Tag Archives: industrial development

Holding Up Political Props Will Not Uphold Human Rights

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When American politicians like Bruce Westerman talk about mining cobalt in the United States, they are almost always talking about copper and nickel mining. According to the US Geological Survey, the US has only 4 percent of the world’s cobalt reserves; and with the notable exception of the Jervois cobalt mine in Idaho and some unexploited reserves in Missouri, “any future cobalt production” would be a “byproduct” of copper and nickel mining.

Most of that mining would be done in the Lake Superior region. In Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, Lundin’s Eagle Mine has produced cobalt-bearing nickel concentrate. Rio Tinto-Talon Metals already control copper and nickel development from Ishpeming to the Keweenaw. In addition to this massive 400,000 acre land package in Michigan, the joint venture also controls the 31,000 acre Tamarack project in Minnesota, the state where most US cobalt reserves are located.

Even here, the primary target resource is nickel, followed by copper, as Tamarack’s own estimates clearly show. In 2017, Antofagasta briefly floated the idea in its annual report that its Twin Metals project near the Boundary Waters would be a significant source of cobalt, but this looks like nothing more than an attempt to position the mine as a source of critical minerals, and the company abandoned that posture. (Trump’s Department of Interior toyed with the idea, too.)

In light of these basic facts, Westerman’s arguments look specious and his moral posture deeply cynical. It’s concerning to see the Chair of the House Committee on Natural Resources use the artisanal, small-scale miners of the Congo as a political prop – I use that word advisedly – and trade on serious human rights concerns without any plan to address them. Amnesty International’s Mark Dummet fears this kind of “wholly self-serving” virtue signaling could even harm the people it pretends to protect.

Westerman seems to be taking his cues from Minnesota Republican Pete Stauber, who made the same argument after the Biden administration announced the 20-year mineral withdrawal to protect the Boundary Waters:

Joe Biden banned mining in over 225,000 acres of Minnesota’s Iron Range, and locked up development of taconite, copper, nickel, cobalt, platinum group elements, and more…not even one month ago, Joe Biden signed an agreement [presumably the Minerals Security Partnership] to fund mining projects in Chinese-owned mines in the Congo, where over 40,000 children work as slaves in forced labor and inhumane conditions with no environmental protections.

Stauber has made similar shows of concern about human rights in the Congo in the past. This time, just a couple of days later, the editorial board of the Wall Street Journal repeated the talking point: “The reality is that if minerals aren’t mined in the U.S., they will be extracted in countries with far less stringent environmental and labor standards.”

A small correction: the reality is that even if minerals are mined in the United States, they will be extracted in countries with far less stringent environmental and labor standards.**

The focus instead should be on taking steps to raise those standards, as Dorothée Baumann Pauly of the Geneva Center for Business Human Rights argues in a new white paper. Trying to eschew artisanally-mined cobalt from the DRC is tantamount to “denial of market realities,”* she writes:

global companies buying cobalt need to encourage the formalization and responsible extraction of the mineral rather than engaging in a futile attempt to avoid cobalt associated with ASM [artisanal small-scale mining] — an attempt that also ignores the sustenance that artisanal mining provides to millions of poor people.

In the Mutoshi pilot formalization program studied by Baumann-Pauly, mechanically prepared (open pit) small-scale mines improved safety. “Formalization stopped children and pregnant women from coming to the mine site.” Other measures encouraged women to participate in mining. The pay these women miners earned could double household income, and in interviews they said the extra income helped offset educational expenses for their children, who were now in school instead of working at a mine site. (Though the pilot program ended during the Covid-19 pandemic, a local cooperative continues to try to enforce these new standards at Mutoshi.)

None of this amounts to a perfect solution, but there’s clearly an opportunity to build on what this pilot accomplished, and it’s encouraging that Microsoft’s Michele Burlington, who accompanied Baumann-Pauly on her trip to the Congo, called for a “coalition” to address ASM in the cobalt supply chain.

If Republicans (or Democrats, for that matter) want to address human rights abuses in the DRC, then they should focus on taking constructive steps. And if they are really concerned about China’s outsize influence in the mineral supply chain, then they might want to take a closer look at China’s ownership stakes in companies like Rio Tinto, the very companies that promise to bring jobs and economic development to their own districts.

*This chart from The Centre for Research on Multinational Corporations (SOMO) nicely illustrates the point.

