EPA Brownfields Funding Secured for New Mexico

Federal, state, and local officials were in Santa Fe on July 19 to announce $1 million of funding for Northern New Mexico through the EPA Brownfields program. Brownfields are former industrial or commercial sites where contamination stands in the way of productive re-use of the land.

Five hundred thousand dollars will go to the City of Raton to assess several sites where environmental cleanup is necessary. 

The other $500,000 goes to a tuition-free education and certification program that Santa Fe Community College has offered over the past 15 years.

SFCC’s EPA jobs program has trained about 200 students and led to 74 percent landing jobs relating to environmental cleanup.

New Mexico Environment Department cabinet secretary James Kenney spoke at the announcement event, praising the educational program that bolsters the state’s environmental work force.

“When folks are being trained right here through this money, and have an understanding of how to clean up Brownfields, they inherently have an understanding how to then address uranium mining; how to clean up those Superfund sites; how to clean up those non-Superfund sites that just haven’t made the list, but are just—let’s call them ‘economic opportunities’ to really revitalize New Mexico,” said Kenney.

One of the graduates of the program attended the event, held at SFCC’s biowall. Isaiah Calabaza, who was born and raised on Santo Domingo Pueblo, completed the EPA Brownfields training program in 2023. 

Calabaza, said that when he was younger, he got involved as an environmental activist, protesting projects such as the Dakota Access Pipeline.

He said that the New Mexico Environmental Job Training Program transformed the way he looked at having an impact on our environmental future.

“Laws, regulations, policies—there’s actually things that you can do besides yelling and raising a flag,” said Calabaza. “You can actually go to school and get education and be in these meetings, in these rooms, where people are actually talking about what is going on, and you can use your voice to actually make a change.”

Shortly after completing the program, Calabaza landed a job on an environmental mediation team working at Los Alamos National Laboratory on a nine-month contract.  Now he’s in the running for an apprenticeship position involving nuclear waste cleanup.

SFCC is currently accepting applications for the next run of its program, in September.