Complaint challenges coal permit

SUTTON — A coalition of groups opposed to a proposed Wishbone Hill coal mining project has filed a complaint alleging the company exploring the possibility of mining between Palmer and Sutton lacks a permit to do so.

“The permit is issued for a five-year span of time, but the regulations say if no activities take place within the first three years the permit expires,” said Kirby Spangler, president of Castle Mountain Coalition, one of the groups that filed the complaint.

The way Spangler and his colleagues see it, when Usibelli Coal Mine filed to renew its permit with the state Department of Natural Resources in 2001, there wasn’t actually anything to renew.

That’s because it expired in 1996 after the original company to hold coal leases there, Idemitsu, didn’t do any work in the area. The company failed to do work in the first three years, then filed for a two-year extension, during which it also did no work, Spangler said.

There was some exploration work, Spangler said, but the only actual coal mining work came in 2010 when Usibelli built a road to the mining area.

Usibelli disagrees.

“There’s been activity that goes back during the time that they were saying there was none that actually validates this permit,” said Robert Brown, Usibelli’s vice president for Southcentral operations, who has been overseeing Wishbone Hill.

Brown said that as far as Usibelli is concerned, it has a valid permit.

“We believe, as does DNR, that we have a valid mine permit from the department,” Brown said. “They’ve shown that by continuing to renew our permit and also accepting changes to the permit that we’ve made over the years. That signifies to me that they believe we have a valid permit to mine.”

The company is working to renew that permit yet again. DNR held its last meeting to gather public comment in Sutton last week.

Brown said it’s not necessarily the case that work absolutely has to start in three years.

“There’s multiple stipulations that a company does not necessarily have to start operations within three years,” Brown said.

The road being built to the area, he said, marks the start of mining operations, though the company hasn’t yet announced its findings as to whether it is cost-effective to proceed with the project.

“Yeah, technically by doing what we did last year that is technically the start of developing a mine, is building a road into it and it was done under our mine permit,” he said. “We also did some drilling under our mine permit last year.”

He said that the move from the anti-coal coalition doesn’t surprise him. He’d heard inklings of it at the public hearing in Sutton last week.

“At the end of the day, in my opinion, this is just another attempt to try to stop it,” he said.

Asked for a prediction on how this complaint is going to play out, Spangler said that a similar issue with a similar permit last year is instructive.

“January of last year, the same thing was brought up about the Jonesville Mine in public comments,” Spangler said.

He said that DNR didn’t respond to that allegation until after it had issued a permit renewal. Spangler and his colleagues complained, the department pulled the permit back, responded to the complaint and re-issued the permit.

In that case, Spangler said, it turned out there was some work being done in the area that he and his colleagues hadn’t known about.

“On this one we really think that they don’t and we really think that there is documentation in the inspection reports,” Spangler said. “No activity has occurred.”

Brown said he expects to hear a ruling from DNR sometime next week. Spangler said he intends to see the complaint through as far as it will go, filing it with other divisions or departments if that is the next step required.

“Looking at the (coal mining regulations) and the surface coal mining laws and the way that they’ve been challenged in other parts of the country, a lot of it is just holding the agencies to their own regulations,” he said. “They get kind of used to nobody really paying attention and now all of a sudden there are people paying attention.”

Contact Andrew Wellner at andrew.wellner@frontiersman.com or 352-2270.