Reply #29: There was NO Deal [View All]

Until 1998.

Not even opossible to start the program until all of the parties involved agreed and the fedeal governoment approved. That was in 1998.

Dean started the process, continued it, stuck to it and was the ONLY constant participant in the process. The compact was signed, but not official until between the two states until 1996, after Bush was in Office.

Notice the date on this one as well:

Letter To Congress

Sierra Blanca Compact

July 28, 1998

Dear Representative:

On behalf of the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC), I urge you to vote No on the Conference Committee Report forThe Texas Maine Vermont Radioactive Waste Compact. LULAC is the oldest and largest Hispanic civil rights organization in the nation. Since 1929, we have been providing a voice to our community throughout the U.S. and Puerto Rico. A major concern of ours is the proposed site of a nuclear waste dump near Sierra Blanca in Texas.

As you know,The Compact proposes the construction of shallow, unlined soil trenches for the burial of "low-level" radioactive waste. LULAC strongly opposes this Compact. Serious issues of environmental justice and blatant discrimination arise when one considers this bill. One should not only vote against this proposal because of serious environmental and health matters, but also because of the racial discrimination practiced against the predominantly Mexican-American population of the area.

Just this month, two Texas administrative law judges recommended the Sierra Blanca compact dump license be denied because of severe geological problems and unanswered questions about environmental racism. If Congress ignores these problems and approves the compact, thus funding the dump, tremendous pressure will be placed on the political appointees at the Texas Natural Resource Conservation Commission to approve the license despite the judges' recommendation to deny it.

The selection of a poor Mexican-American community (which is already the site of one of the largest sewage sludge projects in the country) brings to mind serious considerations of environmental justice. Although the bill does not expressly designate Hudspeth County as the location for the site, the Faskin Ranch near Sierra Blanca has clearly been earmarked and a draft license has been approved. The decision Congress now faces on this matter cannot be made in a vacuum, ignoring serious environmental justice questions that have been raised about the site selection process. These unjust procedures are in apparent contradiction of the 1994 Executive Order that firmly upheld environmental justice.

http://www.lulac.org/Issues/letters/SBlanca.html


The Texas-Maine-Vermont compact was defeated (the first compact ever defeated) in September 1995 by the U.S. House of Representatives. Half of the Texas delegation led the rest of the U.S. Congress in voting down the bill, stating their opposition to siting the dump in an earthquake zone, near an international border and recognizing that the bill would, in fact, open Texas to nuclear waste from all over the nation.
More than 700 people from Sierra Blanca and Hudspeth County have signed a petition against the proposed dump.


http://www.marfalights.com/sbdump.html

Notice the date aagin for the original defeat of the compact:

SEPTEMBER 1995, after Anne Richards was OUT OF OFFICE.

Notice again, that this compact was NOT passed or finalized until after Bush was governor, and brought before the U.S. congress:

U.S. Senate Approves Nuclear Waste Compact
Action Shifts to Clinton Administration and to Texas State Officials
The U.S. Senate approved the conference committee report on HR 629 this week by a 78 to 15 vote, giving final congressional approval to the interstate compact among Texas, Maine, and Vermont that makes Texas the dumping ground for low-level radioactive waste generated in all three states. The action by the Senate makes it more likely that the radioactive waste dump proposed for Sierra Blanca in Hudspeth County in West Texas will be built. If the compact bill is signed into law, then Maine and Vermont will pay a total of $25 million within 60 days to the Texas Low-Level Radioactive Waste Disposal Authority to finance construction.


http://texas.sierraclub.org/newsletters/SCR/Sept3-98/SierraBlanca.html

Notice again, the site had been selected in 1992, before Dean signed the conmpact:

THE APPLICATION. The TLLRWDA applied for a low level nuclear waste dump
site near the
town of Sierra Blanca in Hudspeth County in 1992. The application was
voluminous and was
revised numerous times between 1992 and 1996. The site is to be 18 miles
north of the Rio
Grande.3 The minimum design capacity is 1,200,000 cubic ft. The facility
can accommodate up to
60,000 cubic ft. per year, and its operating life is to be 30 years.4 After
closure of the site, there will
be a 5 year observational phase followed by some monitoring for 100 years
or longer.5=20

The cost of the project is enormous. Since the filing of the application in
1992, the state has spent
$18.6 million on the Sierra Blanca site project.

http://lists.isb.sdnpk.org/pipermail/eco-list-old/1998-September/001274.html

Notice:

Texans Make Plea: Don't Send Waste

By TRACY SCHMALER
Rutland Herald, August 20, 1998


BRATTLEBORO _ Vermonters and Texans made an impassioned plea to state officials Wednesday to take responsibility for the radioactive waste generated by the Vermont Yankee Nuclear Power Corp.