** A briefing from the Business and Human Rights Resource Centre also warns against the complacency behind these arguments: “assumptions [that] localisation of supply of transition minerals and their production in Europe and North America will guarantee respect for human rights and a sustainable, ethical provision of these materials are misguided.”

A BLM Map of Critical Minerals Near the Boundary Waters

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The latest release of Boundary Waters documents arrived today, a 14th supplemental production in response to my FOIA lawsuit v. the Department of the Interior. I’ve put them online here.

Two things caught my attention right away: first, an inventory of documents the Solicitor’s office at the Department of the Interior put together, apparently in connection with the Voyageur litigation. A short Twitter thread calls out some items of interest.

Also among the records I received today: a Bureau of Land Management map showing prospecting permits and preference rights leases in Superior National Forest.

There are already a significant number of active leases and many more in the application stage that could eventually come online.

The purple plume of inferred and hypothetical reserves of critical minerals is especially noteworthy here.

We know from other documents I obtained that political appointees in the Solicitor’s office intended to position Antofagasta’s mine as a source of critical minerals; and after the Trump administration published a new list of critical minerals in 2017, Antofagasta itself even flirted briefly (in its 2017 Annual Report) with the notion that Twin Metals had significant cobalt reserves.

The Biden administration is currently reviewing the actions the Trump administration took on Twin Metals and — maybe just as importantly — they are undertaking a review of the critical and strategic minerals supply chain. If it were to be fully developed, that purple plume of hypotheticals and inferences could become a real-world industrial corridor.

Update, 12 May 2021: According to a May 10 Settlement Agreement in Center for Biological Diversity et al. v. Mitchell Leverette et al. (a case in the US District Court of the District of Columbia), the Bureau of Land Management will review its May 1, 2020 decision authorizing the extension of 13 of the prospecting permits indicated on this map. The renewals were made without an Environmental Assessment under NEPA or an effects determination under the Endangered Species Act. These thirteen prospecting permits are for all intents and purposes suspended until BLM completes its review; Antofagasta agrees not to engage in any ground disturbing activities. Antofagasta’s two mineral leases are also under review at Interior and USDA, and we can expect some news on that front in the June 22 filing in Wilderness Society v. Bernhardt.

The Supreme Court is going to do what, exactly? Another update on MCRC v. EPA

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It turns out Marquette County Road Commission v. EPA, the mining haul route case I’ve followed for a few years, is not dead yet. Back in June, the Sixth Circuit denied a petition for an en banc hearing. That seemed the end of it. Now, a TV6 report says that the Pacific Legal Foundation’s Mark Miller is talking — once again — about Supreme Court review.

A Petition for a Writ of Certiorari was filed on October 25th. A response is due on November 28th.*

Maybe Miller knows something about the composition of the court post-Kavanaugh I don’t. The Sixth Circuit firmly rejected his argument — that the EPA’s objections to the Marquette County Road Commission’s plan for County Road 595 were tantamount to a “veto.” Now, he believes

the U.S. Supreme Court will read our petition, review our case on the merits, ultimately, and agree with us that the road commission’s plan as approved by the state should at least be considered by a judge as compared to the EPAs decision to reject that plan.

If I follow what Miller’s saying here, the Supreme Court is going to review a case that was denied en banc hearing at the Sixth Circuit, and then recommend that a judge — what judge? an administrative law judge? in what court?  — consider the Road Commission’s plan and weigh it against the objections of the EPA. I think I got that right.

Jim Iwanicki, Marquette County Road Commissioner, has another set of expectations:

the purpose of the lawsuit is to have the U.S. Supreme Court review the decision of the Michigan Appeals Court to side with the EPA and to get an explanation as to why the the EPA turned down the permit in the first place….Iwanicki says he wants answers on the EPA’s decision. He says the road commission was not given a solid answer on why the EPA ruled against the road’s construction.

The construction of 595 would have gone through undeveloped wetlands.

“There is no mechanism right now to build 595,” said Iwanicki. “Right now it is more of the issue of, were we treated fairly and was the permit looked at properly. If not then those people that didn’t look at it properly should be addressed and called forward on the carpet.”

I wonder if these are actual expectations, or if Miller and Iwaniki — and StandU.P., the dark money 501c4 behind the push for CR 595 — are rabble rousing.

*Update: on November 21st, Solicitor General Noel Francisco requested, and the Supreme Court granted, an extension to December 28th to file a response. The reason given: “the heavy press of earlier assigned cases to the attorneys handling this matter.”

