On Monday, the City and Borough of Juneau moved one step closer to adopting a revised mining ordinance. The Committee of the Whole unanimously accepted the soft reboot recommended by the Mining Subcommittee. That won’t please Jim Clark and four other Juneau businessmen who proposed overhauling the existing ordinance. But it’s the right thing to do.
The latest battle on this issue began last April when Clark’s group submitted their proposal directly to the Assembly. The stated objective was to remove provisions duplicated by state or federal law which, they argued, “increase the delay and cost of mining exploration and mining” in Juneau and create a “multi-layered sequence of litigation” opportunities for mining opponents.
As an example, they cited the case in which the Thane Neighborhood Association successfully sued CBJ over the permit issued to reopen the Alaska-Juneau Mine in 1993. The implication is the lawsuit was enabled by a flawed ordinance.
But that’s not how the state Supreme Court viewed it. They concluded CBJ “engaged in impermissible phasing” to approve the permit. That created “an unacceptable danger that cumulative impacts would not be sufficiently analyzed. … If allowed to use such phasing in response to defects in mining applications, the [Planning] Commission could grant approval to any permit application no matter how deficient it is, making the Juneau code virtually meaningless and Commission decisions effectively unreviewable.”
Adopting an ordinance to block legitimate complaints like that would be a disservice to the community. But even if the Assembly made that choice, no prospective mining company would be trust that alone. A brief examination of the litigation history at the AJ and Kensington mines and the ongoing controversy over Greens Creek’s environmental compliance record would tell them there’s no easy path from exploration to permitting and eventual production.
My point is even the most relaxed ordinance can’t hide the fact that Juneauites are bitterly divided about mining. Only the community working together can prevent that from remaining a barrier to outside mining interests.
A similar case is the Juneau Access Road. Gov. Bill Walker stopped that project more than a year ago. (Why the Record of Decision for the Environmental Impact Statement hasn’t been issued yet is another story.) There’s no question it’s as divisive as the challenge to the mining issue. But it might less so if the state Department of Transportation (DOT) had followed the Federal Highway Administration’s “Interim Guidance on the Application of Travel and Land Use Forecasting in NEPA.”
Compliance with that guide wasn’t mandatory. But it recommended engaging all concerned parties in an early, collaborative process as a means of “creating better and more legally defensible forecasting applications.” In other words, it’s encouraging opposing interests to work towards consensus rather than relying on the courts to resolve their disputes.
Instead, the DOT proceeded to develop their traffic forecast models in a cocoon. Then the two sides came out of their respective corners fighting.
There’s no guarantee the collaborative process would have resulted a workable consensus. But since DOT was driving the project, it was their responsibility to reach out to the other side. By not doing so they further cemented an already difficult adversarial relationship.
Likewise, because Clark’s group initiated the mining ordinance change, before submitting their draft to the Assembly, they should have discussed it with the mining specialists at the Southeast Alaskan Conservation Council.
Unfortunately, there’s more to overcome than the classical land use/environmentalism divide that’s plagued these two projects. Mutual animosity has become a substitute for intelligent public discourse across the entire political spectrum. It’s evident in articles like one on Townhall.com titled “The Joy and Necessity of Driving Liberals Nuts.” Or when Slate.com headlines one of theirs with the question “Why Are Conservatives More Susceptible to Believing Lies?”
Even worse, Donald Trump has made tweeting insults from the White House an everyday routine. And as David Graham observed in The Atlantic, our president has induced many formerly thoughtful public figures “to sink to his level.”
There’s no business that will feel welcome in Juneau if we fall that far. But even in our relative civility, the land use laws governing our community must reflect a divided community. Which is why the Assembly was right to accept only minor changes to the existing mining ordinance.
• Moniak is a Juneau resident and retired civil engineer with more than 25 years of experience working in the public sector. His columns appear every Sunday. My Turns and Letters to the Editor represent the view of the author, not the view of the Juneau Empire.
