Mayor Mike Williams said Tuesday the city has not received any written communication since Deputy Secretary Jon Goldstein addressed the city council on Dec. 12. At that time Goldstein suggested a Dec. 31 deadline for action, which several councilors and Williams took as an ultimatum.
“It sure sounded that way, didn’t it?” Williams said Tuesday.
Goldstein said Tuesday the Dec. 31 date was the department’s way of “trying to get the ball moving,” a suggested start of a timeline to resolve the issue of polluted water, which has resulted in the death of several animals and bad publicity for the struggling club.
“We’ve been working on this issue for 18 months,” Goldstein said. “We’re just trying to get something done that gets these ponds clean up and gets the work progressing,” Goldstein said.
Williams said the city believes that contributing financially, or with in-kind services, would be a violation of the state’s anti-donation law that prohibits a public entity from favoring a private business. But Goldstein said that NMED lawyers have a different view.
“If you have liability and responsibility for something, it’s not really an anti-donation clause (issue) to fix it. That’s the opinion we’ve gotten from our attorneys,” Goldstein said.
But just who is responsible may be an issue that has to be settled in court. While the city does pump affluent (recycled waste) water into the country club, neither side has come out and publicly said if that is specifically causing the contamination of the pond water at Chamisa Hills. So whether the city is responsible just for the quality of the affluent, or if it responsible for how it mixes with existing water, might have to be decided in a lawsuit.
Goldstein said the NMED wants to avoid that scenario.
“We remain hopeful that we’ll be able to sit down with the city and the country club and work out some sort of cooperative solution to this,” he said.
The issue resurfaced this summer when the NMED issued a separate permit to the owners of Chamisa Hills, who appealed the ruling and got a stay in court preventing it from being executed.
“At that point the mayor of Rio Rancho asked us to come down to a meeting with himself and country club, at which time he said the city might want to get involved with this and bring the country club back under he city permit,” Goldstein said. “That was back in September. Our reaction at the time was, ‘Great. All we want to do is get something done and if that’s the way to do that, if the city is willing to do that, let’s do that.’
“That was Sept. 19. Every since then we’ve been waiting for the city to do that that. But nothing has happened.”
Goldstein and several Chamisa Hills residents addressed the city council on Dec. 12 during the public forum section at the start of the meeting. Speakers are usually limited o three minutes, but that time frame was cut to two for the meeting in anticipation of a large number of speakers on other controversial issues, such as the residential parking (trucking) ordinance.
“I was down there to say ‘Here’s how we understood things and we sure would love something to happen on it,’ ” Goldstein said.
Normally, the public speaks uninterrupted for their limited time. But in an unusual move, several councilors jumped in during Goldstein’s remarks and attempted to ask questions until Williams, as presiding officer, ruled the questions out of order.
“I’m never surprised by people’s reactions, especially on this issue. This issue seems to have really raised people’s temperatures a bit,” Goldstein said. “I’m not sure why that is, but it’s been a tough one since Day One.”
MORE TO COME ON THIS STORY.