Second Update, 4 December: Two amicus curiae briefs were filed on November 28th in support of the Marquette County Road Commission by the Southeastern Legal Foundation and the Mackinac Center for Public Policy and the County Road Association of Michigan and Stand U.P., the 501c4 dark money organization promoting CR595. Both briefs take their cue from the argument that failed in the Sixth Circuit, asserting that the question before the court involves an “arbitrary and capricious EPA veto.”

Update, 19 December. The Department of Justice has requested a second extension, until January 28, 2019, to file a response. The reason given is, again, “because the attorneys with principal responsibility for preparation of the government’s response have been heavily engaged with the press of previously assigned matters with proximate due dates.” The request goes on to note that counsel for the Marquette County Road Commission does not oppose a second extension. So we can’t expect anything like a resolution in this case until the New Year.

Update, 28 January 2019. The Environmental Protection Agency responded today to the Road Commission’s petition for Supreme Court review.  As expected, the reply focuses on the fact the Road Commission “voluntarily discontinued the permitting process” back in 2015, then turned around and brought suit, saying the EPA had acted in an arbitrary and capricious way.

The EPA replies that this is a mess of the Road Commission’s own making.

To be sure, EPA’s objections may have had the practical effect of making the overall Section 404 permitting process (if petitioner had continued to pursue it) more protracted than it otherwise would have been…. At most, however, EPA’s objections required petitioner to continue with a permitting process that petitioner was obligated to invoke regardless of EPA’s objections—a requirement “different in kind and legal effect from the burdens attending what heretofore has been considered to be final agency action.”

The Road Commission has repeatedly failed to convince the lower courts of its central contention, that EPA objections amounted to a veto.  Instead, when the Michigan Department of Environmental Quality declined in July of 2015 to grant or deny the Road Commission’s application, permitting authority for CR 595 transferred to the Army Corps of Engineers. The Road Commission could have simply continued the permitting process.  Why didn’t they? Instead, they’ve ended up here, at the door of the Supreme Court, looking for relief from — what, exactly? their own impatience?

Update, 11 February 2019. Attorneys for the Marquette County Road Commission have filed a Reply Brief. In a more sophisticated version of the veto argument rejected by the Sixth Circuit, they accuse the EPA of playing “a semantic shell game” around the issue of final agency action. They still use the word “veto” throughout the brief, and argue that EPA has made an important concession in its 28 January filing:

they now concede one crucial point that below they denied: the Corps required the Road Commission to submit a new Section 404 CWA permit application after the EPA vetoed the permit the State of Michigan stood ready to issue. [Here they cite a sentence from the EPA brief, which states:] “the Corps asked petitioner to submit a ‘new’ application.” That factual concession amounts to an implicit legal concession that, in regards to the State of Michigan Department of Environmental Quality (MDEQ) Section 404 CWA permit application process, the EPA’s work was consummated… Moreover, it recognizes that there were consequences to the Road Commission that flowed from that consummation of EPA’s work in regards to that vetoed state permit: now, the Road Commission had to take action in order to obtain a Section 404 CWA permit—it had to submit a new permit application to the Corps.

Who, exactly, is playing shell games? This argument appears to be little more than sophistry. When the EPA brief uses the word “new” at the indicated place (page 11), the brief is quoting the Marquette County Road Commission’s own petition. That is why the EPA places “new” inside quotation marks. EPA is, moreover, quoting Marquette County Road Commission in order to refute the assertion that this was anything but the continuation of an ongoing review process. To quote your opponent is not to concede his point.

The Reply Brief also cites the recent Weyerhaeuser decision over enforcement of the Endangered Species Act to argue that there is “a basic presumption of judicial review for any party suffering legal wrong because of agency action.” This would seem to create the burden of proving that the Road Commission suffered legal wrong — which would seem to bring us full circle: the Road Commission only suffered legal wrong if, in fact, the EPA’s objections constituted a veto.

Round and round we go. Now it’s up to the Roberts court to sort this out, or just turn it down. I still think the latter is the most likely outcome.

Update, 19 February 2019. A 13 February entry in the docket shows the case has been distributed for conference on the first of March. It is one of ten Sixth Circuit cases up for consideration.

You’ll find my other posts on MCRC v. EPA here. 

Is Corruption at Interior Putting the Boundary Waters At Risk?

