New Mexico Mercury

Editor’s note: This is part 2 of a series on the life cycle of small-town Playas, New Mexico. You can read the first part here.

When a Small Town is Sold for National Security

I returned to Playas only once. In 2001, before the blockade, I ventured south on a weekend trip from college to celebrate my twenty-first birthday. Among the many tasks for David Stanford to manage around town, his favorite was running Feelgood’s Bar in the bowling alley.

“Ask your uncle for a fuzzy navel,” my mother instructed. I did and David lifted his shirt to oblige. I remember thinking how fatigued he looked when his sheepish-lion grin faded. I didn’t know at the time that he was putting together a list of friends and colleagues to lay off.

Eventually my family and I wandered through the town site. None of the streetlamps were on, but the full moon frosted everything in an icy blue light. The cracker-box bungalows looked like cold headstones in a graveyard. We stopped in front of our old house. Casket-dark within. Dead trees rimmed the yard like skeletal beggar hands pleading for water.

I drove away that night trapped in a haunted silence.

Playas seemed destined for ghost-town status until 2004. Then, thanks to a $5 million grant from the Department of Homeland Security, the New Mexico Institute of Engineering and Technology (New Mexico Tech) purchased the town from Phelps Dodge.

As the first university known to ever own an entire town, New Mexico Tech’s purchase and creation of the Training and Research Center bolstered their position within a network of academic institutions that train emergency workers to respond to various threats and disasters. The network is so refined that certain states specialize in particular skills. Alabama, for instance, works on chemical disasters. Louisiana deals with biological threats. Nevada, radiological attacks. Texas, weapons of mass destruction.

New Mexico specializes in explosives, which explains why New Mexico Tech cut the ribbon at the inaugural celebration of the PRTC by detonating a small explosive device.

The PRTC flourished as soldiers, emergency responders, and law enforcement officers flooded the tiny town. Other universities purchased time at the PRTC. NMSU signed on to conduct agricultural and food supply security studies. The University of Hawaii came to study how to improve existing electrical grids. Playas was perfect for the task, with pre-existing grids and neighborhoods.

New Mexico Tech posted regular updates on the PRTC’s innovations and successes. News of the PRTC landed headlines in the New York Times and NPR, and even a segment on Good Morning America.

Ample video documentation of the town’s perpetual destruction accumulates online. Former residents have the luxury of watching soldiers and cops kick down their front doors, smash out their bedroom windows, and pitch grenades that blast craters in front yards where their children once played. We watch the town, our former home, crank as an essential cog in the patriotic machine of homeland security.

But with the war on terror shifting from Iraq to Afghanistan, the PRTC had to shift its training services. More counter-insurgency training than combat training started taking place there in 2010. The army constructed two mud-brick villages (one in town and one about 30 minutes out of town, situated near a vineyard on a hillside). A couple hundred Afghani role players were employed to be villagers, market vendors, tribal elders, and interpreters. Before serving a tour in Afghanistan, soldiers could first visit the New Mexican boot heel and get a nearly authentic geographic and cultural orientation to a foreign country.

Besides the role players, part of the authenticity came from all those chickens, goats, and donkeys roaming the villages. To keep all those animals healthy, New Mexico Tech subcontracted a veterinary technician named Jessie Stanford.

The name is no coincidence. Jessie married David’s son, my cousin Brian, and together, they moved back to Playas with their two sons. The Wild West Brian left behind in 2002 had since been transformed amid the thunder of Black Hawk helicopters, rumbling tanks, and crack-a-tatter machine gun fire.

“That first year living there was great,” Jessie explains as she delivers a round of peach cobbler to the dining room. My nephew’s graduation party is over, the sun is down, and Jessie is finally free to join Brian and me. She has an abundant smile and habitually tips her chair forward when talking.

Jessie continues, “It really was a lot of fun. We got to meet all kinds of people.” Role players from the other side of the world, emergency responders and military personnel from across the country—Playas was an international melting pot.

“It was cool,” Brian adds. “I’m not big on meeting a lot of people, but that was pretty cool.” But he quickly adds that living in the PRTC was nothing like living in the Playas he remembered.

“It was sad. I mean, honestly it was,” he says. “Just to drive around and see the houses…that was hard to take. All the memories would come back and it was just sad.”

