EPA delays decision on Pebble veto to December
Citing a large number of public comments, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has given itself more time, until Dec. 2, to make a fi - nal decision on a controversial plan to close off large areas of state lands in the Bristol Bay region to large mine development. In a Federal Register Notice, EPA said it received more than 35,000 comments on the plan by Aug. 24 and expects the number to grow as com- ments received just before a Sept. 6 deadline are included. The plan is ba- sically aimed at foreclosing any plan for the proposed large Pebble copper/ gold/molybdenum project near Il- iamna, southwest of Anchorage. The agency’s normal procedure would be to decide within 30 days of the close of public comments, or by Oct. 6. Meanwhile, Pebble’s developer. Pebble Partnership Ltd., or PPL, a
subsidiary of Northern Dynasty Min - erals, submitted its comments with a blistering criticism of EPA’s pro- posal. PPL also recently announced that it had secured $60 million in new financing though advance sales of gold and silver from the project to a buyer. “The EPA (proposed) action … flies in the face of decades of reg - ulatory precedent for fair and due process for development projects,” said John Shively, CEO of the com- pany said in its comments. “EPA’s actions are politically motivated … (the agency) has made wildly specu- lative claims about possible adverse impacts from Pebble’s development that are not supported by any defen- sible data and are in direct contra- diction with the facts demonstrated in the U.S. Army Corp of Engineer’s Final Environmental Impact State- ment (FEIS) for the Pebble Project,”
Shively said. “The FEIS clearly states that Peb- ble can be developed without harm to the Bristol Bay fishery … Regulations and court precedent specify EPA must establish that development will have demonstrable adverse impacts before it can initiate a veto, and the EPA did not do this.” Shively said. “Congress did not give the EPA broad authority to act as it has in the Pebble case, using a provision in Sec- tion 404 of the federal Clean Water Act to veto a U.S. Army Corps of Engi- neers permit. The Section 404, “veto was intended to be narrowly defined and for specific areas. In this case, the EPA has preemptively vetoed 309 square miles (nearly 200,000 acres) of state of Alaska land, an area 66 times larger than any previous 404 veto,” Shively said.
— Tim Bradner
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The Alaska Miner
Fall 2022 9/29/21 2:37 PM
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