Residents from both states called on the Vermont State Nuclear Advisory Panel to reject a three-state compact which would allow Vermont and Maine to ship its low-level nuclear waste to a site in western Texas.

“Not only do we not make it, not only do we not use it, we were not given the opportunity to say no," said Susan Carry of Alpine, Texas. Curry lives 100 miles downstream on the Rio Grande from Sierra Blanca, a small community in Texas chosen as the disposal site for Vermont Yankee's low-level waste.

http://www.angelfire.com/vt/vermontwalk/texans.html

Notice again, the site locatin was selected before the compact was SIGNED:

ere's a quick recap of that process. After eight years of being run out, legislated out, and litigated out of site after site, the Texas Low-Level Radioactive Waste Disposal Authority (TLLRWDA) found itself in 1991 many millions of dollars down and still at square one. To its rescue that spring rode the Texas Legislature with HR 2665, which decreed that "notwithstanding any other law," the site must be located within Hudspeth County and in an area "circumscribed on the north by 31 degrees north latitude, 15' and 00"; on the south by 31 degrees north latitude, 00' and 00"; on the east by 105 degrees longitude, 00' and 00"; and on the west by 105 degrees longitude, 22' and 30"." This law, which drew a 370 square mile "box" around the town of Sierra Blanca, on the eastern side of the county, was the response of nuclear utility district legislators to the January decision in a state court throwing the Authority out of its previous site, on the western side of Hudspeth county, on the grounds that it had violated its own siting criteria by disregarding or misrepresenting geology and hydrology, among other things. The state officials cut a back room deal with El Paso County, the plaintiff — move the site farther east, and we won't sue again.

By 1992 the Authority had selected the Faskin Ranch within the "box" and was taking steps to acquire it. Gayle Schroder, whose company owned the land, later told the San Antonio Express-News that the move surprised him, since at that time no state scientists had asked permission to set foot on the ranch, nor had they tested the land for fissures or faults, nor had they drilled test wells to check the groundwater. But they bought the 16,000 acre ranch (for a 440 acre dump — room for growth) anyway, and, a month after they announced their intent, another dumper, MERCO Joint Venture, appeared from nowhere to buy another Sierra Blanca ranch in order to meet their July deadline for providing a site for "beneficial use" land application of New York City's urban industrial sewage sludge. NYC was under a court order to cease poisoning the ocean with the stuff, and New York law forbade such "beneficial use" application of the heavy metal-laden toxic on that state's agricultural land, so it had hired haulers like MERCO to find places where protections were nonexistent or more pliant. The result: the largest sewage dump in the world, on 150 square miles of high Chihuahua desert, with a second such ranch currently filing for a similar registration. More polluters fouling the air and water make it tougher to determine specific blame, so dumps beget dumps.

http://www.social-ecology.org/learn/library/tokar/nuclear_2.html


Notice agan, it was MAINE AND VERMONT, who were going to BUILD the site:

In 1994, the states of Texas, Maine, and Vermont entered a compact allowing the disposal of low-level nuclear waste at a proposed Texas site. This creates the tenth such compact in the United States since 1980, when a Federal law was passed requiring states take responsibility for their low-level nuclear waste, urging cooperation. This compact demands both Maine and Vermont to pay Texas $25 million to build a disposal facility. Prior to becoming law, the compact first needed to gain Congressional approval. Following its approval on September 20, 1998, the compact then required the state of Texas to license the project before moving forward. October 22, 1998, Texas officials voted to deny the compact's proposed site located just outside of Sierra Blanca.


Sierra Blanca, a small West Texas town over two-thirds Hispanic, already hosts Merco Joint Venture. This company is the town's largest employer shipping over 400,000 tons of New York City sludge daily to a nearby ranch. Furthermore, Sierra Blanca is located only sixteen miles from the Mexico border, on top of an aquifer, and in an active Earthquake area. Residents, environmentalists, and community groups have made numerous cries of "environmental racism", even filing a suit under Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. The groups have faced an uphill battle defending the town from becoming a nuclear disposal site. However, while the fight was won in Sierra Blanca, the compact is law and these states will seek an alternative site.


http://www.umich.edu/~snre492/blanca.html

Dean was involved from the beginning, he was aware of the details he dealt with the governor of Texas involved with the furtherance of the project, he approved of all aspects of it, was aware of its placement before the compact was signed.

The act does not have to have ONE indication of where the waste was going to be placed. Acts of this nature rarely specify location. Thse are administrative details and never part of such acts.

All the above indicate that Dean entered into this compact with full knowledge of the location of the site.

He supported the compact after it had been defeated in Texas in 1995.