Dec. 23—The New Mexico Environment Department is asking for additional monitoring of a city dog park in the Casa Solana neighborhood established on a former landfill, but officials said the request isn’t a cause for alarm.
There is no indication the popular Frank Ortiz Dog park is unsafe for animals and their walkers, or any other users, city of Santa Fe Public Works and Utilities Director John Dupuis said.
Monitoring is routine for landfills that date back to the era of the Frank Ortiz site, which closed before the state initiated regulations for landfill closure.
The City Council in November approved an amendment to its contract with Intera Inc. to increase the compensation by $229,132.72 for ongoing groundwater and soil vapor monitoring at the dog park.
The park sits on a section of the closed landfill. The remainder is an unused section of the Buckman Road Recycling & Transfer Station and is not open to the public.
Environment Department spokesperson Jorge Estrada wrote in a November email the agency asked the city to install one or more additional groundwater monitoring wells on the site “to verify any groundwater or subsurface vapor impacts the former landfill may cause do not extend beyond the property.”
The city also intends to finish a multiyear surface emission monitoring program for landfill gas, which began in 2022, he wrote.
“The City implemented the landfill gas monitoring program to formally demonstrate the landfill does not emit harmful levels of methane at the surface,” Estrada wrote. “The data collected to date under this program confirms this conclusion.”
Even after a site has been confirmed to be clean, the Environment Department requires continued monitoring for a period to time to ensure conditions remain stable.
The department expects monitoring will continue at Frank Ortiz Dog Park for at least several more years, Estrada wrote.
Dupuis said one of the overarching concerns — and why monitoring is necessary — is that nitrogen from the former landfill could leach into groundwater that supplies the city’s well fields. However, he said, he doesn’t think this is likely.
“There’s a pretty significant distance between the dog park and the river, and we don’t have wells in between those two,” he said.
Another well sits farther away, Dupuis said, but the depth of the groundwater the well pulls from is not where some elements from the old landfill are migrating.
“There’s a general movement towards that area, but it’s not overly detrimental, and we just have to continue to monitor it to make sure what we assume is occurring won’t be a problem,” he said. “And if we ever notice anything different, we’ll take action to prevent it from becoming a problem.”
Dupuis said it’s not clear if the nitrogen is coming exclusively from the landfill site or from another source. A resident of the Casa Solana neighborhood, Dupuis said he’s speculated on whether some of it could be from the former Japanese internment camp at a site near the park.
“That’s the only thing I could fathom, because it’s only thing I know of that was here before Casa Solana was here,” he said. “I’ve never seen old maps to know, like, where did they have waste? Where did they have their facilities? To me, it seems plausible.”
The internment camp was established in 1942 and interned over 4,500 Japanese American men during World War II. A stone marker commemorating the camp was placed in Frank Ortiz Dog Park in 2002.
Dupuis said he’s sometimes wondered if it would be cost-effective to fully remediate the former landfill site and develop it into housing.
“I’ve looked at other places that have relocated all of the mass that is within their old pre-landfill dump area so they can reclaim it for other purposes, and looked at how expensive it would be and then what the value of the land is — there’s potential for it to pencil out,” he said.
The way things stand now, the site isn’t doing anything for anyone, including the city, Dupuis said: “You just have to watch it forever.”
A new state requirement calls for the city to monitor the groundwater at the site for perfluoroalkyl and polyfluoroalkyl substances, known as PFAS, and the solvent 1,4-dioxane.
“To provide more comprehensive coverage of the site, we requested that these analyses be performed after the additional groundwater well is installed,” Estrada wrote in an email.
Dupuis said he isn’t surprised the Environment Department is beginning to require more PFAS monitoring, something he said is beginning to be requested in some water discharge permits as well. Areas around the state have become hot spots for PFAS contamination, including some private wells in La Cienega and La Cieneguilla, raising questions about how widespread the proliferation of the “forever chemicals” truly are.
The more data the state can get, the better, Dupuis said.
“I wouldn’t be surprised that anywhere and everywhere where they can get someone to give them data on PFAS, they’re probably asking for it, just because we want to understand where is it at and how big a problem it is,” he said.