Follow us |
|
| Follow us |
|
| "Remember Your Humanity" blog |
|
Permalink for this letter (tomorrow). Please forward! Other Letters
This letter: No LANL in Santa Fe -- update December 12, 2019 Dear friends – There are several important topics to cover but one is enough for tonight. The 12/8/19 presentation by Mr. Affeldt on his team's plan for the Midtown Campus in Santa Fe (discussed in Bulletin 264 and our letters of 11/29/19 and 12/07/19) was attended by perhaps 150 people, including many of you. Special thanks go to Paul and Roxanne of Retake Our Democracy for their helpful blog post ("LANL Coming to Midtown: The City Different? A Nuclear Weapons Research Center?," Dec 5, 2019) as well as to Robin Collier of KCEI Taos for his substantive interview ("Plans for LANL on Santa Fe campus," 12/4/19). The tireless Robin returned to Santa Fe to record Mr. Affeldt's talk for broadcast (archived here). Kay Matthews of La Jicarita followed up with a good article ("The Fate of the Former Midtown Campus in the Hands of Santa Fe," 12/10/19). Besides newspaper articles (here, here, now also here and here), background information on the Midtown project is available on its web site. Affeldt's "Central Park Santa Fe" presentation was slick, fast-moving, and filled almost all the available time. There was little time for questions. The most important question asked was something like, "How can we be sure this project will not include Los Alamos National Laboratory [LANL]?" (Thank you, someone.) We thought the long and evasive answer boiled down to something like, "Trust me." (You can listen at the link provided above.) In other words: no real answer at all. NNSA and LANL are not ruled out. Affeldt even said it would be "illegal" to rule out LANL -- the logic of which escaped us. We left with many unanswered questions. A lot of the plan was merely illustrative, hypothetical, or aspirational. Some of it made little practical sense. We have profound misgivings as to the vision overall, as well as many of the details. Our vision for that space is very different than Affeldt's. It is a far deeper green, far better integrated into the land and responsive to the converging crises we face, much more in tune with the region -- not just to an imagined future Santa Fe as an urban outpost of the global metropole. That's a discussion for another time and place. On the day after Affeldt's presentation, the New York Times covered an important Brookings study on centers of innovation in the U.S. ("A Few Cities Have Cornered Innovation Jobs. Can That Be Changed?, Eduardo Porter, 12/9/19). Porter's article begins:
So I read the study. It examines the powerful agglomeration economies affecting high tech industries. Its principal thrust is to say it might be possible to add 8-10 additional cities in the U.S. where innovation could center, at an estimated federal cost of $100 billion over 10 years. Threshold criteria for likely success, according to the authors, include a city size of at least 500,000, a notable research university, lots of STEM workers, and so on. The list of possible centers includes Albuquerque (#24 on their list), but as always they overestimate the "high tech" nature of our economy by counting nuclear lab employees who do largely classified work and are not in the private sector. Special nuclear materials and nuclear weapons design skills transfer to the private sector very poorly, we hope! Albuquerque lost more than 20% of its "innovation" workers from 2005-2017 -- not much "innovation" growth here recently! Santa Fe was not worth mentioning in this context. Santa Fe cannot really compete in the "innovation" economy, for many reasons. Affeldt's team is just one applicant for "master developer." There is also John Rizzo's team ("Silicon Valley executive enters midtown campus derby," Teya Vitu, 12/10/19), called "Santa Fe Innovation Village":
Who is John Rizzo? Well, for one thing he has money. Vitu: "Rizzo has spent 30 years in Silicon Valley, now as president and CEO of Deem Inc., a San Francisco corporate travel software company that in January was acquired by Enterprise Holdings, which also owns the Enterprise and Alamo rental car companies and has annual revenue of $24 billion." Further details regarding the Rizzo's "Innovation Village" were included in T. S. Last's 11/24/19 article:
LANL has been pushing the exact same "innovation triangle" slogan as part of its expansion pitch to contractors and local governments, an expansion to be driven largely by the expanded warhead core ("pit") production mission. Significantly, according to reporter T.S. Last, "Santa Fe Innovation Village...is also part of the [Affeldt-led] Central Park Santa Fe proposal" (emphasis added). This may explain Affeldt's evasive answer to the LANL question. As previously noted, the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) is also an applicant for "master developer" of the site. That, we believe, would be a major federal action with significant environmental impacts and therefore would require an environmental impact statement (EIS). The City of Santa Fe, with some other local jurisdictions, has passed several formal resolutions, excerpted here, that may bar support for the nuclear weapons industry, i.e. what NNSA and LANL do and are. They specifically bar support for expanded plutonium pit production, LANL's new mission. What to do? Retake Our Democracy got it right: "...the City should not even consider LANL as a Master Developer and...Santa Fe wants no part of a partnership with the nuclear weapons industry....the Midtown Project must not include any LANL presence whatsoever." The "master developer" decision will be announced in mid-January, which is obviously very soon indeed. Please write or call, publicly or privately, as soon as you can: Mayor Alan Webber: (505) 955-6590.mayor@santafenm.gov Thank you, Greg Mello, for the Study Group |
|||
|
|
|||
|