Nome Residents Try to Block Gold Mine
By Elizabeth Bluemink, Anchorage Daily News, Alaska
Jun. 8–Some Nome residents want a federal judge to stop construction at a small but controversial open pit gold mine a few miles from town.
The Rock Creek mine and mill complex, under construction on Native and mining company land about six miles north of Nome, is largely located on several hundred acres of wetlands.
Construction needs to be stopped before the wetlands are permanently destroyed, Victoria Clark, an attorney for the Nome plaintiffs, told U.S. District Judge Ralph Beistline at a Thursday morning hearing in Anchorage.
If Beistline stops construction, most of the workers would be laid off, the mine’s general manager Doug Nicholson said in court filings.
About 170 people are working at the construction site now, most of them employed by the mine’s building contractor, Anchorage-based Alaska Mechanical Inc., Nicholson said Thursday.
The Nome lawsuit claims federal regulators illegally approved a permit last year allowing NovaGold Resources Inc. to fill in the wetlands.
The Rock Creek mine has been a controversial subject in Nome since last year for a variety of reasons, in particular, the mine’s planned use of cyanide to extract gold.
The plaintiffs’ attempt to block construction to save the wetlands is a moot issue at this point, an attorney for the mining company told Beistline.
Workers removed most of the wetlands earlier this year, before the suit was filed, the attorney for NovaGold said Thursday.
“(The plaintiffs) essentially don’t have any harm left for you to weigh,” attorney Michael Grisham told Beistline.
After listening to arguments from at least five attorneys — including three from the U.S. Department of Justice — Beistline told them he would make his ruling “very quickly.”
Thursday’s court stand-off was a climatic moment in the lawsuit filed in April by Nome residents and their nonprofit group, Bering Strait Citizens for Responsible Resource Development.
The lawsuit — originally filed last year but temporarily withdrawn due to a federal decision to conduct an internal review of the permit — claims the U.S. Corps of Engineers violated two major environmental laws when it approved the permit allowing the mine to remove and build on wetlands.
Instead of providing the public with a detailed environmental review of the project, the corps assumed a “Trust us, we’re the government attitude,” said Clark, who works for the Trustees for Alaska environmental law firm.
DOJ attorneys told Beistline the opposite.
They said the corps followed all federal guidelines for evaluating a wetlands fill permit and looked at all of the alternative ways to build the mine.
This was the best alternative, the DOJ attorneys said.
“The plaintiffs have cherry-picked a few issues,” said Daniel Pinkston, a Denver-based DOJ attorney, who argued in defense of the corps’ permit by telephone.
The corps’ internal review of the permit resulted in some minor changes. It was reinstated last winter.
NovaGold is trying to make the transition from an explorer to a producer of gold, so opening Rock Creek is a big deal for the company, Nicholson wrote in his court affidavit.
NovaGold spent about $75 million to explore and develop the Rock Creek gold deposit and the smaller, but higher-grade Big Hurrah satellite deposit, which the company hopes to develop later on.
NovaGold plans to finish construction at Rock Creek at the end of 2007, and hopes to produce 100,000 ounces of gold per year, he said in the affidavit.
The mine has an estimated lifetime of five years and would likely employ about 135 workers, he said.
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Daily News reporter Elizabeth Bluemink can be reached at ebluemink@adn.com or 257-4317.
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