Glenn Puit: More Sulfide Mine Questions

Acid mine drainage” occurs when air and water touch sulfide. A mining company wants to dig sulfide from beneath the Upper Peninsula’s Salmon Trout River and extract the valuable copper embedded in it. Photo credit Save the Wild U.P

Nearly a year ago, the Great Lakes Bulletin News Service documented secret political donations made by Kennecott Minerals, a mining company, to non-profit organizations controlled by Michigan’s Republican and Democratic Parties.

Kennecott was trying to gain political support for the construction of a controversial sulfide mine that would unearth nickel and copper directly underneath a cherished trout stream near Marquette. To this day, the amounts of those donations have not been revealed because of holes in Michigan’s campaign finance laws.

Now, as the battle over the mine plods through the courts, revelations about the activities of two state officials, one with the Department of Environmental Quality and the other with the governor’s office, are raising additional questions about the probity of the state’s approval process for the Kennecott project.

One of those members is Hal Fitch, who heads the Office of Geological Survey in the Michigan Department of Environmental Quality, the agency that reviews environmental permits for mining. The other is Matt Johnson, who until recently staffed the governor’s Upper Peninsula office, in Marquette.

In Mr. Fitch’s case, Save the Wild U.P., a citizens group formed to oppose the Kennecott proposal, reported that the environmental administrator launched a non-profit organization and invited a Kennecott engineer to serve on its board.

Some sulfide mine opponents and at least one Lansing-based advocate for statewide campaign financing reform say that the relationship between Mr. Fitch and the Kennecott engineer, geologist Andrew Ware, is a conflict of interest.

One of the opponents, Sierra Club forest ecologist Marvin Roberson, notes that Mr. Fitch was intimately involved in the hotly contested decision to permit the Kennecott mine, still is involved because of the court case, and would be responsible for regulating the mine it if and when it is built.

“He is the director of a division in a regulatory agency that is currently involved in a contested case proceeding for a mining application that was submitted by one of his board members,” Mr. Roberson pointed out.

And Rich Robinson, director of the Lansing-based Michigan Campaign Finance Network, also believes Mr. Fitch’s connections to Kennecott via the non-profit are a potential conflict.

“It just seems to me the larger concern is that he’s entered into an effective partnership with someone they are supposed to be regulating,” Mr. Robinson said.

In an interview with the Institute’s news service, Mr. Fitch insisted there was no conflict and that the purposes of his non-profit, the Northern Michigan Geologic Repository Association, are purely philanthropic: Replacing aging buildings that store ore samples from mining tests conducted on state-owned land in the Upper Peninsula. The materials can be studied by academics or companies looking for new mining opportunities.

Mr. Fitch said no money was collected from either of the mining companies represented on his board-the other is Bitterroot Resources, a mining company prospecting under the Menominee River for uranium-and that he resigned from the organization to avoid an appearance of a conflict. He formed the repository association this past October, well after MDEQ approved the Kennecott project.

But Mr. Fitch also insisted that, while his MDEQ department would regulate any mine that Kennecott operates in the state, his actions with the association were unrelated to that role and that he always remains neutral when dealing with permit applications.

This is not the first time Mr. Fitch has faced questions about his relationship with Kennecott, however.

As a top adviser to MDEQ Director Steve Chester, Mr. Fitch chaired a working group that crafted new state law regulating sulfide mining in Michigan-an activity that has not occurred in Michigan before and is controversial because sulfide, when exposed to water and air, generates sulfuric acid in a process that cannot be halted.

Critics of the working group’s proposed rules, which the state Legislature approved and Governor Granholm signed, say it contains significant flaws that favor mining companies over the public’s right to protect the environment.

Complaints about Mr. Fitch’s sympathies bloomed into outright calls for his removal in March 2007, when, as the MDEQ considered Kennecott’s application, opponents discovered that Mr. Fitch’s department had neglected to reveal two highly critical reports on the structural integrity of the proposed mine-which would be dug directly beneath the Salmon Trout River.

When that omission came to light, Save the Wild U.P. and other environmental groups said it was evidence that from “day one…the regulators were acting more as an arm of Kennecott Minerals than the public watchdogs they are supposed to be.”

Mr. Fitch denies allegations that he caters to the mining industry. He says he led the mining law work group in a completely independent manner and that “no one got everything they wanted.”

Complaints have also surfaced about Mr. Johnson, who directed Governor Granholm’s U.P. office. In November, Johnson resigned to take a job as a government relations official-i.e., a lobbyist-for Kennecott.

Meanwhile, as she has with the state’s other top environmental controversy, proposals to build up to eight new power plants in Michigan, the governor remains silent about MDEQ’s approval of the Kennecott sulfide mine.

And, echoing the criticism leaders in Lansing are receiving about their indifference to Michigan’s “coal rush,” sulfide mining opponents say that questions about how the new mining law was assembled and passed, why the state Legislature approved it, and the nature of the relationships between Granholm officials and mining companies make it clear that Kennecott’s political influence, fueled by sizeable donations and well-funded lobbying, is harming environmental policy in Michigan.

To learn more about sulfide mining in Michigan, visit www.savethewildup.org. The Michigan Land Institute’s Great Lakes Bulletin News Service published articles about the proposed mine and the intense lobbying around the issue last year.