I am writing today to announce the closure of the New Mexico Independent. After three and a half years of operation in New Mexico, the board of the American Independent News Network, has decided to shift publication of its news…
While environmental activists played their part yesterday during demonstrations at the capitol building, going so far as to dress up as solar panels and to sing the tune of “You Are My Sunshine,” their counterparts, the anti-cap-and-trade contingency who has…
Roughly one quarter of University of New Mexico students are unimpressed with the state’s flagship public school, according to a survey that questioned college students about their higher education experiences.
Photo by Esther Gibbons.
When Bernalillo’s engineering firm of record, HDR, studied the town’s water treatment options in 2006, former town manager Stephen Jerge asked the company to include in its report a new arsenic-removal system produced by Bernalillo-based ARS-USA, according to town Planning Director Maria Rinaldi and an HDR official.
But no municipality had yet adopted the ARS system, and HDR refused to include the new system in its engineering report.
“We talked with ARS and weren’t comfortable with what they had,” HDR’s Bill Zimmerman told The Independent. “We weren’t able to look at their equipment because they had a patent and wouldn’t disclose things to us. They weren’t willing to give us all the information we needed (to evaluate it).”
HDR recommended that the town purchase a widely used iron “co-precipitation” treatment system to remove arsenic from the drinking water. But that report went missing from town files, Rinaldi said, and it was never submitted to the state Environment Department, Department engineer Stephanie DuBois confirmed.
Instead, Jerge hired engineer Ramesh Narasimhan’s Phoenix-based Narasimhan Consulting Services (NCS) in 2006 to write a new report, Rinaldi said.
Town records suggest NCS was hired to “modify and amend” HDR’s report, but Narasimhan insists his firm prepared its own analysis. (Jerge did not answer emails seeking comment.)
The NCS report went much further than simply adding the ARS system to the list of the Town’s water treatment options. The new report omitted any mention of the system HDR had recommended. In fact, the state Environment Department’s Construction Projects Bureau initially rejected the NCS report because it contained no mention of any alternatives to the ARS system, town and Department records show.
Having championed ARS technology, NCS was awarded the project engineering contract for the town’s new water systems.
“Ramesh (Narasimhan) was the engineer on the whole project,” interim Town Manager and Treasurer Santiago Chavez told The Independent in January. “ARS is a subcontractor on the project. It is Ramesh’s responsibility to make sure that the whole project is completed and successful.”
Because ARS is the only manufacturer of its patented system, NCS also helped the Town secure Environment Department permission to use an obscure “sole source” provision in state procurement law, state and Town records show.
The sole source provision is very rarely used in the construction of water systems, according to DuBois. That made Rinaldi uncomfortable.
“I haven’t sole-sourced anything for the Town in my 20 years here,” Rinaldi said. “Staff, water system operators, and me too—we constantly asked Stephen (Jerge) why the system was being sole-sourced before we had test results. He said it wasn’t my project.”
Jerge resigned last April in the midst of a financial scandal surrounding his $45,000 in questionable purchases and cash advances using a Town credit card.
But by then, ARS equipment had already been installed on the Town’s two active wells and new contracts obligated the Town to purchase ARS equipment for its remaining two wells, which are being refurbished to accommodate growing demand.
State Police raided Jerge’s former Town offices last summer. They and State Auditor Hector Balderas have both referred their investigations into Jerge to the District Attorney’s office in Santa Fe, and Balderas continues to investigate Narasimhan and Jerge’s cozy relationship.
