DENVER—A state lawmaker is asking state Attorney General John Suthers and U.S. Interior Secretary Ken Salazar to help him resolve a decades-old dispute over emissions from a power plant on Native American land, saying he’s tired of the mustard-colored cloud that blankets the area.
Rep. Scott Tipton, R-Cortez, said Colorado doesn’t get electricity but does get air pollution from the Four Corners Power Plant located on the Navajo Nation in New Mexico.
“The excessive emissions have traveled across state and sovereign nation lines, clogging the air and damaging the health of southwestern Colorado residents. Just as New Mexico would not accept toxic pollutants to be dumped by Colorado into the Rio Grande River, neither should Colorado allow avoidable pollutants to flow into our state from New Mexico,” Tipton told Suthers in a letter requesting help.
Tipton asked Suthers to join his appeal to the Environmental Protection Agency for more stringent emissions standards and to urge Salazar to intervene as head of the Bureau of Indian Affairs.
Mike Saccone, a spokesmen for Suthers, said the attorney general is reviewing the request. Salazar’s office referred all questions to the Environmental Protection Agency, which did not return a phone call seeking reaction.
Steven Gotfried, spokesman for Arizona Public Service, one of the companies that runs the New Mexico power plant, said the company expects a report from New Mexico’s environmental regulators this week on whether it has met state standards. He said that report will be reviewed by the EPA because the plant is on Indian land.
All states must field reports next month to the EPA, which will decide which areas need to reduce ozone levels. States will have until 2013 to come up with plans to reach attainment.
The Rio Grande chapter of the Sierra Club in New Mexico sued the EPA in 2006 over emissions at the plant, but the group settled its claim after the agency agreed to finalize a pollution control plan.
The EPA’s plan for the power plant located on the Navajo Nation was completed in May 2007. It included stricter limits on sulfur dioxide and set federal limits on nitrogen oxides, total particulate matter and opacity.
