ABQ’s American Cement air quality hearing — to be continued

ALBUQUERQUE — A public hearing ran so late Tuesday night that another hearing will be scheduled to hear testimony from residents about a request from a cement plant located in Albuquerque’s North Valley to extend its hours of operation.

Although the hearing was extended from 9 p.m. until 10 p.m., only a handful of audience members had time to testify, said North Valley Coalition President Chris Catechis — who stayed an hour later than this reporter. The Air Quality Division said it would schedule another hearing and allow enough time for everyone to give testimony.

The audience of about 100 people, gathered in a meeting room in the basement of  the downtown Albuquerque Convention Center, became restless after the scheduled presentation by representatives of American Cement ran later than expected. The question period, when audience members were allowed to ask questions of the company or of the city’s Air Quality Division employees, didn’t get started until around 7:30, an hour and a half after the meeting began.

Although Enrique Escalante, the president of GCC of America (the parent company of American Cement) noted in his opening remarks that he saw several of the company’s clients in the audience, it was clear from the collective groans and applause that most were there to oppose the permit.

The company has applied for a permit that would allow it to operate 24-hours-a-day. The company says it has no plans to run continuously, but needs the flexibility of operating at night and on weekends in order to remain competitive in a tough economic climate.

Doug Roark, the environmental and process manager for GCC explained that the company, which bought the cement transfer station from the previous owner in 2008, identified some problems at the plant and made significant improvements in the past year. GCC installed new filters to capture cement dust as the product is loaded into trucks, paved the roads inside the property and bought a $40,000 street sweeper to vacuum up any dust left by the trucks or cement escaping from the silos.

Roark also acknowledged he had seen the video, taken by a resident, that showed cement dust pouring from a silo on the site.

“This is a perfect example of the kind of issue that was identified and corrected by GCC as they moved in,” he said.

Roark and Escalante struggled to convince audience members that the new company is trying hard to be a “good neighbor,” citing the fact that it hired Trinity Consultants, an environmental consulting firm, to do an audit of the plant and identify areas for improvement.

“The bottom line is that we made recommendations as a result of the audits and those were fully implemented by GCC in every case,” Vern Choquette of Trinity Consultants.

But the facts and figures and slides presented by the company appeared to do little to assuage the anger and fear of North Valley residents.

In a hallway outside the meeting room, Dennis Robertson, lives two houses from the cement plant, complained about traffic, dust and noise coming from the plant.

“I haven’t heard anything tonight to make me feel any better,” he said.

Catechis said although the residents who showed up at the hearing were clearly angry, they made some good points in their questions and testimony.

“I thought it was going to be worse. …You’ve got to take the emotion out of the argument. Because they’re not going to not grant a permit based on ‘Well, we don’t want it here.’”