Mine plan source of dispute

SANDPOINT – About 65 miles, and the jagged peaks of the Cabinet Mountains, separate the communities of Sandpoint and Troy, Mont.

The towns share a blue-collar past in resource extraction. But when it comes to the proposed Rock Creek Mine, the neighbors are worlds apart.

Last week, Sandpoint merchants gathered at a wine-and-cheese reception to speak out against the mine, which would extract copper and silver from underneath the Cabinet Mountain Wilderness. The Rock Creek Mine is being proposed by a Spokane Valley firm, Revett Minerals Inc.

Realtors, retailers and interior designers said the mine has little to offer Sandpoint.

Grizzlies in the Cabinet Mountains – an area of concern if the mine goes into operation – are an asset to the town’s “New West” economy of tourism and recreation.

So is the water quality in Lake Pend Oreille. The mine would discharge treated wastewater into the Clark Fork River, which flows into the lake.

Realtor Jim Watkins said potential clients often ask him how clean Lake Pend Oreille is. Many waterfront properties still draw drinking water from the lake.

“The lessons of Lake Coeur d’Alene have not been lost on us,” said David Gunter, spokesman for Coldwater Creek, a Sandpoint-based retailer of women’s apparel. “That’s a lovely body of water to the eye, but because of many years of mining activity, no one knows what the cleanup cost will be.”

To the east, Howard Nichols offered a different view. He’s the assistant manager at Stein’s IGA in Troy, a struggling town of 950 people. Twenty percent of Troy’s residents live in poverty.

Most local residents support the mine and its promise of 300 new jobs, Nichols said. Salaries would average $50,000 – about twice Troy’s median household income.

“We’d like to see Rock Creek make a go of it,” Nichols said.

“To build an economy, you have to have resources. Mining is a resource, and so is logging. Without them, you don’t have a good, solid economy.”

‘A world-class deposit’

Viewed from the air, the Cabinet Mountains are a place of austere beauty. Towering granite outcroppings drop to steep valleys, forested with dense stands of cedar and hemlock. The streams contain bull trout; the mountains, copper and silver.

Revett Minerals estimates that the Rock Creek Mine holds 228 million ounces of silver and 2 billion pounds of copper, enough to operate for 30 years. “It’s a world-class deposit,” said Carson Rife, Revett’s vice president of operations.

First proposed in 1987, the Rock Creek Mine has a long history of litigation. The latest battles involve grizzly bears.

In March, a federal judge stopped work on the Rock Creek Mine, ruling that the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service had erred in allowing the mine to receive permits in 2003.

An estimated 15 grizzlies still roam the Cabinets. The federal agency, in its “biological opinion,” estimated that the mine could displace one or two grizzlies. With fewer than five female bears in the population, even the loss of two animals could be devastating to recovery efforts, wrote U.S. District Judge Donald Malloy.

Environmental groups, including Sandpoint’s Rock Creek Alliance, hailed the ruling as a potentially crippling blow to the Rock Creek Mine.

The ruling implies that “we need to fix the bear population” before the mine can be permitted, said Mark Wilson, a field supervisor for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service in Helena. “We need a healthy bear population.”

The ruling halted Revett’s plans for exploration drilling this summer. The company, however, hasn’t given up. Revett is appealing the judge’s ruling and awaiting the results of a revised biological opinion from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, which is tentatively due out in September.

Revett’s president, Bill Orchow, said the company is prepared to spend millions of dollars on grizzly mitigation ordered by the federal government. The Rock Creek Mine would disturb about 500 acres above ground. In return, the company would have to buy 2,450 acres of privately owned grizzly habitat in the Cabinets, including 100 acres in a critical travel corridor.

Over the life of the mine, Revett would also reimburse the state of Montana for the salaries of a bear biologist and an enforcement officer. The employees would monitor bear populations and educate local residents about living with grizzlies.

“We think the biggest threat to the bears comes not from the mine itself, but from several hundred people moving to the area to work at the mine,” Wilson said.

