It appears President Donald Trump’s freeze on some Environmental Protection Agency funding will not impact the Superfund site around Silverton.
“We have received confirmation from the White House that water-quality monitoring and cleanup efforts at the Gold King Mine will not be impacted in anyway,” Liz Payne, spokeswoman for U.S. Rep. Scott Tipton, R-Cortez, wrote in an email Wednesday morning.
On Tuesday, local and state officials voiced concern that the Bonita Peak Mining District Superfund site would stall or potentially lose funding because of Trump’s freeze Monday on all EPA grants and contractor work.
The issue was exacerbated by Trump’s subsequent gag order on the EPA, which barred agency personnel from speaking with reporters on how the freeze might affect ongoing or future projects.
However, Payne wrote that Tipton’s office was “assured that the directive does not have an impact on work/projects/grants that are already finalized and in progress.”
In September, the EPA formalized a hazardous cleanup project known as the Bonita Peak Mining District, comprised of 48 mining sites believed to adversely impact the headwaters of the Animas River around Silverton.
The decision came just a year after the Gold King Mine spill, in which an EPA-contracted crew breached the portal of the mine, sending 3 million gallons of mustard-yellow mine wastewater down the Animas and San Juan rivers.
The mine blowout, which caught national attention and thrust into the spotlight the issue of legacy mines polluting waterways, also effectively reversed Silverton’s more than two-decades-long opposition to a Superfund designation in less than a year’s time.
“I feel so fortunate that we did get the Superfund when we did,” Durango City Councilor Dean Brookie said Tuesday. “If we waited any longer, we’d be caught up in the EPA not being able to fund anything. But we still need to find out how much of the future funding of the Superfund is in jeopardy.”
Trump has continually expressed disdain of the EPA, threatening on numerous occasions to defund the agency to a point where it’s crippled, and at times suggesting getting rid of it.
Recently, Trump picked Oklahoma Attorney General Scott Pruitt, a fierce EPA critic, to lead the agency. Pruitt has been quoted as saying the EPA “was never intended to be our nation’s frontline environmental regulator.”
And while Trump has pledged to cutback, if not eliminate, environmental regulations and turn the narrative of climate change, it’s unclear where the new administration stands on legacy sites that are polluters, such as the case in Silverton.
According to USAspending.gov, the federal government’s database, the EPA had awarded 149 grants and contracts throughout Colorado, totaling about $6.37 million, for 2017. On Jan. 11, the EPA awarded $1.5 million to Environmental Restoration, LLC, the contractor in charge during the Gold King Mine spill and involved in the subsequent cleanup.
When contacted Wednesday, San Juan County Administrator Willy Tookey said officials in Silverton have not been contacted by the agencies involved in the Superfund process regarding the changing of guard on the federal level.
Tookey summed up similar sentiments expressed by some along the Animas and San Juan watersheds, where communities have shifted from the optimism felt this fall that Superfund would finally address the long-standing issue of toxic waste spilling into the waterways.
“We really don’t know what’s going to happen,” he said. “We’ll just have to wait and see.”
The EPA on Wednesday issued a statement that said agency staff has been reviewing grants and contracts with the incoming transition team, with the goal of completing the process by Jan. 27.
The statement also said EPA “fully intends to continue to provide information to the public.”
“A fresh look at public affairs and communications processes is common practice for any new administration, and a short pause in activities allows for this assessment.”
jromeo@durangoherald.com
