By JEFFREY ROBERTSLos Alamos National Laboratory regularly purports to be supportive of Northern New Mexico, Los Alamos, and the surrounding communities.
They say how much they support local business, people, and outreach. I know they have a community outreach department for just such publicity.
So what do they do to express this support? They permanently close local salvage operations. They take what has been an institution at LANL, a program that has run for some 50 years or more, and give it to a Texas based company geared to selling to professional businesses.
I have no idea what the loss in revenue is to Los Alamos as a whole, but we have seen as many as 200-300 people attend these sales, even as LANL reduced the items sold locally and left the scraps to the locals. We do know these local sales were attended by small business owners from Espanola and the surrounding communities.
Now apparently every item is to be trucked off the hill. To attend a sale in the future one must travel to Albuquerque on a weekday, purchase a bidder card ($25), have a credit letter with company, and compete with out of town businesses.
Sadly, LANL does not care that the locals are frozen out. We are disappointed that Texas will benefit from another loss to Los Alamos, and wonder if this was a clearly thought out upper management decision or an oversight? We have asked the Los Alamos County Council and members and state representative to look into this and hope that something can be done. This business operation has been a successful, very well run program that has run locally for so long that could have overcome any difficulties.
