Montana’s Republican governor, Greg Gianforte, has decided to ignore a court order, the Montana Constitution, and the state’s “bad actor” law intended to prevent mining executives who have left environmental damages behind from receiving new mining permits. Even worse, his decision is intended to benefit extremely “bad actor” CEO Phillip C. Baker to allow him to operate yet another environmentally risky mine, this one under the Cabinet Mountains Wilderness Area.
Baker’s trail is a Montana environmental horror story. He was a top executive in the Pegasus Gold Corp. that developed a number of mines in Montana using the open-pit cyanide heap-leach process to pull gold from low-content rock. The process has left the state with very serious environmental problems, including “treatment in perpetuity” at numerous mine sites, many of which are now federal Superfund sites.
To make the long and ugly story shorter, when Pegasus Gold declared bankruptcy it left the state with what’s turning out to be hundreds of millions of dollars in reclamation costs in the last 30 years — and millions more to come as difficult “reclamation” efforts and “treatment in perpetuity” continue.
The list of the damage left behind by Baker and Pegasus is incredible. The Zortman Landusky Mine Superfund site in the Little Rockies has poisoned the water source for the Fort Belknap Tribe and cost the state and federal government more than $83 million dollars in on-going reclamation costs.
When the Montana Environmental Information Center filed a request for records on the state’s communications with Baker, Gianforte refused, then ignored a court order to produce those records, and is now appealing the order.
They say “the once-burnt child fears the fire.” Montana has not just been burnt, but nearly immolated by Mr. Baker’s mining disasters and the on-going costs of reclamation. Put bluntly, Gov. Gianforte is dead wrong to allow this “bad actor” to burn our state, our people, and our environment ever again.