Farmer Quits Topsoil Deal Controversial Scraping Continues Elsewhere, With Dirt Used At Superfund Site

An application to strip topsoil off a Kootenai County farm to cap the Bunker Hill Superfund site has been pulled after the landowner refused to sign a permit request.

IT Corp., which has an office in Smelterville, is currently scraping topsoil off a farm in Shoshone County along the North Fork of the Coeur d’Alene River.

The company had an agreement to do the same on Dennis Wright’s two parcels in Kootenai County near Cataldo.

That proposal was scheduled to go before a Kootenai County hearing examiner today.

However, Wright has not signed the application so it was pulled from the agenda, said Jill Bowes, Kootenai County associate planner.

“Whenever the applicant and land owner are not the same, the county needs a letter of authorization from both,” she said.

Bowes asked several times for IT Corp. to send the county Wright’s signature on the two conditional use permit requests.

At one point, Meckel Engineering - hired by IT Corp. - sent a letter to Bowes with a copy of the original agreement - dated July 1 and signed by both IT Corp.’s Cal Evens and Wright.

Bowes returned the letter and said the county does not accept signed agreements that are more than 6 months old.

“Mr. Wright called me and said, `I ain’t signing nothing,”’ Bowes said. “So, it’s been pulled.”

Reached at his farm Wednesday, Wright had no comment.

IT Corp. has been in a legal fistfight with Shoshone County officials over its operations along the North Fork.

One of the two farms to be mined is owned by Shoshone County planning commissioner Dick Rifkind.

Although he helped the county draft a 1998 ordinance regulating surface mines, rock pits and even top soil, he considers IT Corp.’s work as “field prepping.”

The state and other Shoshone County officials disagreed and succeeded in stopping the operation.

However, IT Corp. got permission to resume digging when 1st District Judge Craig Kosonen ruled in May that the project is not “mining” as defined by county ordinance.

Instead, he concluded, it is an agriculture practice that is allowed in rural residential areas.

The topsoil is being used to cap the 260-acre pile of mine tailings at the Superfund site in Kellogg.

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers faxed letters to Kootenai County planners Wednesday indicating that it had asked IT Corp. to place flags around wetlands on both Shoshone County sites.

“(IT Corp. officials) told me they haven’t got any plans to do any filling in wetlands,” said Gregg Rayner, regulatory project manager for the corps.

“We would certainly like to see them take steps to control runoff and we have made recommendations that they do that,” he said.

However, no flags marking wetlands or erosion controls were visible Tuesday near wetlands on either Shoshone County site.