Local officials near Rocky Flats are disbanding their oversight council — but that doesn’t mean all fights are over

Rocky Flats is at a crossroads once again.

For 25 years, 10 city and county governments near the former nuclear weapons manufacturing site northwest of Denver have monitored for contaminants and other hazards through their participation in the Rocky Flats Stewardship Council. But now the council, which has met regularly to discuss conditions on the troubled property-turned-wildlife refuge is disbanding.

Broomfield pulled out earlier this week, joining Golden, Superior, Thornton, Northglenn and Boulder County in abandoning the council — a sufficient number of member defections to trigger the organization’s demise. The body will hold a final meeting this fall, clear the books and dissolve by early next year.

Deven Shaff, a Broomfield city councilman who has sat on the stewardship council for the past five years and serves as its vice chair, said its death doesn’t mean concerns about Rocky Flats will go away.

“You have an end to the stewardship council, but there is a story ahead for Rocky Flats,” Shaff said. “There’s a sense that there’s a new chapter for Rocky Flats.”

That new chapter could begin as soon as next week, when construction is set to start on two regional trail access points at the edge of Rocky Flats National Wildlife Refuge. Looming over the project is a potential ruling from a federal judge that could halt plans to build the planned underpass and bridge, which will bring the Rocky Mountain Greenway trail onto the refuge.

The stewardship council’s demise and the continuing controversy are the latest developments in the long and tortured history of Rocky Flats.

The weapons manufacturing facility opened in 1952 and made plutonium triggers — or fission cores — for the nation’s nuclear arsenal throughout the Cold War. On a windswept piece of Jefferson County prairie between Arvada and Superior, the ugly result of all that industrial activity was the creation of tons of hazardous chemicals and barrels of noxious waste, some of which leaked or burned over the years.

Rocky Flats, which employed about 40,000 workers over its nearly 40-year active phase, was closed down after the FBI raided the plant in 1989. It sent 70 armed agents in a convoy of vehicles to the U.S. Department of Energy property to ferret out suspected environmental crimes.

“No way” everything was cleaned

Despite a 10-year, $7 billion cleanup that ended in 2005, many remain leery of what Jon Lipsky, one of the lead FBI agents during that raid — and an outspoken critic of Rocky Flats for years — calls an “unlicensed nuclear dump.”

“There’s all sorts of infrastructure that exists underground, and nobody knows what’s there,” Lipsky told The Denver Post. “There’s no way the Department of Energy cleaned everything.”

The Rocky Flats Stewardship Council is compromised because the Department of Energy funds it and “runs interference” for it, Lipsky said. That’s a sentiment shared by the Boulder-based Rocky Mountain Peace and Justice Center. Chris Allred, who works on nuclear issues for the center, said there needs to be an organization that can look out for public health “without being subject to regulatory capture by the DOE.”

The peace and justice center is not convinced that the 6,500-acre site, which opened as a national wildlife refuge six years ago, is safe for human recreation. It’s one of several environmental groups that sued the federal government in January in an effort to stop the trail connections from being built on Colorado 128 and Indiana Street.

About 1,300 acres in the middle of the refuge remains a Superfund site, off-limits to the public, where the plutonium triggers were manufactured inside what amounted to a small standalone city.

“Rocky Flats is not stable in the environment,” Allred said. “This will only be made worse if construction projects are allowed to continue spreading contaminated dust.”

Dave Abelson, the longtime executive director of the Rocky Flats Stewardship Council, flatly rejects the claim that he is bought and sold by federal interests, saying his accusers “have not shown a single example of where the funding source affected the actions or comments of the board or of the contract staff.”

“Not a single instance,” he said.

Abelson agrees that it’s time for the organization to sunset — not because it’s untrustworthy, he says, but because the science says so.

Water samples from the site have been relatively stable and within a safe range for years, while hundreds of soil samples — with the exception of one that generated headlines five years ago for its elevated plutonium reading — have also been deemed safe.

