Published March 3, 2004 Cyanide ban targeted HELENA — A Whitehall consulting firm, backed by money from mining company Canyon Resources Corp., took the first formal step Tuesday toward repealing Montana's 1998 ban on cyanide leach mining. Tammy Johnson, vice president of Environomics, on Tuesday filed a three-page draft of an initiative she hopes to place on the 2004 ballot that would restore cyanide mining in Montana and, she said, add more environmental safeguards to the practice. "The people in this state want to have this dialogue,'' she said. "People truly think that mining should be part of the economic underpinning of the state.'' With money from Canyon Resources, which had hoped to build a large, cyanide heap leach gold mine near Lincoln in 1998, Environomics has been looking into repealing the ban since late last year. The company hired Moore Information in Portland , Ore. , to conduct focus groups with small groups of Montanans in December and January, Johnson said. The groups talked about repealing the cyanide ban and other natural resources questions. Cyanide leach mining is a technique that extracts gold and silver embedded in large amounts of rock by trickling cyanide through rock piles. Cyanide dissolves the gold and silver into a solution. The precious metals are then extracted. In 1998 voters passed Initiative 137 by a 52 to 48 percent margin, banning the practice. The ban came before Canyon Resources had a permit to break ground on its proposed McDonald Gold Project and after Pegasus Gold, which pioneered cyanide leach mining, went bankrupt, leaving several large mines to the state of Montana to clean up. Critics say the ban froze any new mining in the state and hobbled the economy, while supporters say it protected Montana taxpayers from any more costly environmental clean ups. The draft initiative, filed first with the Legislative Services Division on its long path toward being placed on the November ballot, would restore the legality of cyanide leach mining. It would also re quire that leach pads, ponds and other mine elements containing cyanide to keep all the cyanide-tainted liquids from leaking, including the runoff resulting from major storms. All cyanide leach pads would also be required to have two liners and system for detecting leaks. The mines must also have a back-up system to keep cyanide-tainted liquids from escaping. Cyanide leach mines that use vats or tanks must also have a back-up system that is able hold all the liquids in the first vat, plus an extra 25 percent. The initiative further grants the Department of Environmental Quality the leeway to require extra environmental protections and would requires that groundwater must be monitored to make sure no mine pollutants are trickling into the aquifer. Before the initiative can be placed on the November ballot, it must pass several legal reviews and supporter must gather 20,510 signatures from registered voters around the state. The signatures will have to come from at least half of Montana ' s 56 counties. Jim Jensen, executive director of the Montana Environmental Information Center in Helena and author of I-137, said the proposed initiative doesn't offer any new environmental safeguards that weren't available in the past -- when cyanide leach mines were allowed and eventually leaked. "This technology does not work,'' he said. "The mining industry has never been able to show that they can build a cyanide leach gold mine that won' t leak and therefore have always sought permission for perpetual treatment of water because of the perpetual poisoning of water.'' Jensen said the effort "isn't about jobs, it's about profits,'' particularly the profits of Canyon Resources, which is funding the drive. Canyon Resources is currently squaring off against the state over cleaning up another gold mine the company owns, the defunct C.R. Kendall mine near Lewistown. In January, Canyon Resources President Richard DeVoto said his company was involved in efforts to repeal the ban, but only through its membership in the Montana Mining Association. He did not say that his company was paying the consulting firm overseeing the effort. Johnson said the effort is not about any one particular company or one particular mine. Although Canyon is the company paying for the effort so far, Johnson said a coalition of other companies and industry groups, are also involved, including the Montana Mining Association. DeVoto said Tuesday his company is not the mouthpiece for the proposed initiative, although it "certainly endorses the effort.'' Johnson said the effort is about letting other Montana families enjoy the benefits hers enjoys. Her husband is an electrician at the Golden Sunlight gold mine near Whitehall . Jan Sensibaugh, director of the Montana Department of Environmental Quality, said all of the environmental safeguards required in the proposed initiative were available when cyanide leach mining was legal. However, none of them were specifically required by law. Canyon Resources has been fighting the 1998 ban in court for years. But efforts to repeal the ban didn't start gathering steam until the 2003 Legislature, when Sen. Debbie Shea, D-Butte, proposed -- but later dropped -- a bill that would have placed a repeal of the ban on the 2004 ballot. |