Marquette County Officials Discuss Plan to Build Rio Tinto’s Ore Hauling Road

Yesterday, some local elected officials met with the Marquette County Road Commission to discuss whether or not to move forward on Rio Tinto’s County Road 595/Woodland Road ore hauling project. The meeting was closed to the public.

“We met with elected officials from townships, the county board, and the cities and we discussed what information that we each had about what was going on and there was some discussion on what direction we should take,” said county road engineer Jim Iwanicki. “I was asked to try to prepare a letter to send to Kennecott [wholly-owned subsidiary of Rio Tinto] and I am working on that letter as we speak.”

“The general consensus of the group was that the existing road system was not in the best public safety interest of the community as a whole and they wanted to continue to look at what options there were to continue on the 595 project.”

Rio Tinto announced last week that it was canceling plans to pursue building the 595/Woodland Road.

According to Iwanicki a rail option was discussed at the meeting with elected officials but, “from a road commission standpoint” the county has to look at trucking options using either existing roads or building a new road, not a rail line.

Iwanicki said that a funding source for the roughly $50 to $60 million road project is currently unknown. While the 595/Woodland Road plan does meet Michigan primary road standards and would be eligible for federal assistance, the county is expecting to get only $603,000 this year in Rural Federal Aid System funding and projects utilizing this money have already been planned out as far as 2014. Other possibilities, including asking state and federal legislators for special appropriation money, might not work either.

“The newly elected officials aren’t too fired up about getting special appropriations now in Washington,” said Iwanicki. “That’s probably an impossibility. So, right now it is strictly what could happen with entities that would use that road, private entities that would use that road for possibly funding.”

Iwanicki says permitting and building 595 is dependent both on Rio Tinto sharing its preliminary Woodland Road work with the county and eventually funding the haul road project. Iwanicki says “there’s no possibility” the county could cover even a fraction of the costs necessary “to get something like that permitted,” let alone to cover construction costs, without Rio Tinto’s participation.

“The Road Commission will not be able to pay for building it under the present funding scenario that we have,” said Iwanicki. “The Road Commission and the community as a whole does not know how it will be paid for because there is no agreement with Kennecott and there is no other funding source that would be capable of building a road of that cost and magnitude.”

Iwanicki says the same environmental issues that applied to Rio Tinto’s Woodland Road plan would apply “whether a governmental entity asks or a private entity asks.”

Last March, in a letter to the Michigan Department of Natural Resources and Environment, the EPA expressed concerns with the Woodland Road project due to its likely impact on wetlands, wildlife, and water quality; and a project statement that dodged the primary reason the company is trying to build the new road: “to haul ore between the Kennecott Eagle Minerals Company mine site and the Humboldt Mill processing site.”

Additionally, according to the Army Corps, “if the road is required to connect the proposed nickel mine at Eagle Rock with the milling operation and tailings disposal facility at Humboldt, these actions should be evaluated under one project. . .our regulations require a holistic view of a project, and the public and the process are best served by evaluating projects in their entirety.”

[Read letters from the EPA, Army Corps and US Fish & Wildlife Service expressing concerns with Rio Tinto’s ore hauling road by clicking here]

“The question that we have is. . . are we starting a new project with a clean slate or is it going to be viewed as a full project that’s already been asked for once already,” said Iwanicki. “At least at the political, the governmental level, we believe that it’s a different situation if its being asked for a public road in that area, rather than a private road.”

Iwanicki said a previous meeting with state DNRE officials suggested the ore hauling project can only be looked at under present circumstances, without factoring in the potential for the Rio Tinto to open additional mining projects west of its Eagle Mine.

Iwanicki says “that’s not planning for the future” and says additional mine development in the area is something the Road Commission is considering in their decision making on the 595 project.

Iwanicki says he has “no idea” on a possible timeline for when County Road 595 might be permitted or built and says the county will have up to five years to build the road, following possible permit approval.

“If it never gets built, it never gets built,” said Iwanicki.