From Valmont Butte, the view overlooking the Boulder Valley is grand. What's not so grand, however, is what's underfoot and still further below -- tons of radioactive debris.

After decades of degradation of land considered a historic, geologic and cultural treasure to Native Americans, pioneer settlers in the region and others by disposal of radioactive tailings and other radioactive and toxic wastes, the high point in Boulder County has become a low point for City of Boulder officials as the truth of the butte's toxic impacts to the surrounding environment are being unearthed.

Some of the truth is being dug up, literally, by prairie dogs.

The little critters are poking holes into not only the dirt covering tons of toxic tailings and other wastes, but also the official story of what's really going on at Valmont Butte and why it matters for the region's health and viability.

Since the City of Boulder bought the beleaguered butte in 2000, serious questions whether appropriate due diligence was exercised by city officials during the acquisition are warranted. The sellers' level of disclosures about the full nature and extent of the site's contaminated condition known to previous owners and operators - including an entity called the Valmont Butte Corporation, Hendricks Mining and Milling, Tusco, Inc., and Allied Chemical (now owned by Honeywell) - are also at issue, with environmental liabilities.

Valmont Butte's resident burrowing animals create channels and tunnels that provide pathways for water to more easily penetrate the surface and spread thoughout the hidden hazards. Tunnels typically can descend vertically as much as 16 feet and go laterally as much as 100 feet. In an uncontaminated environment, this can helpfully channel rainwater into the water table rather than being lost as runoff. Yet when the burrowing is into badlands like those at the butte, the result can only further a problem that officials have sought to minimize, if not deny outright, bringing forth a legacy that has leached to land and water below since long ago.

The earth excavated is piled up in mounds that serve as observation posts for the critters. What have they observed, atop a site EPA once considered among the top ten hazardous sites in Colorado under its system for scoring potential Superfund sites? Native Americans with their children and elders visiting the site for traditional prayer and ceremonial activities, burning woods and plants gathered from the radioactive lands, descendants of Valmont's pioneering families, visiting the graves of their ancestors buried there, City of Boulder workers mowing and performing other butte maintenance activities without respiratory protection. While the City of Boulder has granted access to the site for such purposes, what disclosures about its contamination and related risks have come with the keys?

The Rocky Mountain Peace & Justice Center last Fall raised numerous questions regarding the inadequacy of plans for the scale of hazards posed and why polluters are not paying for a better butte clean-up, given the documented impact of tons of hot wastes leaching from their hillside grave to a fertile valley below.

In a letter of response by Boulder's City Manager Frank Bruno, RMPJC was assured that the "cap" at the site, EPA and CDPHE approved, was expected to adequately contain the wastes for 200 years. Yet as if to thumb their furry little noses at the officials, the prairie dogs have poked holes in that claim within only a few months of the 200 years promised for protection. According to an April 2008 update on the City of Boulder's website, it is acknowledged that "prairie dogs that are on the cap areas must be removed because they are breaching the caps."

The plan? Instead of removing the contamination at the source, they'll try to remove the critters that will no doubt continue to seek out Valmont Butte as habitat, while leaving the hazards lurking in place.

Meanwhile, Frank Bruno is soon to leave the city's employment to assume a post with CU Boulder as a vice-chancellor for administration. He'll then not have to defend this abysmal remedial effort, which RMPJC considers as little more than a loose-fitting lid with holes on a bottomless pot. Other pesky questions - like what the radioactive rodents are digging up and whether a proposed sale of the bad butte land to an entity that would ultimately transfer the land into Native American ownership constitutes environmental racism -- will bounce to a yet-to-be-named successor.

It's time to end the cover-up and start a real clean-up, paid by those who caused the contamination, not the city's taxpayers.

As to where Valmont Butte's prairie dogs should be relocated? Perhaps they should be released at the EPA's regional headquarters offices in Denver, where perhaps they'd be better able to dig up the documents EPA now wants to keep hidden, like the ones about the radioactive water north of Valmont Butte that our public officials don't seem to want to address.

And a little advice to the City of Boulder. Next time you want to buy polluted property with taxpayer money? If a graduate of one of the C.U Environmental Studies courses I taught for 11 years is not handy:

Ask a prairie dog.

Adrienne Anderson coordinates the Nuclear Nexus project for the Rocky Mountain Peace & Justice Center. Over the last year, she has been further researching Valmont Butte's toxic history, augmenting the work of her students at CU who researched the site under her supervision during 1998-99, when she served on the CU Environmental Studies faculty. For more info on problems with the Valmont Butte clean-up, see www.rmpjc.org.