Mine your own business

How much public comment should be gathered before kicking off a new gold mine in Nevada? Well, with the state’s economy in the toilet, it’s understandable to want to get new mines up and running in as short a time as possible—as in less than a decade. But at what cost?

That’s the crux of a complaint by Great Basin Mine Watch, who’d like to see a change to a Nevada regulation that streamlines the state’s permitting of mines.

The matter is a side note to the mining watchdog agency’s ongoing lawsuit over the expansion of Newmont Mining Corp.'s Gold Quarry mine and the new Leeville Mine on the Carlin Trend, which has been going through the permitting process for more than five years. After obtaining approval from the federal Bureau of Land Management for Leeville, a little-known loophole in state law allowed Newmont to streamline the process of getting state approval, evading a second round of public comment.

By Nevada law, if a mine’s plan of operations is agreed to by the BLM or the U.S. Forest Service, it doesn’t need to go through additional public review as state approval is sought.

That’s a bad idea on many levels, says Tom Myers of Great Basin Mine Watch. The public needs opportunities to comment on such issues as reclamation of land that’s been maimed by mining and on the amount of reclamation bonds the state requires new mines to put up. Though agencies such as the BLM are required to take public comment and respond to it during many aspects of a project’s draft environmental-impact statement, the agencies don’t have to respond to comments on a project’s reclamation plan.

“The BLM doesn’t take public comment on a reclamation plan, and it can approve one with no public comment,” Myers says. “We can see it and file comments, but they are not required to respond.”

After the state approved the Leeville Mine, the Nevada Division of Environmental Protection held workshops in mid-December to find out whether the law should be changed. Representatives of the mining industry were adamant that the regulations should remain unchanged, that going through a whole new public-input process at the state level would be redundant, straining the state of Nevada’s already limited resources.

“We support a transparent public process, but it is a process that at some point has to come to an end,” says Russ Fields, president of the Nevada Mining Association. “Additional public comment periods are not necessary. It adds more and more time to the permitting process, which is a problem.”

Fields says the NMA values public input: “You bet they need to be involved. But there’s a proper way to handle public comment, if the federal agencies handle it right. … Don’t go in unnecessarily and change the regulation.”

Myers sums up the opposition’s argument like this: “They’re saying, ‘This is the law, and the law doesn’t say anything about public review.’ We respectfully disagree. It’s another instance of the industry applying pressure, and in Nevada, they get their way as they always do.”

The loophole comes from reclamation regulations issued in 1990, which included an exemption for mines that had already been permitted by the BLM, as long as the mine met permit requirements. That made some sense, eliminating some red tape for mines, and it didn’t bother watchdog agencies such as GBMW. But when it comes to permitting new mines—especially approving reclamation plans—the watchdog agency says it has a hard time obtaining information that should be completely in the public domain.

For example, just how does a governmental agency calculate how much money the mining company should put up to ensure the people of Nevada can afford to pay for a costly cleanup in the event a mine folds? Example: The bonding amount for Newmont’s Gold Quarry Mine was $112 million, but industry experts affiliated with environmental agencies say a conservative estimate of cleanup costs could run beyond $150 million or even as much as $300 million in some cases. In November, GBMW filed a lawsuit in Federal District Court challenging the BLM’s decision to permit Gold Quarry and Leeville. The mines, Myers says, have the potential to pollute and drain half a million acre-feet of water during dewatering. The water table could drop up to 1,600 feet, drying up area rivers and streams. (One acre-foot of water is about 326,000 gallons, or about a year’s supply of water for a family of four.) The potential damage could affect water for hundreds of miles in every direction, he says, and taxpayers potentially could be liable for more than $50 million.

“There is no place in the world where the mining industry has wasted so much water or devastated a watershed as much as in the Carlin Trend,” Myers says. “This is especially irresponsible in a desert.”

But this lawsuit against the BLM isn’t based on the facts, argues Paul Pettit, manager for environmental compliance and hydrology of Newmont’s Eastern Nevada operations. The EIS for Gold Quarry in 1993, which Pettit calls a “conservative” document, predicted that 25 streams would dry up or be affected by the mine by the year 2000.

“But none of these streams have been impacted by dewatering,” he says. Some of the streams, which usually dried up by the end of summer even before mining, are merely dry for about an additional month after the groundwater is recharged by winter precipitation and runoff.

And what about insufficient reclamation bonds?

“We think our reclamation bonds are adequate,” Pettit says. “So does the BLM. So does the NDEP. We think [GBMW’s] charges are without merit.”

One way or another, the argument over mining’s environmental and fiscal impacts on the state of Nevada isn’t going to go away. Myers, who points to new progressive California laws that actually require mines to backfill open pits left when mines close, is frustrated that the issue in Nevada is whether the public should be allowed maximum input.

“People are very emotional about mining," Myers says. "They think there are only two choices: Either we have to let mining do whatever it wants, or we have to live in a cave. … But we think that, in the mining industry, technology has advanced to the point where they can do a much better job than they do. We work to encourage them to do that."