“Do you need the same type of intense focus that the governments have put on this?” Abelson said. “The answer appears to be no. You don’t need the same level of focus because it’s a stable site and has been for many years.”

Concern about lack of collaboration

The stewardship council grew out of the Rocky Flats Coalition of Local Governments, which was launched in 1999. The council, created in 2006, was a more formal version of its predecessor and was created under a mandate in federal law to provide local communities a voice in the management and monitoring of contaminated sites nationwide.

The council has proven vital in looking for and identifying post-cleanup problems at Rocky Flats, Abelson said.

One year, city and county officials on the council challenged a plan by DOE officials to breach ponds on the site. They also expressed concern with the condition of Rocky Flats’ notorious landfills.

“The governments were alarmed when it became clear that portions of the original landfill that lie above Woman Creek were not stable,” Abelson said. “DOE eventually remedied the problem.”

In more recent years, things have been quieter, said Thornton Mayor Jan Kulmann, who chairs the stewardship council. She’s served on the body for a decade.

Thornton’s main concern is water quality, she said, with Standley Lake — just east of Rocky Flats — serving as a major source of drinking water for the city of 145,000.

“The data that we’ve been receiving from DOE … have not changed in 10 years,” Kulmann said. “We’re cautiously optimistic that it has reached a more stable condition.”

Broomfield’s concerns are different than Thornton’s, given its closer proximity to the refuge.

The city and county has been aggressive in separating itself from all things Rocky Flats in recent years. It started in February 2020, when the city’s elected leaders unanimously voted to pull out of the Jefferson Parkway Public Highway Authority following the discovery in 2019 of an elevated reading of plutonium along Indiana Street and in the path of the proposed highway.

Not long after that decision, Broomfield withdrew from the Rocky Mountain Greenway project, resulting in the trail being rerouted through Westminster. But Broomfield Councilwoman Heidi Henkel isn’t so sure the city should have withdrawn from the stewardship council without having an “exit plan.”

“The only way to make government accountable is (that) you make everything public,” said Henkel, who served on the stewardship council for two years. “It’s disappointing to me that with a Superfund site there, we’ve decided to stop this group without any commitment to further the public discussion.”

While the Department of Energy will send quarterly water quality reports to the cities and counties that made up the stewardship council’s membership, Henkel worries about the lack of collaboration and shared knowledge that comes from everyone sitting down at a table together.

50,000 visitors to Rocky Flats

Seth Kirshenberg, executive director of Energy Communities Alliance, said the cities and counties around Rocky Flats are in a unique position because their advocacy organization — the stewardship council — is one of the first in the country to disband.

His Washington, D.C.-based group works with communities that are located near former nuclear weapons plants and nuclear energy facilities.

“Remedies fail and you have to keep on top of these issues,” Kirshenberg said. “The remedies need to be protective of human health and the environment. Hopefully, all we see is the use of the site — but if something happens in the future, they may have to put it back together.”

A Department of Energy spokesman told The Post that the agency would continue doing what it has been doing while the stewardship council has been active.

“The cleanup of the Rocky Flats site has proven to be protective of human health and the environment for nearly 20 years,” spokesman Jeremy Paul Ortiz wrote in a statement. “As we move into the third decade since cleanup, DOE will continue reporting on-site monitoring and maintenance activities and post this material on our public website.”

The Rocky Flats National Wildlife Refuge saw 50,000 visitors in the most recent fiscal year, according to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

One of those visitors is Jeanette Hillery, a member of the League of Women Voters of Boulder County. She’s also been a member of the stewardship council since its inception 18 years ago.

She said she’s struck by how the contamination horror stories of decades ago still seem to guide people’s thinking about Rocky Flats today. The site isn’t pristine, she said, but the testing and data she has seen over the last two decades indicate the risk posed by Rocky Flats’ legacy is more than manageable.

“There are a lot of people who want to go back to the 1970s and 1980s — and think that what was going on then is still going on today,” Hillery said. “The testing indicates it’s safe.”

Get more Colorado news by signing up for our Mile High Roundup email newsletter.