In March,
the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency weighed in on the
Supplemental Draft Environmental Impact Statement on the PolyMet
sulfide mine, near Babbit, in northeastern Minnesota. The EPA gave
the copper-nickel mining project – which is called NorthMet – a
rating of “EC-2,” with the “EC” standing for “environmental
concerns.”
“The
rating means that federal regulators still have concerns about
potential environmental effects of the proposed $650 million project
and that they want to see more analysis and a clearer explanation of
how pollution problems will be resolved,” the Star Tribune noted,
regarding the EC-2 grade. “Specifically, they asked for more detail
on issues that have dogged the project for months: how long
contaminated water will have to be treated in future decades and how
PolyMet’s ‘financial assurance’ will protect the state against
unforeseen financial and environmental costs.”
The EPA’s
recent rating is an improvement over the failing grade the agency
gave the NorthMet project in October 2009, which sent PolyMet Mining,
a Canadian-based corporation, back to the drawing board. Four years
later, the SDEIS came out. In my February column, I reported on the
public hearing held in St. Paul (other hearings took place in Duluth
and Aurora) and noted that the Ojibwe bands up north have expressed
concerns with baseline data about water flow from the proposed mine
site. The Minnesota Department of Natural Resources responded to the
tribal concerns, and stated that it is “reviewing new stream flow
data for the Partridge River.”
The Indian
bands – Fond du Lac, Bois Forte and Grand Portage – are
“cooperating agencies” in the PolyMet environmental review
process. The proposed sulfide mine and mill would be sited in the
1854 Treaty ceded territory and tribal members have reserved rights
to fish, hunt and gather in this vast landscape, as per the terms of
the treaty that their ancestors negotiated with the Great White
Father in Washington. One specific concern of the tribal cooperating
agencies is that acid mine drainage from the NorthMet project could
destroy what’s left of wild rice beds in northern Minnesota.
Getting
back to EPA’s EC-2 rating of NorthMet project, Jon Cherry,
PolyMet’s president and CEO, spun the decision this way: “This
rating demonstrates the significant improvements PolyMet has made to
the project in response to previous public and regulatory comments.”
In a statement posted on the PolyMet Web site, the company noted that
the EPA’s EC rating “is the same received by some other notable
Minnesota projects including the Central Corridor Light Rail Project
in theTwin Cities, the St. Croix River Crossing, and several other
major highway improvement and bridge projects.”
The 90-day
public comment period on the NorthMet Mining Project and Land
Exchange proposal ended in March. There were around 50,000 comments
made in all forms, according to Chris Niskanen, the DNR’s
communications director.
The
comments came in “emails, lots of written letters by snail mail,
also written comments submitted during the public meetings,”
Niskanen told me during a phone interview. “We had comments, of
course, during the public meetings, when people got up to speak. And
we had people comment at the public meeting to stenographers,” who
wrote down what folks had to say about the various aspects of the
environmental review.
Niskanen
mentioned that more than 90 percent of the comments received by the
DNR were generated from auto-fill letters on Web sites. Presumably,
both the PolyMet boosters and environmentalists opposed to the
sulfide mining scheme employed this method. Niskanen agreed that
these type of submissions tend to have a familiar look. “That
doesn’t necessarily mean that they are not substantive comments,”
Niskanen said.
He
explained that the DNR is now engaged in the process of batching the
comments around similar themes – “impacts to wetlands, mercury in
the air, mercury in the water, the water model issues,” etc. –
and getting everything into a digital database.
“And
then after we get through that, we have to decide what to do to
address some of the specific comments in the batches,” Niskanen
told The Circle. So, perhaps the DNR will “collect
additional data” or “re-do some of analysis, such as re-running a
model – not creating a new model – but re-running a model with
new information. Or we might possibly tell the proposer that we’re
going to modify the project.”
The
batching and sorting of comments by the DNR will take “many months”
– there’s no deadline. There will be a final environmental impact
statement on the NorthMet project and another public comment period
for that. NorthMet also has to obtain 21 permits from the DNR and
various other state and federal agencies.
At the end
of our phone chat, Niskanen said that he wanted to address the
assumption some people make “that it’s a foregone conclusion that
this project will get permits. That is not the case.”
