El Paso City Council will vote to Rezone Contaminated ASARCO Land and Allow Development

For Immediate Release, May 7, 2011

Contacts:

Heather McMurray EPgtlo, (915) 539-3388, heamc@earthlink.net

El Paso City Council will vote to Rezone Contaminated ASARCO Land and Allow Development

Under Guise of Smartcode, the Rezoning Would Ignore
Undisclosed Poisons from Asarco's Secret-Waste Disposal Operation

El Paso, TX.— El Paso City Council will vote this next Tuesday May 10 (Items 19A and 19B) on Ordinance to change zoning of Asarco from unrestricted manufacturing to "SCZ" (Smart code) and allow development.  Under the ownership of the ASARCO Texas Custodial Trust and the El Paso Trustee ASARCO Bankruptcy contract, the clean-up is not required to disclose or remediate the still undisclosed hazardous wastes from when Asarco ran the illegal and secret toxic-waste disposal operation (1992-1998 - NYTimes 10/2006).  As Representative Reyes said in a press statement (2006) "Asarco paid millions on the condition that the details of what it had done would never become public". 

• The ASARCO Texas Custodial Trustee for El Paso stated that "Asarco, as a large integrated metal producer and refiner obviously handled a wide variety materials including radioactive materials." 
  
• The International Joint Advisory Committee under the La Paz Accord/Treaty passed a Resolution recommending testing, but no testing has yet been done to determine what contamination remains in this region from Asarco's illegal hazardous-waste incineration.
• EPA has not yet released the documents detailing those wastes.
  

EPgtlo demands that until governmental agencies disclose the hazardous-wastes from its illegal-waste-incineration that this land not be rezoned. 

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Federal DOJ Trustee for Corpus Christi TX ASARCO Bankruptcy and sites failing to do their job

It is illegal in our lay-opinion for the Federal DOJ Bankruptcy Trustee to continue to make legal decisions and recommendations that act as if Asarco (Encycle and Asarco inc.) never engaged in nearly ten years of secret hazardous-waste-disposal for $$. (see news announcement, below)  Why is the Federal DOJ Trustee not acting on this knowledge, that they were legally apprised of back in 2006?

We respectfully demand that the Obama Administration's DOJ appointees and the EPA's Obama Administration appointees demand that the DOJ Bankruptcy Trustee (Region 7 Judy A. Robbins United States Trustee ) do their job and require that the trustees overseeing that liquidation, Michael Boudloche (Corpus Christi), Mr. Puga (El Paso TX) consider the ramifications from the illegal secret wastes.   It is now public-domain-knowledge (both from the released-1998-formerly-confidential for settlement purposes only 72 page document AND from the 1994 Asarco Encycle Supervisor Whistleblower report) that Asarco-Encycle and Asarco El Paso TX (and E. Helena MT) ran an un-permitted hazardous-waste disposal-operation for nearly ten years just to make money.

There should be no demolition at these sites until there is full disclosure of the secret wastes handled and burned at these sites, using comprehensive chemical analyses recommended by the International La Paz Accord JAC group several years ago.

"Google Alert:
"State can't stop demolition, bankruptcy trustee says
Corpus Christi Caller Times
A US Bankruptcy Court trustee said the contested demolition of the ASARCO/Encycle plant will continue and state officials have no authority to stop the work ..." "