Brief by Allen Best
Mining – February 2009 – Colorado Central Magazine
The Colorado Supreme Court this week said that Summit County — and other Colorado counties — cannot ban the method called heap-leach that uses cyanide and acids to remove gold from crushed ore. Gunnison, Gilpin, Conejos, and Costilla counties had also adopted similar legislation.
“A patchwork of county-level bans on certain mining extraction methods would inhibit what the General Assembly has recognized as a necessary activity,” Justice Gregory Hobbs wrote for the majority. That necessary activity, he added, is the “orderly development of Colorado’s mineral resources.”
The counties had adopted the regulations after the Summitville mining disaster in the San Juan Mountains of Colorado in the 1980s resulted in a badly polluted Alamosa River. The only remaining place where the same mining technique is used is on the western flanks of Pikes Peak, at the Cripple Creek & Victor Gold Mining Co.
Mining industry officials say Colorado’s state government has improved its regulatory oversight to prevent a recurrence of Summitville. County officials remain unconvinced.
“The state’s oversight of mining hasn’t been sufficient, and at the county level we don’t have the tools to deal with mining,” Summit county Commissioner Karn Stiegelmeier told The Denver Post. Counties, he added, now need “more clarity from the Legislature.”
John Taylor, legislative affairs director for Colorado Counties Inc., told the same newspaper that this case illustrates “ongoing tensions over what is in the state sphere and what is in the county’s, and how they coexist.”
