Published Sunday, October 17, 2004 City lights: Political mud found in ads backing I-147 Despite what you may have heard from people in both political parties, this doesn't strike me as a particularly nasty campaign season in Montana. The mud that's been flung has been pretty thin, compared with what we've seen in the national races and in our own history, and I can't help believing that we'll be in good hands no matter who wins the major state races on Nov. 2. But there is some ugliness abroad this year, and it's concentrated around the "citizen" initiative to allow cyanide heap-leach mining to resume in Montana. People in this state who were fed up with corporate welfare and long-term pollution, fed up with the idea of leveling whole mountains to extract tiny amounts of gold and silver, voted six years ago to ban this wasteful, destructive form of mining. That didn't sit well with Canyon Resources, the Colorado company whose plans to gouge out an open-pit mine on the Blackfoot River two-thirds the size of Butte's Berkeley Pit were interrupted by the 1998 initiative to ban cyanide leach mining. Even though polls have shown that support for the ban remains at least as strong as it was in 1998, Canyon Resources almost single-handedly managed to get a new initiative, I-147, on the ballot this year in hopes of repealing the ban. Don't let the name of the "group" supporting I-147 fool you. It may call itself Miners, Merchants and Montanans for Jobs and Economic Opportunity, but it is Canyon Resources. Footing the bill According to the most recent campaign-spending reports, Canyon Resources kicked in $1.3 million, about 97 percent of all the money raised by Miners, Merchants and Montanans for Jobs and Economic Opportunity. Canyon Resources paid the people who gathered the petitions needed to get I-147 on the ballot, and it has paid for nearly everything else, including the recent barrage of advertising. The mining company has the right to spend its money trying to buy our vote, but we have the right to point out who's doing the talking, and what kind of lies they're telling. The big lie is that I-147 includes "new" safeguards to prevent the kinds of environmental disasters that people rightly associate with heap-leach mining. If mines do pollute, the buck stops at the desk of Warren McCullough, the Environmental Management Bureau chief for the state Department of Environmental Quality. He told me flat-out that I-147 would not give his agency any additional authority to prevent pollution at cyanide leach mines. The phony environmental regulations are no more than window dressing. The crux of I-147 is the section restoring "contractual interests and rights" supposedly lost as a result of the 1998 ban. The company says on its own Web site that passage of I-147 would allow it to resume permitting of its McDonald Gold Project on the Blackfoot River near Lincoln. Cyanide leach mines have proven to be bad news wherever they're located, but you'd have to work hard to find a worse spot for one than on the headwaters of one of the finest rivers in Montana. And Canyon Resources has not exactly earned our trust. Belated reclamation At the company's Kendall mine in the North Moccasin Mountains, production stopped in 1995 and Canyon Resources did some reclamation there until three years ago, when it simply quit. This summer, with the election looming, it suddenly felt an urgent need to start doing reclamation work again, even though the state asked the company to wait until it had completed an environmental study - a study that Canyon Resources has refused to pay for, saddling taxpayers with the $500,000 bill. The Kendall reclamation work was in the same category as the "new" environmental rules in I-147 - window dressing meant to divert our attention from the real issues. Almost all of the advertising paid for by Canyon Resources talks about how cyanide leach mines will create new jobs and produce tax revenue, which sound attractive. But heap-leach mines always leave messes behind that somebody else has to pay for. Aside from reclamation work, we hardly know what it will cost to maintain water-treatment operations at some defunct mines. The BLM has estimated that it will cost $16.4 million to operate a water-treatment system at the Zortman-Landusky mine south of Malta "forever." McCullough, of the DEQ, says the technology in use at cyanide leach mines dates from the 1960s, so we don't have any idea yet how long "forever" will have to be. "It's somewhere between a long time and a very long time," he said. Environmental problems often seem so huge that regular citizens feel there's nothing they can do about them. You can recycle a few cans, maybe, but how is that going to clean the air or keep our rivers clean? Well, here's your chance. Two weeks from Tuesday, all you have to do is put your X in the box. Tell Canyon Resources "no." |