Press "Enter" to skip to content

Board Rejects Spearfish Canyon Gold Mine, Due to Risk and Incomplete Plan

The Lawrence County Planning and Zoning Board unanimously recommended last week that the county not permit Deadwood Standard Project/Valentine Mining Ccompany LLC to blast for gold in Spearfish Canyon near Savoy.

Why wouldn’t we want a mining company knocking more holes in the ground in the midst of one of South Dakota’s great natural wonders? Maybe because Valentine Mining Company doesn’t have a complete plan for processing whatever ore it finds:

The previous plan included on-site processing. Now VMC plans to haul the ore somewhere off-site.

But company officials said they don’t know where yet. That troubled some audience members and board members, who said the lack of a processing plan means there’s no way to anticipate truck traffic, or to gauge the potential environmental harm of the processing [Seth Tupper, “Board Recommends Denial of Mining Near Spearfish Canyon,” SDPB, 2020.10.02].

Or maybe because experience tells us that letting folks who lack a plan start mining leads to pollution and taxpayer expense:

Retired physician Don Kelley, of Nemo, offered comments by phone.

“Although I believe the folks advocating for this permit have no desire to cause harm,” Kelley said, “I think our record of mining projects in Lawrence County should tell us that things often tend not to go as planned.”

That record includes the Gilt Edge Mine near Lead. Since its owner went bankrupt in 1999, the state and federal government have spent more than $120 million cleaning up the mine and treating its polluted water [Tupper, 2020.10.02].

The Planning and Zoning Board notes that Valentine still hasn’t provided information that officials asked for eight years ago when the miners took their first swing at seeking to blast the canyon:

County Commissioner Daryl Johnson, who sits on the planning and zoning board, pointed out that VMC originally applied for a CUP in 2012 when Johnson sat on the commission, and at that time was directed to provide more information, a directive that was never acted upon or followed up on.

“We basically said, ‘We want you to go to the state, the DENR, have them analyze all of your data and come back to us with a recommendation. … To my knowledge, at this point, we’ve never gotten that information back,” Johnson said. “Another concern of mine is the fact that the state sets up a bond requirement and as we’ve seen in the past with several superfund sites in Lawrence County, the bonds that have been put in place aren’t nearly sufficient to cover what’s happened. Shortfalls of hundreds of millions of dollars” [Jaci Conrad Pearson, “Proposed Gold Mine Rejected by Planning and Zoning,” Black Hills Pioneer, 2020.10.03].

The Lawrence County Commission gets the final say on the Dakota Standard Project. The commission cannot hold its public hearing on this matter before October 20.

2 Comments

  1. Donald Pay 2020-10-05 13:06

    Interesting. The Lawrence County Planning and Zoning Commission has really changed for the better since I was involved in the mining issue in the the 80s and 90s. As with all P&Z decisions this can be overruled by the County Commission. Let’s hope not.

    Groups in the 90s proposed a special, exceptional critical and unique designation under SD mining law for Spearfish Canyon that would have precluded the Ragged Top mine. The mining companies only wanted a rim to rim designation, leaving Ragged Top out of the designation. Of course the Board of Minerals and Environment went with the mining company proposal. And that’s why we have this controversy today.

  2. leslie 2020-10-06 05:30

    Is commissioner Johnson a minority member?

Comments are closed.