Rosemont environmental impact statement delayed

The Coronado National Forest will not release a draft Environmental Impact Statement on the proposed Rosemont Mine by November, as planned, and an official said it has not been determined when it will be made public.

The EIS is required by the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), and two members of Congress hope a “no action” recommendation in the EIS could eventually lead to a decision to deny the mine.

The announcement Wednesday by Coronado supervisor Jeanine Derby comes shortly before an Oct. 24 visit by Jay Jensen, deputy secretary for the Department of Agriculture.

Jensen, who oversees U.S. Forest Service policy, is coming at the invitation of U.S. Reps. Gabrielle Giffords and Raul Grijalva, (D-Ariz.), to tour the mine site and meet with the public.

A detailed schedule for the visit has not yet been released. Rosemont is owned by Augusta Resource Corp. based in Canada.

Giffords and Grijalva want USDA Secretary Tom Vilsack to have the Coronado consider a “no action” alternative for the mine in the EIS, hoping it could lead to a denial on the grounds of “no mitigation” possible to the forest.

The Forest Service has never issued a decision denying a hard-rock mine, although litigation in response to agency approval has halted mining efforts. The Coronado’s position is that, under federal law, particularly the 1872 Mining Act, Rosemont must only come up with means to mitigate or reduce impacts from a mine. This stance conflicts with other policies requiring environmental protection within the Forest Service.

Pima County Administrator Chuck Huckelberry also wrote Vilsack in September calling a Coronado-Augusta memorandum of understanding to evaluate a mining proposal an “abuse of power,” and requested that he order the Coronado to examine the validity of mining claims that would have tailings deposited on them, and to suspend the EIS process until the validity claim was done and an MOU rewritten.

Derby’s postponement of the draft EIS follows a series of studies and EIS alternatives submitted y Pima County, a formal “cooperating agency,” along with state agencies, to the NEPA process.

Two letters were sent Sept. 30 by Huckelberry to Derby. One of them included a study commissioned by the county written by National Academy of Sciences member-geochemist Ann Maest. Huckelberry emphasized that Maest was co-author of a 2006 analysis for Earthworks, an environmental nonprofit, that concluded that 76 percent of mines studied, approved under NEPA for U.S. public lands, had violated the Clean Water Act.

The analysis examined Augusta tailings’ “leaching” (water polluting) potential, and ore analyses submitted to the Arizona Department of Environmental Quality as part of their state Aquifer Protection Permit. Such analyses are submitted to demonstrate the potential of a mine to contaminate ground and surface water based on the actual ore mined and tailings produced.

Huckelberry asked Derby to “refrain from relying on unproven statements (by Rosemont) and to gain more scientific information” to characterize the ore, tailings and geochemistry of the mine.

In August, Pima County had suggested that Rosemont consider an underground mine alternative that included tunneling through the Santa Rita Mountain ridge and sending waste by rail to the Twin Buttes mine in the Green Valley area.

The mine dismissed the proposal “without reason,” Huckelberry said. The county also suggested land trades as partial mitigation, backfilling or partially backfilling the pit and using liners below the tailings, all dismissed by Rosemont, according to Huckelberry.

In an Oct. 14 letter to county supervisors, Huckelberry attacked a recent Rosemont mine public mailing to regional residents that described the mine as “sustainable,” producing twice the copper out of half the land on half the water consumption, and that said purchases of excess CAP recharges of water for the Santa Cruz basin had already offset up to 10 years of mine water use.

The administrator described the mailing’s portrayal of “natural” surface reclamation of the mine on the east side of the Santa Ritas as the “filling of several watersheds to create a terraced waste pile, an artificial ridge transverse to natural topography, and a tailings pile set in the forefront of the Santa Rita Mountains.”

The Rosemont proposed mine has failed to meet other criteria beyond reclamation, said Huckelberry in his latest letter, that the county laid out in 2006 including pre-funded and enforceable reclamation while operating, setting aside 8,800 acres for preservation per County conservation guidelines with an environmental endowment to manage those lands, and no impact to water in Cienega Basin and Creek. Since that time the County has steadfastly opposed the mine.

Jamie Sturgess, Rosemont’s Vice President for Sustainable Development, originally suggested that he could respond to the county letters to the Coronado but later said, “Rosemont chooses not to comment on internal deliberative or draft documents that have not been released to Rosemont by the Coronado Forest.”

Derby said the Coronado hasn’t responded to the Sept. 30 letters.

“We consider the meetings of cooperating agencies to be the appropriate venue,” she said.

At the Oct. 15 meeting of those agencies, the Coronado agreed to provide Pima County with a list of studies under way.