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New West Feature

Mining Near Bryce Canyon: Who Benefits?

By Christian Probasco, 9-02-10

“If the mine doesn’t go through, it would devastate us,” says Janet Oldham, who owns the landmark Flying M Restaurant and is the mayor of Panguitch, a town that capitalizes on its proximity to Bryce and other tourist spots but needs jobs a mine could bring.

A decision by the Utah Board of Oil, Gas and Mining to confirm a 2009 mining permit for Alton Coal Development is the best thing to have happened to the communities of southern Utah in some time—and the worst. It was a vindication of the thoroughness of Alton Coal’s proposal and a confirmation that the state is completely out of touch with modern values.

The board stood up to badgering from extremist environmental groups and caved in to pressure from their wealthy friends in the mining industry.

“The (Sierra) club is disappointed in the board for upholding the decision, but we plan to pursue every other avenue possible to stop the mine,” said Clair Jones, the Sierra Club’s “Beyond Coal” campaign spokesperson, in a response to the Aug. 3 decision.

“The board’s decision to uphold the mine permit is a clear victory and will allow development to proceed in an environmentally responsible manner,” said Alton Project Manager Chris McCourt in a press release on the day of the decision.

The environmental groups involved in the dispute are trying to stop any new mining in southern Utah, as usual. The mining company is trying to push the project forward while avoiding public scrutiny, as usual. The locals in favor of the mine have been cast as ignoramuses incapable of deciding where their best interests lie. What else is new?

THE FACTS

Here are the (largely) undisputed facts:

Alton Coal Development LLC, based in Naples, Fla., plans to strip mine a shallow coal seam on approximately 635 acres of private land in a grazed valley that is about 200 miles south of Salt Lake City and approximately 10 miles from Bryce Canyon National Park. The mine’s footprint would be about 60 acres, but the company has also applied for a permit from the BLM to mine an adjacent 3,500 acres of public lands.

The initial plan would have the coal transported 130 miles by truck from the mine near the town of Alton (population 93 in 2003) in Kane County, through neighboring Garfield County on U.S. Highway 89 then west on State Route 20 to Interstate 15 and then south to Cedar City, where it would be loaded onto rail cars and sent to destinations unknown.

If the corporation sticks with that route, it will potentially be sending between 190 and 300 trucks per day lumbering through downtown Panguitch, a picturesque town listed on the National Register of Historic Places, which has made efforts to capitalize on its proximity to Bryce Canyon and Zion National Parks, Cedar Breaks National Monument and several national forests to increase its share of Utah’s tourist economy.

The town’s interest in tourism could be said to have heightened at the same time its primary economic base began to wane. Panguitch was built on ranching and logging. Ranching revenues have fallen with declining market prices and greater restrictions on grazing by the U.S. Forest Service, and logging has practically disappeared from the region, a victim—depending on whom you talk to—of similarly capricious market forces or unrelenting appeals of timber sales by environmental groups.

The final blow for the region’s once-thriving economy came in 1996 when Kaibab Industries closed the (by then barely sputtering) lumber mill in Panguitch, which had at one time employed 400 men in good paying jobs. That was also about the time President Bill Clinton declared the establishment of the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument from the rim of the Grand Canyon in Arizona, killing the prospects for a highly lucrative coal mine on the Kaiparowits Plateau, within the monument’s boundaries.

BAD, BAD P.R.

Alton Coal blundered into a public relations snafu trying to expedite the approval of its mining permit by the state. Gov. Gary Herbert’s aides cashed a donation to his election campaign from the corporation to the tune of $10,000 on the same day he and state regulators met with a company representative asking, “why the holdup?”

The process, which was, in fact, taking an inordinate amount of time, was hurried up, and the permit to mine 2 million tons of coal from Coal Hollow for three years was issued in November. The governor’s office denied there was any quid pro quo or that Herbert was even aware of the donation as he was meeting with the company representative.

The Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance (SUWA), the Natural Resources Defense Council, the National Parks Conservation Association and the Sierra Club appealed the state’s decision to the division’s board, arguing that the federal Surface Mining Control and Reclamation Act prohibited division employees who had a financial interest in the operation from participating in the certification process. The board didn’t see it their way and refused to revoke the permit.

Meanwhile, the BLM is plodding through the leasing process for the mine to extend into the adjacent 3,500 acres of public lands. The agency has held scoping meetings and has received input from locals and a deluge of form letters from members of SUWA, the Sierra Club and other environmental groups.

The thrust of the environmentalists’ arguments is that the mine will contaminate nearby streams, including the Virgin River, which, on most maps, is in a separate drainage, and that it would harm the wildlife therein and thereabouts. Some national leaders of the environmental movement have openly professed their intent to use the sage grouse, which inhabits the area, to bludgeon mining and ranching interests in the West, in the same manner the spotted owl was employed to kill the West’s timber industry. However, the Department of Interior has been slow to get the bird on the endangered species list and Alton Coal intends to take steps to mitigate impacts on local sage grouse populations.

Environmentalists also contend that dust from the mine will negatively affect stargazing from Bryce Canyon National Park, which, like most of southern Utah, has unusually dark night skies, owing to the paucity of nearby metropolitan areas.

Moreover, they claim to be concerned about the volume of truck traffic which would transit through Panguitch’s historic district and up U.S. 89, which is a state-designated scenic byway.

NOW, THE UN-FACTS

There have been rumors that Alton Coal might split the ore deliveries between Highway 20 and a southern route through Kanab. The company offered to build a trucking terminal in Panguitch but probably can’t be legally held to its word. Company representatives estimate the mine will provide 150 new jobs, including 50 driving positions, but there are no guarantees that those jobs will go to residents of Kane and Garfield counties.

Not a few locals question why the corporation doesn’t look more intently at building a private road to bypass the town.  Some wonder why the trucks can’t simply drive over the Markugunt Plateau west of Alton, thus saving themselves 80 miles of travel (possibly because that route is much steeper and the trucks would be crawling).

Many are wondering where the coal will ultimately be shipped. It could be sent to the Intermountain Power Plant near Delta, in Utah’s West Desert, or it could be shipped to a proposed power plant in nearby Sigurd which has also run into heavy opposition from environmentalists and locals.

Some believe the coal will be delivered to China. There’s even speculation that the coal could be liquefied by a new experimental process invented by a company which is operated by a California developer who owns property near Alton.

OPPOSED TO MINING HERE

Rebecca Gregg, who owns Thunder Horses Mercantile in downtown Panguitch, is not against coal mining per se—“It’s how we get 50 percent of our electricity,” she says (actually, Utah gets about 94 percent of its electrical energy from coal). However, she questions the logic of opening a mine in southern Utah, which, she notes, has the highest concentration of natural wonders anywhere in the nation. She also doesn’t think the issue of safety has been addressed. With many more trucks rolling on Highway 89 every day, she believes, there are bound to be more accidents.

Gregg also doesn’t buy assurances by county commissioners that the mining industry and tourist trade can peacefully coexist. Her opinion is shared by other owners of endangered Main Street businesses, but not by Mayor Janet Oldham who owns the landmark Flying M Restaurant on the north end of town.

“If the mine doesn’t go through, it would devastate us,” Oldham tells New West. “We have people commuting to the Hunter Power Plant in Ferron (about three hours northeast of Panguitch). I’m sure they would rather work near Alton.”

Allen Henrie, Panguitch’s city manager, shares Oldham’s concerns and adds that heavy truck traffic has been a fact of life for most of the town’s recent history. Logging trucks hauled lumber to the mill and tankers carried crude from the oil fields near Escalante. Even today semis continue to rumble through town every half hour or so, carrying ore to be processed into money at the gypsum plant in Sigurd or somewhere else in Utah.

