwide, Camino Real is only permitted to accept solid waste, sewage sludge and “special” wastes. The landfill is not supposed to host hazardous waste.
Camino Real is proud of its environmental record. Employing liners to prevent groundwater contamination, the landfill won the Solid Waste Association of North America’s best landfill in North America award in 1997. Five years later, Camino Real laid claim to the New Mexico state government’s Green Zia environmental award. Currently, the company is exploring the transformation of landfill-produced methane gas, a greenhouse gas, into electricity.
“I’ll tell you that we exceed every law that exists for handling trash,” boasted Michaels in an interview at the hearing. “This is an incredible landfill, and it saddens me that this community has chosen to make this the focus of such attention.”
Occasionally, prohibited garbage has been documented entering the landfill. Confirming that medical waste and asbestos had been illegally dumped at Camino Real in 2004, the NMED negotiated an $11,500 settlement with Waste Connections. At one of the Sunland Park hearing sessions, Camino Real consultant Dr. Mark Turnbough testified that El Paso's Phelps Dodge copper refinery "inappropriately placed" about 5 cubic yards of gas filters and lab materials in garbage that was shipped to Camino Real each year between 2002 and 2004.
Dr. Turnbough acknowledged that the contaminants, which included benzene, selenium and lead were never recovered, but he discounted concerns that the small loads presented environmental or public health hazards. "It was a fraction of a fraction of the total percentage of the waste stream," he said. "It would be like looking for a needle in the haystack in the dark."
In a statement last year, while it was still probing the Phelps Dodge affair, the NMED quoted then-Camino Real District Manager Joe King as saying that the landfill would not accept more shipments from Phelps Dodge.
At the hearing, questions also arose over Asarco's shipments to the landfill, especially during 1986-91, but Dr. Turnbough, insisted that the landfill only accepted ordinary office trash from the El Paso smelter.
Camino Real’s expert witnesses presented studies that showed no adverse impacts on groundwater supplies, traffic flows, noise levels, or property values. To counter dust, Camino Real is permitted to spray upwards of 96,000 gallons of water a day.
Dr. Turnbough, who earlier worked for the former operator of the landfill, Joab, Inc., contended that some new residential properties near the landfill have a greater value than older homes in the same area. Comparing Sunland Park, a federally-designated colonia, with colonias in Texas’ Lower Rio Grande Valley, Dr. Turnbough said the New Mexico border town is “outperforming communities that started in similar circumstances.”
In public comments, several residents painted a far different portrait of the landfill, complaining of early morning jolts from bed caused by landfill trucks, horrible odors fouling the air (especially during the hot months), ubiquitous dust, rampaging cockroaches, and possibly worse.
In an emotional presentation, school worker Natalia Gutierrez blamed her skin cancer on environmental conditions connected to the landfill’s presence. Gutierrez said the refusal of her insurance company to pay for her medical treatment led her to seek surgery in Chihuahua, Mexico.
“The majority of my neighbors are sick, all of them from the landfill contamination,” Gutierrez declared. I don’t think it’s fair that all the trash of
El Paso, Texas, is brought to us in this little community.” The 7-year Sunland Park resident also took issue with Dr. Turnbough’s assessment of her city as an economically upward-moving entity.
“There is no future. Nobody can sell their homes. There is no work in this community,” Gutierrez said.
Whether Waste Connections likes it or not, its role in Sunland Park is inextricably connected to the long, contentious history of the landfill, which began in the 1970s as an illegal dump on the mesa and evolved into a hotly-debated operation that once included a medical waste incinerator run by Joab, Inc., a facility residents blamed for numerous health ailments in the community.
Burgeoning in the late 1980s, mass opposition to the incinerator and landfill garnered the support of NMED Secretary Judith Espinoza. Indeed, the Sunland Park struggle became a textbook example of the budding environmental justice movement that emerged in low-income communities of color across the borderlands and nation at the time. JOAB finally shut down the incinerator in 1992, but the landfill remained open and was subsequently granted two permits by the NMED. Waste Connections took over ownership of the landfill from Joab in the late 1990s.
The medical waste incinerator/landfill conflict sparked a revolution in local politics, vaulting young activists like Ruben Segura into elected office.
Nowadays, Mayor Segura is working to transform his town of an estimated 17,000 people from a border colonia into a dynamic, even upscale city geared towards tourism, riverside recreation and trade with neighboring Ciudad Juarez. In this scenario, the Camino Real facility has no place in New Sunland Park.
For Mayor Segura, Camino Real symbolizes a huge piece of the environmental morass his community needs to desperately escape. Sunland Park, he recognized, has endured the emissions of Asarco, the fumes of El Paso Electric's generating station, the dust of a nearby Cemex plant and the landfill.
“We’re letting the New Mexico Environment Department, we’re letting our governor realize that this is a social justice issue,” Segura said in an interview during a break in the proceedings. “We’re cognizant of the fact that we’re humans that produce solid waste, but the reality is that there is a right location to have a regional landfill like this one,” he said. “It’s too much of an imposition to a community like this.” If NMED does not pull the permit plug on Camino Real, then Santa Fe should at least downgrade the landfill from a regional to a municipal one, Segura added.
Voicing frustration, Michaels said she was concerned that citizens attending the hearing were walking away with misinformation, citing, for example, a woman whose testimony bore the impression that Camino Real produced sewage sludge instead of just disposing of it. Michaels stressed that the growing Paso del Norte region, which will see another population boom with the addition of thousands of new soldiers and their families to Fort Bliss, is in dire need of an economically-feasible, regional landfill. With about one million people living in the corridor between Las Cruces and El Paso’s Lower Valley, not including Ciudad Juarez, the region produces approximately 5 million pounds of garbage every day, Michaels estimated.
“Here, you’re having a community that’s trying to empower itself and the way they’re trying to do that is by vilifying Camino Real Landfill,” Michaels contended. “If this landfill was not complying with the law, if this landfill was some horrible mess, then I can see that these residents would have a reasonable reason to complain about it.”
Landfill opponents worry the process is stacked against them. Veronica Carmona, an organizer for the Colonias Development Council, contended that a “community that has no resources” is at a disadvantage in legal wrestling with Camino Real's line-up of high-powered New Mexico and El Paso lawyers. Anti-landfill activists are also miffed at NMED's decision to hold the public hearing in the busy days leading up to Virgin of Guadalupe Day and the Christmas holiday season.
Michaels doesn’t foresee a quick resolution to the permit battle. Moving the landfill to a new site, she maintained, would cost the company in the neighborhood of $500 million. Camino Real’s spokesperson said the company would likely appeal any permit denial. “We believe that if we are given a permit this go-round, that probably the city will appeal it….either way, this is going to be an ongoing issue for some time,” Michaels predicted.
After the public hearing concludes, possibly by next week, Sunland Park’s bulging hot potato will land squarely on the lap of New Mexico Environment Secretary Ron Curry, who will make the permit decision. The Richardson administration cabinet official has until April 13, 2008 to decide the fates of both Sunland Park and the Camino Real Landfill.