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On the afternoon of Friday, December 22nd, with Congress in recess and most Americans already starting their holiday celebrations, the Department of the Interior issued a 19-page legal memorandum reversing hard-won, eleventh-hour Obama-era protections for the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness in northern Minnesota. Signed by Interior’s Principal Deputy Solicitor Daniel Jorjani, Memo M-37049 allows Twin Metals, a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Chilean conglomerate Antofagasta Plc, to renew its leases of Superior National Forest lands where it proposes to mine copper, nickel, and other minerals for the next 100 years.

Even one year of mining would scar the land, destroy wetlands, wreck the forest and fill it with industrial noise, and pollute the water. And this kind of mining — sulfide mining — always risks major environmental catastrophe, long after a mine is closed and the land reclaimed. After a brief reprieve, the Twin Metals project is again threatening this unique public wilderness area, along with the thriving tourist and outdoor economy that has grown up around it.

The reversal was immediately met with allegations of corrupt dealing. In a statement calling the move by Interior “shameful,” Minnesota Governor Mark Dayton cried foul.

A December 22nd headline in the Wall Street Journal offered what appeared to be a straightforward explanation: cronyism. “Trump Administration to Grant Mining Leases That Will Benefit Landlord of President’s Daughter Ivanka Trump.” But Chilean billionaire Andronico Luksic Craig, whose family controls Antofagasta Plc, and who only after Trump’s election purchased the Washington, D.C. mansion Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner rent for $15,000 a month, claims never to have met his tenants, and says he met Donald Trump only once, at a New England Patriots game.

It’s unclear whether Luksic Craig’s denials can be taken at face value and whether they are enough to dispel the notion that the reversal was made directly to benefit Antofagasta or the Luksic family. What prompted the action? Who directed it? Who contributed to the memo, and who reviewed it? What conversations did Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke, Deputy Solicitor Jorjani, and other administrators have about the reversal, and with whom?

The public deserves clear answers to these questions, and last week, I submitted a FOIA request to the Solicitor’s Office at the Department of the Interior, to see if I might gain some insight into the process behind Memo M-37049. At the same time, it’s worth noting that these are not the only questions worth asking. Luksic Craig and his Washington, DC mansion may make good headlines, tabloid fodder, and Twitter snark, and there is no ignoring the whiff of impropriety about his real-estate dealings with the president’s daughter and son-in-law, who also happen to be senior White House advisors. But that’s not the whole story here. A scandal involving Luksic-Craig and his tenants, or some direct dirty dealing between Antofagasta and Interior, might eventually come to light, but the prospect of such a scandal might also serve to distract us from other, large-scale corruption that continues to put the Boundary Waters — and other public lands and waters — at serious risk.

Put the reversal in context. Consider, for example, the Executive Order, entitled “A Federal Strategy to Ensure Secure and Reliable Supplies of Critical Minerals,” that was issued just two days before the Boundary Waters reversal, and which, like the Interior memo, sets the stage for exploitation of mineral resources on public lands. The EO appeared to be the policy outcome of a U.S. Geological Survey of the country’s critical minerals resources published on December 19th; but Trump’s December 20th order was years, not one day, in the making.

The EO revives Obama-era legislative battles over so-called strategic and critical minerals and declares victory by executive fiat. Back in 2013, pro-mining measures introduced in both the House (HR 761) and the Senate (S 1600) promised to “streamline” the permitting process for multinational companies mining on federal lands, like Superior National Forest. The Obama administration opposed them on the grounds that they would allow mining companies to circumvent environmental review. Proponents of HR 761 called it cutting red tape; the resolution actually tried to shut the public out of the process. It touted jobs, but, as critics pointed out, provided no real strategy for creating them; and it hawked anti-Chinese hysteria of the kind that candidate Trump regularly advanced. (Tellingly, House Republicans rejected a motion that would have barred export to China of strategic and critical minerals produced under the HR 761 permit, in tacit acknowledgment that China drives global demand for copper and nickel.) Coming just two days after this EO, the Boundary Waters reversal looks less like a one-off favor to a Chilean billionaire, and more like a coordinated move in a broader campaign.

This subversion of public process is not just the dirty dealing of a few bad actors. It’s also the consequence of weakened institutions; and institutional sabotage — or what Steve Bannon pretentiously called the deconstruction of the administrative state — is the precursor to large-scale corruption. Scott Pruitt might still be the poster boy for putting the fox in charge of the henhouse, but Ryan Zinke appears to be pursuing a similar brief at Interior. Though his bungling of the offshore drilling announcement made him appear incompetent, he is making big changes to favor big mining. The Secretary has made it one of his agency’s top ten priorities to “ensure access to mineral resources” and committed to minimizing “conservation objectives” that interfere with extractive industrial development. His plan to shrink Bears Ears followed a map drawn by a uranium mining company. At Grand Staircase-Escalante and Gold Butte National Monuments, Zinke has virtually surrendered vast swaths of public lands to extractive industry.

