Dooda Desert Rock: US EPA fails the Navajo people

DOODA DESERT ROCK COMMITTEE
Elouise Brown, President
P.O. Box 7838
Newcomb, Navajo Nation
(New Mexico) 87455

(505) 947-6159

August 16, 2008

Stephen Johnson, Administrator
Environmental Protection Agency
Ariel Rios Building
1200 Pennsylvania Avenue, N.W.
Washington, DC 20460

Dear Mr. Johnson:

You have failed your duty to protect the environment therefore I am telling you that you are not welcome and you should resign. Approving the air quality permit for the proposal of desert rock energy project was a total disrespect and deadly wrongful to the environment. While perhaps I would feel better to vent in a letter to you, I will save the venting for August 22nd. I write to tell you precisely why you will not be welcome and why you should resign — if for no other reason than to acknowledge the injustice being done to grassroots Navajos.

There are many reasons to oppose the proposed Desert Rock coal-fired, mine-mouth power plant. The obvious health reasons are that there are already two of the dirtiest power plants in the United States near the Four Corners, and there are other polluting plants in our area. Ozone emissions from the existing plants are already at the highest permissible level. Added to the mix is dust from uranium sites that United States failed to monitor. The U.S. is still in the process of cleaning up that hazardous waste.

We object because your agency is not following its own policy on environmental justice in compliance with Executive Order 12898 and the guidelines of the Council on Environmental Policy. More particularly, there are two specific issues I will raise in this letter: The first is the violation of the principle that EPA should consider relevant public health and industry data on the potential for multiple or cumulative health risks. The second is the obviousness that the plant will not benefit the people who live in the area.

Frankly, it is a no-brainer that public health data should have been gotten by the author of the draft environmental impact statement — the URS corporation of San Francisco. The data is available at the Indian Health Service in Shiprock, NM, but URS was all too-industry friendly.

URS also ignored the principle of Executive Order 12989 that impacts on poor people and minorities in the area must be examined. The environmental justice discussion in the EIS was poor and it did not measure the true economic and cultural impacts. I live in the area myself, and my neighbors are the targets of environmental injustice.

The Interior Department notice for comments on EIS and the recent EPA press release (in the style of a member of the Bracewell & Giuliani law firm) both tout the economic benefit of the plant. Let’s separate issues — employment and economic benefit to the locality.

It may be true that there will be construction and operations employment. However, no one is acting like that is the fact. That is, there is nothing being done to improve local infrastructure (housing, roads and highways, shopping, etc.) to accommodate large numbers of workers. Why is that?

It is that — like other Navajo Nation economic ventures — the workers will live off reservation because they will have no choice. They will spend their paychecks off reservation too. While some workers will share some of their pay with family, many won’t. There is no direct benefit from jobs to the area as a whole.

On the economic issue, there will be no trickle-down from Window Rock. There are no-profit or tax-sharing agreements in place with the local governments (called chapters) and there are no arrangements to pay for impacts on local infrastructure. The money will be used to feed a centralized bureaucracy, the Interior, the EPA and to the central government of the Navajo Nation is — Navajos call it dola bichaan (the s h _ t it belongs to the bull — B S).

Your people were or should have been aware of these issues. I raised them in a January 24, 2008 letter to the NEPA coordinator in the Navajo Regional Office of the Bureau of Indian Affairs, and our lawyer raised them again in our June 21, 2008 comments on the consent decree with the developers.

We are again being subjected to environmental injustice and discrimination, and we intend to raise the matter with the United Nations Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination because the U.S. is again in violation of its international treaty obligations.

Sincerely,
Elouise Brown