Valmont Butte's Hot Water

Boulder City Officials Asked to Halt Valmont Butte Sale Pending Requested Investigations

The Nuclear Nexus Project of the Rocky Mountain Peace and Justice Center issued an October 31st appeal to the Mayor of Boulder, Boulder City Council members and candidates that any plans to sell the Valmont Butte be halted, pending an investigation of apparent improprieties involving city, county, state and EPA officials over the City of Boulder acquisition of the property in 2000 and undisclosed facts about the contamination history of record at the site.

The City of Boulder is currently planning to sell the site to the Trust for Public Lands, which has announced plans for resale to Native American tribes and/or community groups.

In the appeal, Boulder’s elected officials and council hopefuls were advised of facts apparently withheld as decisions regarding the City’s purchase of the site were being made, and unknown to Boulder citizens who have ended up as owners of an extensively contaminated radioactive waste site. City, county and federal health officials have known for decades - as records obtained by a 1998 records review by a student group of Adrienne Anderson’s for a semester research project in her “Environmental Ethics: Race, Class & Pollution Politics” reveals – that operations at Valmont Butte had contaminated water on and off the site with radioactive substances. Despite this, officials from the EPA and Owens administration of the state health department have denied the potential for groundwater to be impacted, without mention of the agencies’ own prior records proving just the opposite.

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In a letter sent to Boulder's Mayor, City Council and candidates for council, RMPJC’s Nuclear Nexus Project notified Boulder city and county officials and hopefuls for public office of undisclosed facts about the extent of radioactive pollution at Valmont, including impacts to water on and offsite, contaminating domestic wells north of the butte property. The site was used for years not only for milling of radioactive ores, but as a dumpsite for radioactive and other toxic wastes from offsite sources, including 150 truckloads of hot soils hauled from a site at 3rd and Pearl Streets in Boulder. That location had been the former site of a radium extraction mill, and is now a low-income housing project.

City and County officials were advised that the City of Boulder may have relied upon misleading and even false representations - by the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment while under the previous administration of Governor Bill Owens, as well as the Region VIII office of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency - about actual site conditions and known offsite contamination, with related potential future environmental liabilities. This was as the land was being acquired in 2000 and further as more recent decisions have been made regarding clean-up at the Valmont Butte. Currently, the City of Boulder plans to sell the bulk of its holdings at the site for ultimate re-sale to Native American tribes and/or community groups .

RMPJC’s Nuclear Nexus Project urged that the Boulder City Council immediately begin an investigation and reassessment of the site’s actual hazards and offsite impacts prior to any further sale of contaminated property at the Valmont Butte. The group recommended official inquiry into the:

adequacy of past/proposed clean-up actions for this site;
apparent failure of the City of Boulder to exercise proper due diligence in the acquisition of the Valmont Butte property in 2000 with taxpayer funds;
adequacy of disclosures of known conditions and potential liabilities by the prior owners and potentially liable parties at this site; and
apparent failure of city/county, state and federal agencies to fully disclose and even misrepresent to Boulder elected officials important facts of record about the site and its on and off-site.

“We have supported efforts by those seeking to prevent further contaminating activities at Valmont Butte, as a site with historical and archaeological significance and also held sacred by Native Americans," said LeRoy Moore, Ph.D., a founder of the RMPJC and consultant to the Nuclear Nexus Project.

"However," Moore continued, "we must also urge that there be a full clean-up of the site paid for by the polluters, and not an inadequate one paid for by city residents based on misrepresentations and outright denials of fact. Radioactive contamination of water on and off the site is evident from public records found by a group of Adrienne Anderson's students nearly a decade ago, but to date, nothing’s being done about it. This problem needs to be addressed for the long-range environmental health of the region."

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LISTEN TO A KGNU INTERVIEW ABOUT THIS ISSUE WHICH AIRED NOVEMBER 1, 2007 ON THEIR "MORNING MAZAZINE" PROGRAM