The Boundary Waters reversal, too, looks like the work of institutional saboteurs. It settles a lawsuit against the Department of the Interior by conceding that the government should not have discretion over public lands when commercial interests are at stake. Its author, Deputy Solicitor Jorjani, did a brief stint at Interior during George W. Bush’s second term, but it was his high profile job as Executive Director of the Koch Institute that distinguished him as the right man for Ryan Zinke’s Interior. As Polluter Watch, a project of Greenpeace, notes, Jorjani was the Koch Institute’s very first hire, and among the five most highly compensated employees at the Charles Koch Foundation. Now, along with Scott Cameron and Benjamin Keel, Daniel Jorjani works with the team at Interior charged with “reviewing rules their previous employers tried to weaken or kill,” according to reporting by the New York Times and Pro Publica. Similar deregulation teams, “connected to private sector groups that interacted with or were regulated by their current agencies,” were formed at all administrative agencies. The teams put public institutions at the service of powerful patrons, subordinating public protections to private interests.

This capture and sabotage of government agencies compounds and multiplies risk, removing public safeguards and compromising appointed guardians. In the case of the Boundary Waters, the risk of irreversible damage and environmental catastrophe would extend far beyond the mining location, because mining in Superior National Forest would also significantly intensify the cumulative effects of the recent boom in leasing, exploration, and drilling throughout the Lake Superior watershed.

All around the greatest of the Great Lakes, the industrial footprint of sulfide mining operations is expanding rapidly. Just to the southwest of the Boundary Waters, for example, Polymet, a company that has never operated a mine before, proposes building an open pit copper and nickel mine that will require water treatment and tailings dam maintenance “in perpetuity” — that means forever. Meanwhile, Scott Pruitt is dismantling federal rules requiring hardrock mining companies to take financial responsibility for cleanup.

State regulatory agencies are poorly equipped to oversee these new projects. They often fail to give the public a meaningful voice in permitting, or obtain the required prior consent from the region’s Indigenous nations. For their part, many state politicians are racing to deregulate, or at least accommodate, the mining companies. Just this past October, Wisconsin republicans repealed the state’s Prove it First law, which required copper, nickel and gold miners to prove that they could operate and close a sulfide mine without producing acid mine drainage. (They never proved it.) In Michigan, where Canadian mining companies are moving aggressively into the Upper Peninsula, State Senator Tom Casperson has just proposed giving mining companies and other representatives of industry “disproportionate clout” in the review of environmental rules.

Obviously this all goes way beyond doling out favors to billionaire friends or cronies at Mar-A-Lago, and it didn’t start when the Trumps came to town. Until it is called out, voted out, and rooted out, corruption at this scale – coordinated, institutionalized, systemic – will make a mockery of rule-making and oversight, and put our public lands, as well as our public life, at risk.

Postscript: This January 10th article by Jimmy Tobias in the Pacific Standard takes a careful look at Daniel Jorjani’s calendar, which was obtained through a records request, and identifies two meetings with representatives of the Twin Metals mining project: a June 14, 2017 meeting with Raya Treiser and Andy Spielman of WilmerHale on behalf of Twin Metals, and a July 25th meeting with Antofagasta Plc. I discuss these meetings in this follow up post.

Read more posts about the Boundary Waters reversal here.

Some remarks on “another kind of power”

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A new post about the merger of two Upper Peninsula environmental organizations on Keweenaw Now includes this short video excerpt of the talk I gave in Marquette, Michigan a while back about the power and responsibility we have to protect water and wild places from unsustainable development.

You can read the full text of my remarks here.

The Boom Starts With A Rush

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Overturned Eagle Mine TruckThe news that an ore truck overturned last week on its way from Eagle Mine to Humboldt Mill brought me back to a conversation some friends and I had in the lobby of the Landmark Inn this past October. Earlier that day we’d been touring the Yellow Dog Plains on the smooth wide roads that the Marquette County Road Commission cut through the wilderness for the mining company, keeping count of the big trucks we saw. All the trucks were outfitted with double loads — two side-dump trailers worth of ore — and the ore was covered with black tarps, neatly tied down.