Birdfeeders, barbecues and pet food left on porches attract grizzlies, which become nuisance bears when they lose their fear of humans, Wilson said.

Because of the extensive mitigation required, Orchow argues that the mine would be a net benefit to grizzlies.

Company officials also contend that rapid resort development and vacation homes in both Idaho and Montana probably pose more threat to grizzlies and Lake Pend Oreille’s water quality than the mine itself. Real estate markets are booming on both sides of the border.

“I think people need to look at things honestly,” Rife said. “It’s taken us 20 years to get to the evaluation stage, where we will disturb eight acres with exploratory drilling. I talked to a contractor the other day who just disturbed 100 acres for a golf course.”

Documented grizzly area

Environmentalists, meanwhile, argue that the fate of the Cabinet grizzlies is tied to the species’ survival in the lower 48.

“It’s not just a few bears that are in the trouble,” said Louisa Wilcox, the Natural Resource Defense Council’s Wild Bears coordinator. “It’s part of a larger context.”

The Cabinet Mountains link U.S. grizzlies to larger populations in Canada. If the population dies out, grizzlies lose a piece of genetic diversity, Wilcox said.

Even robust grizzly populations in Yellowstone and the Northern Rockies don’t provide enough genetic and behavioral differences to sustain the species in the long term, said Troy Merrill, a landscape ecologist from Moscow, Idaho.

“If you want to have grizzly bears on the landscape, then it’s essential that we maintain a corridor to populations in the north,” Merrill said.

Diverse genes and behavior traits allow bears to adapt to changing conditions, he said. Grizzlies have a short time to stockpile weight for winter hibernation. “They have five to six months to get everything they need, and they do it on the most ephemeral of diets,” Merrill said.

Some years, berry crops are bad, elk and fish are scarce, and carrion is non-existent. In a year like that, only three or four female bears out of 50 will be smart enough to access whatever food is available and gain enough weight to carry a fetus to term, Merrill said.

“In the Cabinets, you’re talking about less than 15 bears,” he said. Based on sightings in recent years, the figure could be as low as five or seven, Merrill said.

Though the proposed mine has a relatively small footprint, it could affect grizzlies on up to 7,000 acres of surrounding habitat, said Tim Preso, a staff attorney with Earthjustice in Bozeman.

“Females, in particular, don’t hang out around intensive industrial activity,” Preso said.

The Rock Creek drainage is documented grizzly area, he noted. This spring, a Revett employee spotted a female grizzly and a cub.

Local residents say their survival is also at stake.

In December, Revett reopened the Troy Mine, a smaller, copper-silver operation. The mine will run for four or five years, at which time the company hopes to transfer the 150 employees to jobs at Rock Creek. Workers ask about the Rock Creek Mine’s prognosis all the time, said Bruce Clark, manager of the Troy Mine’s mill operation. They’re trying to decide whether to buy homes, he said.

Before the Troy Mine reopened, Libby native Patti Regh was commuting more than 200 miles to a job at a plywood plant near Missoula. Regh rented a room from her sister during the week. She saw her husband and 9-year-old on weekends.

Working in the Troy Mine’s mill operation allows her to live at home. “And the pay is better,” Regh said.

Hourly workers earn $13 to $21 per hour, with incentives of up to $4 per hour for attendance, safety and hitting production goals.

In a country that uses so many resources, people should be willing to have mines in their back yards, said Revett’s Rife.

“There’s so much opposition to these projects that people are forced to go overseas,” he said. “I think we can do a better job of controlling the environmental aspects of these projects in our own country.”

Christine Kester, owner of Sandpoint Interiors, promptly offered to give up her jewelry.

“We like to eat the fish in the lake. We like to hike up to Rock Lake in the Cabinets, and there are enough silver mines,” said Kester, a Rock Creek Mine opponent who was at last week’s reception in Sandpoint.

“If I have to give up silver to keep the grizzlies, then I will.”