Update from the Royal King Mine
I received this update from Adam Whitman at RKM:
Meridian didn’t get everything we wanted in this Basin Plan Amendment but we think that after 3-years and huge legal fees the Water Board has produced something we hope will provide regulatory certainty in the RMK site’s closure. To their credit, certain folks in the Regional Water Board worked hard on this too. We understand The Basin Plan Amendment to essentially authorize the Regional Water Board to say that there is salty water, some natural and some increased by mining, within some specific areas on the RMK site and that the overall impacts from mining are not significant enough to warrant any further action. This will provide the Board with the legal authority to say it is OK for us to essentially continue doing what we have been doing for the last 7 years in order for Meridian to comply with the regulations over the long term. So the good news is that essentially no activity will change from what has happened at RMK in recent years. This project has been a lot of wrangling with multiple interpretations of regulatory definitions and analysis of technical data in order to change the verbiage in the Basin Plan to legally account for what many of us have known about the area for a very long time. Assuming this passes at the Regional and State Board meetings it will still be a VERY happy 2014 to have this issue resolved. We then will work on a “Comprehensive Management Plan” to complete formalizing what activities are to take place over the long-term at the site, followed by the Water Board issuing Final Waste Discharge Requirements (WDR’s) formalizing their requirements of how the Comprehensive Management Plan and monitoring be implemented. Using this last pace as a metric, that likely puts us into 2020 for completion of these two remaining permits! Haha! Please feel free to share any part of this with the rest of the neighbors, and post the Water Board’s notice link on the Diamond XX website. They are soliciting comments and as demonstrated in the public meeting held in Copperopolis, your comments can make a HUGE difference.
I hope that you had a great Christmas and have an even better New Year. Adam Whitman
Comments are closed.
Thanks so much for publishing my letter. RMK management has had a good relationship with Diamond XX folks over the years.
Hey Diamond XX folks, as an update, we are on the home-stretch here. The Water Board hearing is this coming Friday March 28 in Sacramento. All of the BPA information is available on line 28 here: http://www.waterboards.ca.gov/centralvalley/board_decisions/tentative_orders/1403/index.shtml
A disgruntled recent retiree from the Water Board has delivered the only public comment against the BPA approval. He is apparently upon retirement now in disagreement with the findings of all of the folks he was working with at the Water Board during the previous three years of this process. Everyone else that Meridian is aware of including the Water Board technical and legal staff is essentially in agreement that this Basin Plan Amendment fits the situation at Royal Mountain King.
As mentioned above, if the BPA is passed it will essentially allow and require Meridian to continue managing the salty water at the site as it has been managed for about the last 7-years. If it is rejected it may require more earthwork to be done and/or treatment of the salty groundwater in some unknown way. Yes, the water we would be required to treat is mostly the same naturally salty water that Salt Springs Valley is known for.
If any of you folks would like to attend the meeting and comment verbally, you have the right to stand and speak in the meeting for 2 minutes. Meridian and the Water Board both agree that our neighbors’ comments carry a lot of weight much as they did for example in the scoping meeting held at the Copperopolis firehouse in the fall of 2011.
Thank you for listening.
Sincerely,
Adam Whitman
Royal Mountain King