The ties caught my attention. I wondered how long it would be before human nature set in, and workers started getting lackadaisical about how they tied down the tarps, or stopped bothering to secure and check each tie.

I was not even thinking of anything so scientific as studies by Ludovic Moulin, which find that over sixty percent of industrial accidents can be attributed to “organizational and human factors.” I had in mind something closer to the line about the field of the slothful in Proverbs: “yet a little sleep, a little slumber, a little folding of the hands to sleep,” and disaster can ensue. Eventually, someone in the course of the day was going to shrug and say to himself, “good enough,” slacken his attention, or hurry off to a break, I thought, and things could go downhill from there. A loosely tied load might spill on the highway or on the roadside, even if the driver was taking every precaution on his route. Repeat that small human error enough times, and you have a trail of sulfide ore from the mine to the mill, running through the Yellow Dog Plains and right through the center of Marquette.

Turns out I’d failed to fully grasp the reality of the situation. I didn’t imagine at the time that the tarps used to tie down the ore on the Eagle Mine trucks would rip in the case of an accident. In this case, the tarp of the second trailer was “torn open,” according to Save the Wild UP; Yellow Dog Watershed Preserve has a photograph of the torn cover here. I was also unaware that the Michigan Department of Environmental Quality allowed these soft-cover tarps only after Eagle Mine had requested a special amendment to its permit. Hard covers would take longer to remove; with soft covers, the trucks could be more easily unloaded. Time is money.

Special amendments and exceptions seem to be the rule when it comes to Eagle. For instance, though Lundin Mining CEO Paul Conibear has repeatedly boasted to investors about the great transportation infrastructure already in place at Eagle when Lundin bought the property from Rio Tinto, the truth is that the current haul route for Eagle Mine was never part of the plan. It was a last minute concoction — an “upgrade” of roads hastily authorized by the Marquette County Road Commission. No surprise, then, that a full environmental assessment of the haul route — as required by Part 632 of the Michigan Nonferrous Metallic Mining Law — has never been made.

Last week’s accident might be yet another sign that Eagle Mine was not actually ready for prime time when Lundin announced, at the end of November, that Eagle had entered commercial production ahead of schedule. But consider things from the company’s point of view. Lundin had acquired the Candelaria copper mine from Freeport only a month earlier for $1.8 billion — taking on huge debt — and by the end of November copper prices were declining precipitously. That made it all the more urgent to start delivering nickel at Eagle. After all, analysts expect “Lundin to introduce a dividend in 2015 once its Eagle mine is ramped up.”  Pressure is mounting. The Lake Superior mining boom appears to have gotten underway in a slightly panicked rush.

A Response from Maidlow’s Office

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Karen Maidlow’s office responded this morning with what appears to be a form letter regarding the proposed lease of a parcel next to the Yellow Dog River for mineral exploration by Lundin Mining.

The letter I sent last week urged Maidlow to look into Fisheries’ sudden — and perplexing — reversal of Kelley Smith’s 2003 “non-development” classification of the parcel.

In 2003, Smith deliberately reversed a 2002 “development” recommendation by Fisheries field staff. Why? Madison of Fisheries said he must have done it “for some reason” and Stampfly of Forestry was “at a loss” to account for it. Maidlow realizes she can’t ignore Smith, so she puts him in his place: “Mr. Smith was not part of the review process, only the approval process”; the former Fisheries Chief was reversed “on the basis of the most recent field review.” The field wins out over the office. The bureaucracy repudiates the bureaucrat. Fisheries’ recent reversal of Smith will likely be upheld.

Here is the salient paragraph:

On November 21, 2002, field staff reviewed the parcel under consideration here for a direct metallic mineral lease request from Prime Meridian Resources, Inc. (Prime). Field staff’s recommended parcel classification was development. Although the parcel did not contain water or aquatic resources, its classification was changed to nondevelopment on August 21, 2003 at the request of Mr. Kelly Smith, former DNR Fisheries Division Chief, as a condition of lease approval. Please note that Mr. Smith was not part of the review process, only the approval process. On the basis of the most recent field review, the proposed classification for this parcel is Leasable Development with Restriction. This means that the sub-surface minerals can be mined, subject to other regulatory review, and any proposed development on the surface would face further review by DNR staff before being permitted.

I’m afraid this already sounds like a done deal, even though nobody at DNR seems to know — or is willing to discuss — why Smith wanted to protect Parcel NE1/4 SE1/4, Section 13, T50N, R29W on the Yellow Dog Plains from industrial development.