All the green grass and nice yards: gone. Friend’s old houses reduced to ragged rubble. Entire streets or clusters of neighborhoods were fenced, gated and off limits to civilians. A half-hour up the road, the once-proud Animas Public Schools was now a consolidated collection of around 70 students, eight of whom played on the football team. But the fanfare of Friday Night Football Games was already long forgotten. All games transpired during the day because the school lacked the funds to run the floodlights.

“But,” Brian concludes, “people had jobs and at least the town was still there.”

More than merely there, the town and the jobs earned the seal of approval from the New Mexico Tech Board of Regents who toured the PRTC in October 2010. According to a statement issued on Tech’s website, the Regents “came away very impressed with the integrity and the innovation” they saw in PRTC’s management. The training they witnessed was characterized as “invaluable” and “highly unique.”

But in 2012, New Mexico Tech attitudes regarding the PRTC took an about-face. Tech spokesperson Tom Guengerich announced the PRTC was “losing money and needs to [be] brought to financial health.”

Last summer, the University laid off all 70 PRTC staff members and once again, Playas’s residents were evicted. Like his father before him, Brian packed up his family and said goodbye to Playas.

Now, the town sits mostly empty, save for a few Border Patrol agents and security guards who live on site. When clients contract Command Post Technologies, who sources say now completely run the town, Playas abruptly refills. When training is done, it empties once more.

While personally devastating, the PRTC layoffs hardly surprised Jessie and Brian. Around Playas, money had a way of spreading worse than weeds. They couldn’t help but notice the almost flagrant use of Tech’s $3 million annual budget—from refurbishing the bowling alley to installing a fitness center in one of the empty houses.

New Mexico Tech is not the only state institution with questionable use of federal funds. In 2010 the Center for Investigative Reporting found that New Mexico had to return $130,000 of Department of Homeland Security (DHS) funds after an audit uncovered expenditures and purchases not permitted by the grant rules. The U.S. Justice Department’s inspector general further questioned $1 million in funds received through the Southwest Border Prosecution Initiative. This program helps Arizona, California, Texas, and New Mexico carry out criminal court cases involving drug trafficking. The inspector general found that $769,000 went to ineligible cases, while another $286,000 came to the state accidentally, thanks to “inaccurate cost calculations.” Finally, at least $42,000 was spent without “adequate explanation” or documentation.

When FEMA awarded New Mexico $1.7 million in federal assistance to cope with the devastation of the Atrisco Fire, a later audit revealed that the state could not account for $800,000. According to the audit, “Documents were missing such as invoices and payroll records.”

New Mexico Department of Public Safety responded to the charges by saying that state lacked staff and resources needed to handle the many administrative responsibilities associated with the grant revenue streams.

Outside of New Mexico, the entire Homeland Security Grant Program (HSGP) has come under recent fire for what one senator is calling “pork barrel spending.” In December 2012, Republican Senator Tom Coburn accused DHS of “misguided and wasteful spending.”

Following a year-long investigation, Sen. Coburn attests that the Urban Areas Security Initiative (UASI) program morphed into a hemorrhaging stimulus package. His report highlights particular examples of UASI spending waste, including 13 sno-cone machines purchased in Michigan, a $45 million failed video surveillance network in Cook County, Illinois, armored vehicles purchased to protect festival-goers in New Hampshire, and a simulated zombie apocalypse in Ohio.

DHS rebukes such claims of free-spending, insisting that its HSGP fulfills the department’s core mission to enhance the country’s ability to prepare for, prevent, respond to and recover from potential attacks and hazards. And, under grant program guidelines, states need only ensure that 25% of grant funds go to terrorism prevention, planning, organization, training, exercises, and equipment.

Perhaps the money spent on Playas’s bowling alley refurbishments came from that other 75% of grant funds. Regardless, there was no amount of money that would entice Jessie back to the town.

“No more. I’m done. Can’t do that. The uncertainty of it is what kills you,” she says. She sees Brian staring at his empty tea glass, like it’s a crystal ball with a view of Playas. “I don’t care how much he begs, screams, kicks, cries—we are not going back. It’s not gonna happen again.”

If only that were true. Without congressional action to curtail spending, the HSGP is likely to continue free-wheeling spending, with states lined up, eager for funding. Some of those funds will undoubtedly funnel south to Playas. The tanks will roll, houses will crumble, and grenades will dimple the landscape. The town may well live on—a pernicious pebble lodged in the New Mexico boot heel and a tender thorn always in the memory of its former families.

(Feature image: Soldiers prepare to bust down a door during training operations in Playas, NM.  Image via Flickr by mashleymorgan.)