State environmental officials will conduct an inspection at Bishop’s Lodge this week. It’s a routine procedure they’re carrying out in response to the luxury hotel’s permit application to release their treated wastewater into Little Tesuque Creek.
Yesterday, KSFR spoke with Jason Herman, who is program manager for the Pollution Prevention Section in the Groundwater Quality Bureau for the state’s environment department.
Herman was at the public meeting last month at Tesuque Fire Station when some 200 area residents and representatives of Tesuque Pueblo gathered to ask questions and comment, often quite vitriolically, about the Bishop’s Lodge plan.
End result of that meeting was an extension of a federal public comment period that will continue until September 30.
Residents of Tesuque have launched a new organization to fight the Bishop’s Lodge plan with the goal of persuading the hotel to contain all of their wastewater on site without releasing it into a New Mexico waterway.
Jason Herman says that Bishop’s Lodge’s owners plan to move forward with their current plan and that they have been responsive throughout the process.
He also mentioned that there are two larger municipalities in the state - Hobbs and Rio Rancho - that reuse the vast majority of their treated wastewater by deploying it for such purposes as irrigating parks.
And he says that a wider-scale reuse strategy is likely to be where the New Mexico Environment Department goes in the future.
“I'm a proponent for reuse. I think that we need to do better in the state, even better than we already have been with making the most of the limited resources that we have.
“We, I believe, reuse more of our domestic wastewater by percentage than any other state. And so we've been doing reuse for as long as we've existed here in New Mexico.”
Herman described Bishop Lodge’s earliest days as a period when they contained most of their wastewater on site.
While officials believe the hotel’s new plant and strategy will meet water standards in Little Tesuque Creek, residents remain concerned. Herman's response?
We understand and empathize with the frustrations and the difficult, complex nature of all of these permitting processes. We see it as our jobs to educate, inform, but also provide realistic information. And, that's not the most popular message oftentimes.”
Herman added that the state is currently developing regulations that would someday issue permits for reusing advanced treated wastewater as safe drinking water.
