One of the takeaways I had during the meeting on Thursday, March 27, regarding the proposed spreading of sludge on a ranch south of Westcliffe was a comment made by the lead Environmental Director for Denali Water Solutions, Luke Bond. When a citizen asked him to comment on the $610,000 in fines the company had agreed to pay the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) in November 2024 for the application of sludge that caused nitrogen pollution, his answer was a master class in spinning a negative action of his company’s (but not his division) into a positive comment on the power of regulation.
“Denali was fined for application violations, but that fine shows that the regulations work.” That statement is a breathtaking exercise in the propaganda technique known as “spin.”
We live in a world where facts and the pursuit of truth are often absent in discussions regarding the desire for a large corporation like Denali to save money by dumping a million pounds of sludge within a few thousand feet of the main waterway in the Wet Mountain Valley. Spin is defined “in public relations and politics [as] a form of propaganda achieved through knowingly providing a biased interpretation of an event. While traditional public relations and advertising may manage their presentation of facts, ‘spin’ often implies the use of disingenuous, deceptive, and manipulative tactics.”
Bond’s statement, “The [$610,000] fine shows that the regulations work,” was one of the best spins I have ever witnessed in the region in the past ten years working as a journalist. Clearly, he had practiced this line repeatedly since the fine was announced by the EPA in November of 2024. First, he and his colleague at the meeting on Thursday created distance from the financial penalty for polluting by stating, “We really do not know what happened in Arizona. The Colorado Group was not involved at all in the group from Arizona or California.” Second, they try to show honesty and respect for the rules and regulations of the EPA by not even fighting accusations, saying, “The regulations work.” And last comes the coup de grace, which is French for the decisive stroke, by implying that the fines show that “Delali is being watched by the EPA, so locals have nothing to fear from our dumping.”
That was a downright masterful spin. But of course, the problem with spin is that it is just not true. The obvious problem that Bond was trying to ignore is that financial fines from the EPA do not undo the pollution damage caused by the over-application of biosolids. No amount of money can rectify the damage that nitrogen poisoning did to other people’s water, land, wells, and livelihoods. And let’s just keep in mind that the fine was just for nitrogen overapplication. What we do not know is what other chemicals worked their way off the properties where the sludge was applied. The conversation locally has been about the amount of “forever chemicals” in the sludge and what would happen to Grape Creek, the aquifer that the Valley sits upon, and the wells that serve the towns of Westcliffe and Silver. If the sludge got pushed into the creek from a weather event, would a financial fine from the EPA be able to fix the damage the sludge did to the community? Of course, it could not; no amount of money could actually reverse the damage, and that is the truth that Bond’s lie was meant to cover up.
Bond stated to the crowd early on in the questioning, “of course, they could not guarantee that nothing would go wrong.” That should have been the end of the meeting right there. If you cannot guarantee with a high degree of certainty that a mistake won’t permanently poison our waterway, the conversation should have ended before the spin got started.
– Jordan Hedberg
(This editorial was originally published on April 4. Ultimately, the Board of County Commissioners decided to step in and help donate $40,000 for the sludge to be shipped out of the Valley to a better location in Eastern Colorado. However, as of April 14, Denali Water Solutions has yet to provide the testing that they claim to have done on the ponds.)