Published on June 5, 2019
Below is a statement from Midas Gold Idaho CEO, Laurel Sayer, in reaction to the Nez Perce Tribe’s notice of intent to sue:
We have long shared the Nez Perce Tribe’s concerns over water quality in the Stibnite Mining District and we are aware of the site’s historically degraded water quality. Filing a lawsuit will not fix the problem. Instead, the site needs to be cleaned up, a point we are certain the Tribe can agree.
As we have stated in our Plan of Restoration and Operations, it is a fact that the Stibnite Mining District has been severely impacted by a long history of past, largely unregulated mining activity. Midas Gold has never mined on site and our actions have been limited to studying the district. We believe that legacy tailings and waste dumps are creating concerning levels of arsenic and antimony present in the water at the site and we have reported these findings to our regulators. For over the last year we have been meeting regularly with our regulators on the issue of the site’s water quality. More recently, we have been working with the Idaho Department of Environmental Quality and the Environmental Protection Agency to gain permission to take action.
While the Stibnite Gold Project is designed to address the legacy problems facing site, with the levels of arsenic and antimony so high, we felt it was important to work with regulators now to identify a take action. We did not cause the current problems at the site, we are not operating and therefore have not discharged any water at site. Yet, we want to be part of the solution and are taking meaningful steps to do so. These problems will not resolve themselves and need attention. Doing nothing is not a viable option.
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