Groups ask DEQ to suspend state permits for proposed Montanore, Rock Creek mines

A handful of conservation groups have asked the Montana Department of Environmental Quality to suspend state permits for two mines Hecla Mining Company has proposed near Libby and Noxon.

The request to suspend the proposed Montanore mine’s operating permit and the proposed Rock Creek mine’s exploration license was made via letter, according to an Oct. 23 news release from the Clark Fork Coalition, one of the groups involved. The others are Earthworks, Montana Environmental Information Center, Rock Creek Alliance and Save Our Cabinets.

The group is asking the DEQ “to enforce the ‘bad actor’ provisions of state mining law” based on its argument that “Hecla is led by a former top official of Pegasus Gold Incorporated,” whose Zortman-Landusky, Basin Creek and Beal Mountain mines polluted the environment, threatening fish and contaminating sacred Native American sites.

The former top official is Phillips S. Baker, Hecla’s president and CEO. He served as vice president and chief financial officer for Pegasus Gold.

Baker “was a top leader of Pegasus Gold for four years, leading right up to the bankruptcy that left the public on the hook for tens of millions of dollars in reclamation costs at mine sites that Pegasus polluted and then abandoned across Montana,” Earthjustice attorney Katherine O’Brien, who represents the groups, said via email.

It was highly on account of that bankruptcy that the Montana legislature in 2001 updated the Metal Mine Reclamation Act to include the “bad actor” provisions, “which prohibit individuals whose former companies failed to complete required mine reclamation from undertaking new mining projects in the state—unless they pay DEQ back, with interest, for reclamation carried out at public expense and rectify the reclamation failures at their old mines,” the news release states.

Hecla Mining Company in a prepared statement contested the groups’ position.

“Hecla Mining Company subsidiaries are the permit applicants and have no relationship to Pegasus Gold or its projects cited in the Earth Justice claim,” the statement reads. “Earth Justice simply is twisting the statute to try to imply that Mr. Baker, a person who works for Hecla, is somehow also the corporation. The fact that Mr. Baker was an officer with Pegasus for a very short time does not transform him into the ‘legal entity engaged in’ those projects or the separate company now applying for permits at Rock Creek and Montanore.”

The statement also notes Hecla’s “track record of meeting its environmental requirements and mine reclamation as evidenced by our on-going efforts at the Troy Mine, a mine we acquired but never operated; Our reclamation of the Grouse Creek mine; and successful operation of the Greens Creek mine in Alaska.”

The conservation groups requested that the DEQ suspend the license and permit within 60 days.