Oldham and many others in city government, and, truth be told, the majority of city and county governments in southern Utah, are interested in attracting real jobs back to the region. By “real jobs” they mean full-time, year-round employment paying a wage that will support a whole family. In other words, the sorts of jobs which are hard to come by in the burgeoning tourism business, which runs eight months out of the year in this area and can be as fickle as any extractive industry.

The vehicle for that higher standard of living would be mining. There is, in fact, a green logic to digging in such a wondrous region, because it contains hundreds of billions (low estimate) to trillions of dollars of recoverable coal. And if that coal could be mined in an environmentally sensitive manner according to the strict guidelines of the Surface Mining Control and Reclamation Act of 1977, from areas most tourists would never see…

NO UNCONDITIONAL LOVE

Even Mayor Oldham’s enthusiasm for the project isn’t unconditional.

“We have to see economic development and jobs being created,” says Oldham. “We don’t want to see all the benefits go to Kane County while we get all the negatives.”

Few who remember the days before the current demonization of tree cutting and dirt digging have much regard for the environmental groups opposing the mine at Coal Hollow.

“Environmentalist organizations like SUWA have killed our economy time and again,” says Henrie.

“The environmentalists don’t want to see anything happen anywhere,” said Kane County Commissioner Dan Hulet. “They just want people in communities and across America to rely on social programs like with health care. They don’t want to see anyone with a good paying job.”

The way many local leaders see things, the modus operandi of SUWA, et al has been to help strangle extractive industries with legal appeals to sympathetic federal judges and then berate rural communities for seeking an economic base expanded beyond the singular shining path of tourism. Couple that self-fulfilling prophecy with a suspiciously progressivistic outlook that miscategorizes the proud professions of their ancestors and, hopefully, their children, as relics of a bygone era and you have a well-funded, legally savvy, irresistible force bashing into all-too-movable objects, which happens to be families who have lived there for generations.

The playbook is the same for the Alton Coal Mine.

“We have never had a coal strip mine in Utah,” says Clair Jones, “and we will fight to make sure that companies like Alton Coal can’t come in and destroy our air, water and local tourism and agriculture-driven economies….Tourism is a growing and lucrative industry in Kane County, and that will change if this mine goes forward. But the mine life is only three years and, after that, Kane County and the surrounding area will be stuck with the contaminated air and water that comes with a toxic coal strip mine.”

Mining proponents would characterize Jones’ statement as being long on sentiment and short on substance. The mine will only last three years if the Sierra Club and/or SUWA is/are successful in blocking Alton Coal’s access to the adjacent public lands. Otherwise, operations could continue for 20 years or more.

The massive Kennecott Copper Mine, a.k.a. “the richest hole on earth,” across the valley from, and in plain sight of, Salt Lake City might not qualify as a strip mine because it is, in fact, a vast pit where once stood a mountain, but it is a surface mine and has certainly set the precedent of peeling open a corner of the state to get at a precious resource. It has also not demonstrably damaged Salt Lake City’s tourist industry.

The jury is still out on whether the mine will cause an environmental catastrophe, as Jones assumes. And finally, on the issue of mining, there certainly is no “we” outside of downtown Salt Lake City and a few other liberal Utah communities when it comes to the California-born Sierra Club and Washington-D.C. based SUWA.

***

For much more information, go to the BLM’s 2007 scoping report.

For more information on Beyond Coal Utah, check out their website.

For a PowerPoint presentation on the mine by Alton Coal, go to their website.

Full disclosure: Thunder Horses Mercantile owner Rebecca Gregg is a business partner of the author.

Disclaimer: The author doesn’t trust Governor Herbert, Alton Coal or any other corporate entity any more than he does SUWA or the Sierra Club. He is trying to decide if his motto should be “publish and be damned” or “I only speak the truth” or “the article is already 2,000 words. If I had to go into global warming, or reducing the nation’s dependence on foreign energy sources, or the world market’s insatiable demand for coal, I would have to write a tome.”

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