Los Alamos County · issues
Civic issues
Topics getting the most attention in Los Alamos County public meetings, ranked by how frequently they come up.
Fix Our Forests Act support
With red flag warnings, PNM has disabled automatic reclosers on transmission lines, raising outage risk. Staff also explained the May 8 townwide outage stemmed from unprogrammed relay settings, with a fix expected within two weeks.
Natural gas phase-out and electric future
The county has a goal to phase out natural gas (10% reduction by 2030) but usage hasn't budged in 25 years. Councilor Havemann urged nudging the development code toward all-electric new construction; Foxdale Flats power comes online next spring and the carbon-neutral-by-2040 goal has seen little progress.
Proposed federal changes to Section 106 of the National Historic Preservation Act
Proposed changes to 36 CFR 800 would drop ethnographic landscapes, remove cumulative and setting effects, sideline tribal and state historic preservation officers, and eliminate public participation in federal historic review. Gregory warned it would fundamentally change how historic preservation works nationwide and affect the lab's roughly 1,300 projects a year.
LANL Site-Wide Environmental Impact Statement briefing
Greg Mello of the Los Alamos Study Group asked for agenda time to discuss the lab's rapidly expanding pit production mission, saying safety standards are being lowered and the community's early support is eroding.