Westland Development finalizes sale of land steeped in New Mexico history

by Christie Chisholm, Weekly Alibi, January 18, 2007

It takes a minute for the fumes to hit. Before they do, there’s only red. A sprawling pool of red.

“What is that?”

James Aranda stares at it, waiting for synapses to pop.

Then a whiff of paint thinner … but it can’t be paint thinner.

He looks around for the source. There. A hose.

The smell is stronger now, almost headache inducing.

He follows the hose through a tear in a barbed-wire fence, traces it along the dirt, until it reaches a large, pill-shaped tank. On its side, in black letters, he reads: Warning. Red Dye Diesel. Non-Highway.

“Those bastards.”

No one is there. Just a partially drilled well humming in search of natural gas, a few rusty barrels, a hose spilling diesel by the gallon and a sign declaring “Tecton Energy, LLC.”

Aranda walks back to the gathering pool of diesel and crouches. Sand grates under his brown loafers. A hundred feet away, a cluster of black cows low. Diesel pours into hoof prints. His eyes sink to the ground, his ground.

In this moment, Aranda is one of six-thousand owners of that landscape, all 57,000 acres. The land is interrupted on the east end with the occasional small, inconsequential development. But mostly it’s empty—just a vast fragment of land hugging the western edge of Albuquerque.

Aranda knew he was going to lose it. He knew it would be soon. But he didn’t know it would be like this.

The spilt diesel had all the marks of vandalism. A couple days later, Tecton filed a police report as well as a report with the Oil Conservation Division. State investigators visited the site soon after and found the spill backfilled and cleaned.

But Aranda’s chance discovery of the spill impressed upon him a more ominous threat. Within a matter of weeks, he would be forced to sell his part ownership in the land. Whatever harm came to this mesa—whether from hoodlums, oil companies or developers—its fate would be out of his control.

A new offer to buy Westland Development unfolds

by Christie Chisholm, Weekly Alibi, June 8, 2006

The shareholders of Westland Development might be in for a surprise. You see, their company, which owns 57,000 acres of land immediately to the west of Albuquerque that used to be the 300-year-old Atrisco Land Grant, has been up for sale since last August. There was an offer from a Delaware-based company (ANM Holdings), for a tidy sum of $158 million at $200 a share, which the Westland board of directors decided to take. Then there was the better offer from Nevada-based company Sedora Holdings for $211 million at $266.23 a share, which the Westland board decided was good enough to warrant exiting their previous contract. Now, a new player has entered the ring—the California-based SunCal Companies. And the fight to the end has all the markings of a long, dirty brawl.

A new buyer for Westland Development?

by Christie Chisholm, Weekly Alibi, March 30, 2006

All stories have an end. But for the Atrisco Land Grant, the climax is still building.

Occupying tens of thousands of acres on the southwest cusp of our city, the future of the 300-year-old land grant is intimately tied to the future of Albuquerque.

In 1967, 57,000 acres of this hereditary land was converted into Westland Development, Inc., a for-profit corporation with the goal of planning and leasing the lands to further the economic and social development of Atrisco heirs. In August of last year, Westland announced plans to sell the land to an unnamed buyer, who was later revealed to be ANM Holdings, a Delaware-based company that was incorporated nearly a month after the announcement.

Since the Alibi last reported on this story [See: Feature, “A Place by the Water,” Dec. 15-21, 2005], there have been several major developments, not the least of which is the arrival of a new potential buyer, the Las Vegas-based Sedora Holdings, a company belonging to one of the largest developers in the Southwest.

A new Sandia study shows that a contaminant from the Mixed Waste Landfill could reach the Albuquerque aquifer as early as 2010

by Christie Chisholm, Weekly Alibi, March 16, 2006

War is known for its potential to breed damage. Sometimes that damage is emotional, psychological, physical or political. Other times, it takes the form of pollution. The Cold War left behind a long trail of abandoned bombshells, nuclear reactors and fission products, and a fair amount of them ended up in our backyard.

Sandia National Laboratories' Mixed Waste Landfill (MWL), established during the Cold War in 1959 and closed in 1988, has become one of the more controversial sites for discarded nuclear weapons research material in the state. It holds below its mere 15-25 feet of dirt more than 40 types of radioactive elements, as well as hazardous waste, solvents and volatile organic compounds (VOCs). Sitting on an unlined 2.6 acres, about 460 feet above the Albuquerque aquifer, it contains an estimated 73 cubic yards of transuranic waste (which is about 200-250 55-gallon drums worth), including plutonium, tritium and cobalt-60. Not all of the contents of the site are known.

Over the years, some groups have argued that the contents of the site should be removed and shipped to places better equipped to handle them, such as WIPP or Yucca Mountain. Others have rebutted, saying that moving the site and stirring its contents that have been sedentary for 17 years could be more dangerous than allowing them to remain.