Stories in this Regional News Roundup are excerpted from weekly newspapers from around the region. This is part one, with part two scheduled to appear in Sunday’s Tribune.
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COLFAX — Save the Palouse not-for-profit members came before the Whitman County Commissioners to ask them to fight against the Wind Turbine project proposed near Kamiak Butte during the regular commission meeting Monday.
Colfax farmer and Save the Palouse member Bill Myers asked commissioners to reconsider the moratorium again.
A moratorium is a temporary suspension of an activity, law or regulation.
“It makes absolutely no sense to grant these guys anything,” Myers said, noting that he is concerned about subsidiaries when the turbines are passed on.
Whitman County resident and Save the Palouse member Teresa Bannister asked commissioners if they were aware of Benton County’s lawsuit against the wind company.
“The lawsuit they are filing against the governor’s approval of the project, yes,” Whitman County Commissioner Art Swannack responded.
According to Bannister, this opens the doors for the commissioners to join and fight for the county. “Not agree with them, not decide, not lay down and let this happen,” she said.
“Can you explain how Benton County sued against the governor and would open the door for Whitman County,” asked Swannack, to which Bannister replied they are fighting against the wind turbines in Horse Heaven.
Kevin Akesson stated that the governor’s ability to impose basically land use regulation by disappointment of the FSEC and the authority it has been given recently is unconstitutional.
Swannack said those issues were dealt with in 2008 and 2012 by the State Supreme Court in regard to the constitution of the legislature setting up for FSEC ruling it was constitutional and their administration processes are constitutional.
“How the governor handled this last issue specifically we’ll see what the courts say on that. I don’t know if they’ll uphold his action or they’ll have some remanding saying he went too far,” Swannack said. “But they upheld FSEC’s ability to be the alternate path for land use regulation compared to the county.”
Swannack said he understood and agreed that it should be local but that is what the Supreme Court ruled.
“In my mind, a moratorium would give us some time to do that more thoroughly, utilizing whatever the state is currently studying the issue as well and coming up with documents for non site specific regulations,” Akesson said. “I think there’s justification for a moratorium and that would help our situation in the county.”
— Teresa Simpson, Whitman County Gazette (Colfax), Thursday
Sidney Resources to mine at Warren: New facility planned for 2025
McCALL — Idaho-based mining company Sidney Resources is ramping up plans to mine gold, silver and other precious metals in historic mines in Warren, with construction of a 12,000-square-foot facility set for 2025.
The project area about a mile to the west of Warren includes a total of 53 acres of mining claims on private property. Sidney holds an additional 3,100 acres of unpatented mining claims adjacent to the property.
Warren is located in Idaho County about 35 miles northeast of McCall.
Operations would extract gold and silver from historic tailings set aside from previous mines, and also explore underground veins of unexcavated precious metals deposits. No surface mining is planned, Sidney Resources Chief Operations Officer Dan Hally told The Star-News.
The new facility will be paid for by $8 million in private funding that was announced Monday.
“The centerpiece of this expansion is the construction of a state-of-the-art milling and processing facility. This larger, modern facility is designed to handle increased throughput, optimize efficiency, and ensure the highest standards of environmental sustainability,” read Monday’s news release.
Mining operations are planned in phases, starting with processing historic tailings first, then moving into mining new areas.
“Prior to doing a lot of underground mining work, we want to recover what is easily recoverable,” Hally said.
The company has not yet estimated the value of precious metals that could be gained from the project, but “the data that we have indicated that this would be a world-class deposit for gold, silver, and platinum group metals,” he said.
“We’re still working on those numbers, but we’re in the neighborhood of several hundred thousand tons of tailings,” Hally said, noting that tests have shown concentrations over 10 ounces of gold per ton present in tests so far.
“Our goal is to have the testing phase completed by next fall, evaluate from there and then move into the mining phase,” he said.
Once the tailings are processed, Sidney would begin underground mining in two tunnels that were used for mining nearly a century ago.
“One in particular started in 1862 and it was last worked around the 1930s,” Hally said.
The plan to mine new material is to expand upon that underground network far deeper than previous efforts.
“What was mined in the Warren district was very shallow … I think it was close to 500 feet, but these veins go thousands of feet,” Hally said.
Planning and exploration for the mine have been ongoing for years.
“We’ve been in Warren now, and been pretty quiet about what we’re doing since 2000,” Hally said.
Mobile offices and a 1,200-square-foot facility at the site for testing rock samples were set up in 2022 to assist in planning for ramping up mining production.
Work on the site was intended to cause as little environmental damage as possible, Hally said.
“Instead of doing a bunch of drilling … we find the old mines that were worked on that and then we test their tailings, or we look at the historical mining records,” he said.
Hally said that Sidney Resources plans to operate the mine and not sell the project to a larger firm.
“We don’t want a situation where you have a small company that’s doing it right, and then gets bought out by one of the big boys that wants to do, you know, that traditional mining practices,” he said.
Hally emphasized that Sidney intends to prevent as much environmental damage as possible.
“It’s so sensitive there. The Secesh River and Warren Creek flow into the Salmon River,” he said.
The company is working to move an access road away from Smith Creek.
“We’re willing to spend the money to do a road that moves away from the riparian zones that will completely eliminate any silt from getting into the waterway,” Hally said.
“Even though it’s a small waterway, we understand that a little bit of silt here and a little bit of silt there impacts the larger waterways,” he said.
Because the site is located on private property, minimal permitting was required from the Payette National Forest, compared to the Stibnite Mine proposal near Yellow Pine, which is still in the permitting process.
The Payette’s only involvement with Sidney’s Warren proposal so far has been administering a special use permit to use a Forest Service road to access the property. The permit requires Sidney Resources to maintain the roadway, a representative from the Payette said.
The property is owned by Leland Minerals of Spokane and mining operations have been contracted to Western Frontier Exploration and Mining Company.
Sidney Resources was founded in 1896 in Coeur d’Alene. The firm’s main offices are now in Warren and Clarkston.
The company has three salaried employees, several contracted employees and a nine member board. The company has a market cap value of about $137 million.
— Max Silverson, The Star-News (McCall), Thursday
