Fight over ABQ cement plant comes to a head

ALBUQUERQUE — Tonight the city of Albuquerque has scheduled a public information hearing to hear concerns about whether a North Valley cement company should be allowed to expand its hours of operation to 24 hours a day.

Residents of the neighborhood surrounding the American Cement plant complain that cement dust from the plant covers their trees and yards, and clogs their swamp cooler pads, and they have been protesting the permit since it was first submitted over a year ago. But representatives for Grupo Cementos de Chihuahua say they’ve made significant improvements since buying the plant last year, and now they’re trying to be good neighbors.

The facility is a transfer plant, where cement is unloaded from rail cars and loaded into trucks. Inevitably, some of that powdery mixture gets released into the air, and the trucks that roll in and out of the plant kick up dust. One frustrated resident even used his video camera to film what he said was cement dust billowing from a silo last summer.

The company wants to expand its hours in order to be more competitive, said GCC environmental consultant Doug Roark. Although the permit would allow it to operate 24 hours a day, the company has no plans to run continuously, he said, and isn’t staffed to run all day every day.

“We just want to put that [new permit] in place and show that even if anything ran all the time we would still meet our air quality [requirements] and then when a contract came up that we wanted to bid on, we could do it. Right now we’re at a competitive disadvantage because we can’t bid on those jobs,” Roark said.

The permit request was originally submitted in March 2008, but GCC withdrew the permit after it bought the plant, saying it needed some time to do a voluntary audit of the plant. Based on the results of that audit, several changes were made, Roark said.

“We recognize that there were issues with the previous owners and we wanted to identify any shortcomings of the previous owners, but we have a different approach. Dust is the biggest problem on a site like this. Now we have the best dust control systems you can get and because of that, those emissions are very low. The larger impact, compared to the silos, was the roads and the facilities have been completely paved and we’ve purchased a street sweeping unit that runs multiple times per week and removes any dust,” he explained.

Roark said GCC has not had any air quality violations since taking over.

This spring, convinced it had made enough progress on cleaning up the site, the company resubmitted its application. But the neighbors organized again in opposition.

It’s an environmental justice issue, said Kyle Silfer, president of the Greater Gardner Neighborhood Association, which abuts the plant. In May, he wrote to the City of Albuquerque Air Quality Division requesting a public hearing on the plant’s permit request and explaining why neighbors feel they’re already over-burdened by industry:

Residents of the Greater Gardner area (as well as the unrepresented neighborhoods nearby) already suffer from noticeably poor air quality. Often we are forced to shut off our swamp cooler’s fan to prevent the strong, headache-inducing odor of asphalt from the Holly Asphalt plant from entering our homes. The American Cement facility is right next door to the Holly plant, creating a pocket of dust and foul odor that severely impacts the quality of life for the many homes in the area–homes that preceded the arrival of these polluters by several decades. This pocket of pollution does not need to grow. If anything, it needs to shrink.

The real problem is a failure of communication says Steve Gallegos, a former Albuquerque City Councilor and Bernalillo County Commissioner hired a month and a half ago by GCC to facilitate neighborhood relations.

“The new company took over in January 2008. As soon as they came in they did a self audit and started rectifying some of the issues that they had, but they didn’t communicate with the neighborhood about what they were doing,” Gallegos said.

“They’re pretty good at doing what they do in terms of running a cement plant, but they’re not good at communicating with residents. … They’ve done significant improvements, and yet the neighborhood knows absolutely nothing about them,” he explained.

Gallegos created a newsletter and walked door-to-door talking to residents about improvements at the plant, he said. He also recommended to the company that it set up a formal process of communicating with the neighborhood, either on a monthly or quarterly basis.

But even if better communication had been established sooner, it’s not clear that the neighborhood would drop its opposition to an expansion of the cement plant’s production.

Chris Catechis, president of the North Valley Coalition, a group of 15 area neighborhood associations, met Monday night with Gallegos, state Sen. Dede Feldman (an Albuquerque Democrat who represents the North Valley), a representative of GCC and Raymond Sanchez, former speaker of the New Mexico House of Representatives who is also working on community relations for the company. Catechis said the meeting didn’t change his mind.

“They did say that they have these new fancy filters that are 99.5 percent effective, but even if they are that effective, [the plant will] still be increasing the amount of dust they put out there,” Catechis said.

“And they did say, ‘We’re really not going to run 24 hours a day, but we do want the ability to run 24 hours a day in case we need to.’”

The neighbors are still doubtful, Catechis says.

The hearing tonight should give neighbors an opportunity to air their concerns once more, and give American Cement the opportunity to make their case.

The public hearing will be held tonight from 6 to 9 p.m. in the Picuris and Sandia rooms at the Albuquerque Convention Center. For more information, call 768-1972.