Mindless Demand Validates Paranoia
Stockholder John Sullivan of Spokane can’t recall Merger Mines doing much more than a little exploratory drilling and hauling one carload of lead silver through a Coeur d’Alene Mine shaft.
This, over the course of almost 70 years.
Yet, the Environmental Protection Agency is demanding that 70 companies, including Merger Mines, provide a detailed account of their role in more than a century of mining. By Thursday, no less.
Cost of the paperwork alone to meet EPA’s ultimatum could bankrupt tiny mining owners. That is, if original copies are available. Those who don’t comply with this bureaucratic nonsense face a fine of $27,500 per day.
The scheme deserves the epithet hung on it by a disgruntled mining official: “That’s the stupidest damn thing I’ve ever heard of.” It is exactly the kind of ploy that fuels contempt for government and pushes honest, hard-working people over the edge into militias and worse.
Congress needs to rein EPA in.
Only an agency drunk with power and contemptuous of America’s natural resource industries would issue EPA’s June 5 letter to mining companies. The letter ordered the companies to turn over copies of “writings of any kind … whether or not wholly or partially in handwriting” from 1880 to the present, some 117 years - and gave the mining companies only 14 working days to comply.
That’s a Herculean task, even for companies with large legal teams. It’s an impossible undertaking for the small ma and pa operations targeted by EPA, many of which have been nearly defunct for decades.
One mining company executive told the weekly Idaho News Observer: “It’s a nightmare. I’ve got six filing cabinets full of information, and that only goes back to 1960.
“We’re a very small company. Who’s going to pay for the copy cost? This could put us under all by itself. I think that’s what (the EPA) wants.”
If a mining company somehow meets the EPA’s goofy deadline, it gets the opportunity to be sued. That’s what this fishing expedition is all about. EPA has until Aug. 29 to add more defendants to its multimillion-dollar lawsuit against companies said to have contaminated the Coeur d’Alene Basin with heavy metals.
EPA already has fingered ASARCO Inc., Coeur d’Alene Mines Corp., Hecla Mining Co., Sunshine Mining Co. and several affiliates as co-defendants. Now, it’s after Seafirst Bank, Noranda Exploration, Louisiana-Pacific Corp. and the smallfry that leased mining claims, transported ore, or financed mining-related businesses.
EPA won’t be satisfied until it and superfund attorneys have wrung every dollar out of an industry that helped build the Inland Northwest.
God, save us from the bureaucrats.
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