Border Town Collaborates with ASU on Winning Project

 

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This feature is the first in a series highlighting the recipients of the 2008 President’s Medal for Social Embeddedness

When Richard Gordon, an ASU professor of agribusiness, became involved with the tiny border town of Naco, Arizona nearly ten years ago, the community boasted few businesses, no industries and significant environmental issues. Moreover, with a population of less than 800 and a lack of organized councils and politicians, the community seemed powerless to obtain the funds and technical assistance needed to improve its lands, economy, and the well-being of its citizens.

In an effort to address some of the unique problems of this community, including cross-border water contamination and the restoration of contaminated lands (known as brownfields), Gordon, now deceased, partnered with the Naco Fire District, as well as ASU’s environmental technology management (ETM) department  to form the Naco Fire District-Brownfields Supplemental Assistance Partnership.

Since its inception, the partnership has united ASU faculty and students with Naco community members and other universities to secure vital environmental grants from the Environmental Protection Agency, perform environmental site assessments, and begin plans for community development.

 

“It’s a very underserved population,” says Therese Carpenter, an ETM graduate student involved with the project, “Like many border communities, they don’t have a lot of means to provide for themselves. As government and organizations and institutions get involved, it shows the community that this is a worthwhile endeavor.”

 

Such governmental and organizational support has proven vital to the involvement and approval of community members, many of whom did not immediately see the project’s potential impact on improving their lives.

 

“The first part of the grant was outside of the lives of many community members,” says Rebecca Orozco, current Brownfields project manager and director of the Center for Lifelong Learning at Cochise College. “The value of the environmental testing data does not seem to connect with the vast majority of Naco residents. But a park for their children will be something they can truly appreciate as a community asset.”

 

Orozco and Carpenter have been working together closely to move the project from its initial assessment phase into a planning and development phase. While Gordon, along with ETM professors Nicholas Hild and Larry Olson, had spent the last several years assessing contaminated lands in order to facilitate --among other goals-- the construction of a new wastewater facility benefitting both sides of the border, Orozco and Carpenter are now focusing on the development of public spaces, such as parks and historical sites, which will more visibly benefit the community.

 

“The biggest need now is a sense of central community infrastructure,” Carpenter says. “There’s no area for the children, or for the community to gather. And the other issue is economic redevelopment.”

 

They have expanded the scope of the original project to include the development of a public park, the preservation of Camp Naco (a flashpoint during the Mexican Revolution), and a trail system that would highlight a nearby mammoth kill site, in the hopes that increased tourism will generate revenue for the impoverished community.
 “We’re trying to come up with the best plan possible that will give the community a safe place to be, as well as a source of revenue,” Carpenter says.

 

Orozco is similarly excited about the planning and development of the project.
“As the pieces of the grant project came together,” she says, “it has been so wonderful to see that there will actually be an outcome that will be of [observable] benefit to the community.”

 

The partnership has proven considerably beneficial to ASU students as well –providing them with a unique, hands-on environmental management experience.
“We’ve been able to take students from both undergraduate and graduate levels [to Naco] and have them participate hands-on in the sampling and community forum activities so they can be exposed to what’s going on down there,” Carpenter says. “We’ve gotten five thesis papers out of this already.”

 

ETM professor Nicholas Hild, an original member of Gordon’s team, feels that the project has proven not only educationally beneficial to students, but personally meaningful to them as well.

 

“It cost the university nothing but the students will always credit ASU and the ETM program for giving them the opportunity to contribute to the betterment of a community’s future,” he says.

 

Larry Olson, another ETM professor spearheading the project, adds, “The project has been a good example of ASU working with a community to deal with a problem it couldn’t solve by itself.”

Camp Naco project
http://www.campnaco.org/Home_Page.html

 

ASU’s department of environmental technology management http://etmonline.asu.edu/

 

Cochise College
http://www.cochise.edu/

 

Environmental Protection Agency
http://www.epa.gov/

 

Catherine Traywick, ASU in the Community feature writer
catherine.traywick@asu.edu
480-965-0335

 

Share your comments, questions and thoughts. Send an email to maureen.mills@asu.edu