Supervisors vent over copper mine

TUCSON—More arguments against creating an open-pit copper mine east of Green Valley were heard by the Pima County Board of Supervisors on Tuesday.

In a six-and-a-half-hour meeting at the County Building, supervisors also criticized Secretary of State Jan Brewer for her criticisms of Pima County vote procedures, officially decided not to hold bond elections next November and, as many audience members cheered and jumped to their feet, approved a contract with an employees’ union.

Supervisor Ray Carroll, Green Valley’s board representative, said he didn’t get home until midnight Monday after a U.S. Forest Service meeting on the proposed mine.

And besides the issue of where the water and electric power will come from for Augusta Resource’s mine in the Santa Rita Mountains, Supervisor Ramon Valadez also raised the issue of where the trucks carrying the ore will drive.

He said roads in the area are small, two-lane thoroughfares, not large enough to haul the tons of ore to its final processing plant.

He called for a traffic study to determine the impact.

He said the volume of traffic would be huge.

Canadian company Augusta Resource plans to develop the mine on about 1,000 acres of private land, and it’s holding hearings to persuade the Forest Service to let it dump its tailings, or dirt it removed to get at the ore, on 3,300 acres of forest land.

County Administrator Chuck Huckelberry said the Arizona Department of Transportation has been asked to look into the traffic.

The main route to it will be Scenic State Route 83, a two-lane mountain road stretching from south of Sonoita to Tucson.

The mining company has also discussed building another road approaching the mine from the north.

Elizabeth Webb of Vail, who was also at the Tucson meeting, told the supervisors “There’s a huge number of environmental issues” about the mine and said “This mine does not have a permit.”

Webb said there are 45,000 residents at Vail, the nearest community to the proposed mine. She told the supervisors that the mine would also impact the federal Las Cienegas Natural Area.

Nineteenth century laws often favored mining companies when they created mines.

The Forest Service deadline for taking comment about the proposed mine is July 14, and the supervisors approved sending the county’s objections to it.

Earlier this year, the supervisors voted 5-0 to oppose the mine.

On the voter issue, Pima County Democrats have been feuding with the county over the handling of election results, arguing that there’s the potential of tampering with results collected by some electronic voting machines.

In fact, state Secretary of State Brewer has scolded the county for some of its proposals to tighten security, saying some of the proposals are unneeded.

County Administrator Huckelberry recently replied to Brewer’s criticism and on Tuesday’s board agenda the county proposed 11 steps to tighten oversight of the electronic balloting.

Earlier this year, the county lost a suit filed by the Democratic Party challenging some of the vote procedures.

At Tuesday’s meeting Supervisor Valadez moved the adopt the 11 recommendations, then added a 12th. It would require that the Sept. 11 primary ballots be scanned be scanned by electronic and that the county would comment from the state Attorney General and U.S. Department of Justice.

Although the proposal passed 5-0 in a voice vote, Supervisor Carroll remained skeptical that all electronic improvements can be installed by that time.

“I worry about things that may delay the machines until after the primary,” he said.

The supervisors also recognized the Service Employees International Union as bargaining agent for many of the county employees.

About 50 people, some wearing SEIU T-shirts or badges stood up, waved their hands over their heads and cheered when it passed.

The county officially said there’ll be no bond election next November for capital projects of almost $1 billion.

Bond Committee Chairman Larry Hecker told the supervisors that a citizens bond committee started out screening requests for projects that totaled $3.2 billion and narrowed it to $1.9 billion before further reducing it to less than a billion.

Earlier at another meeting, Hecker said the committee would take a break before returning in the fall to consider other requests for recommendations to the supervisors.

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