Open Gorge: The Skamania Dispatch & Klickitattler

[Skamania] 🪨 The 1872 Rule Hiding Under Skamania's Mining Fights

• Kate • Season 1 • Episode 54

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Skamania County has two mining fights going at once. A Canadian company wants to drill toward an open-pit copper mine near Mount St. Helens, and a gravel quarry on the west end could put five hundred truck trips a day onto Highway 14. But underneath the copper fight sits a law from 1872 that almost nobody mentions, and it decides who gets paid. This episode covers recent discussions at the Skamania County Board of Commissioners, Skamania County Community Development, and the long history they're inheriting.

In This Episode:

  • Why hardrock minerals on federal land pay no royalty, to anyone
  • The Nevada senator who wrote the law, and why it never expired
  • What happened the last time this promise met a place like ours
  • Coal, oil and gas pay. Copper doesn't. Why the difference matters to the county budget
  • Butte, Montana and the bill that outlasted the boom
  • What three Montana councils actually won from a mining company, and what Skamania could ask for
  • Which of these two fights Skamania can actually shape, and the July 30 deadline to do it

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SPEAKER_00

Hey there, and welcome back to the Scamania Dispatch. It seems that fans of this podcast love both history and local explainers, so I'm back with another deep dive into one of the extraction industries in Scamania County. And for once, it's not timber. Today we're actually talking about minerals and why recent discussions around them have a deep history across the American West, with equally storied implications for some local discussions happening here right now. I've spent the past year sitting in county meeting rooms for this newsletter. And lately two of those meetings keep circling two big mining proposals. Up in the remote northwest corner of the county, right against the Mount St. Helens Monument, a Canadian company called Cambria Gold Mines wants to drill towards a possible open pit copper mine in the Green River Valley. That company used to be called Ascot Resources. And on the west end, a company called Storadal wants to open a gravel quarry. Neighbors say it would put roughly 500 truck trips a day onto Highway 14. These are two very different projects, and the arguments you hear are the ones that we've come to expect in this area, around fish and scenery and volcano risk on one, trucks and water and torn-up pavement on the other. Jobs come up on both, and the Yakima Nation and the Khalitz tribe, who know that mountain as Lawe Lotla and hold it sacred, oppose the copper mine too. These are all real discussions worth having on any kind of project of this size. But I sat through the June 30th Commissioner's meeting, where Cascade Forest Conservancy came to brief the board, and I kept waiting for someone to say the one thing that, in my opinion, reframes the whole conversation. But almost nobody did. So here it is. If that copper mine gets built on federal land near Mount St. Helens, the copper comes out of the ground, the public that owns that land actually collects no royalty on the metal. That's you and me I'm talking about. None. Not the county, not the state, and not even the federal treasury will get any royalties on the minerals that are extracted from that mine. The reason is a law older than the state of Washington. The General Mining Act of 1872. President Grant signed it, and it still governs how hard rock minerals come off federal land today. Copper, gold, silver, molybdenum. Wow, I learn new words every day putting together the research for this podcast, and molybdenum is a mineral I had not yet heard of. Those are the metals that this company is after. It was written when the whole point of federal policy was to give the West away and get people to go out and settle it. So it lets a company stake a claim and dig out the minerals and pay the public nothing for the ore itself. Let me tell you who wrote it, because his story tells you almost everything you need to know about this 1872 law. His name was William Stewart, a senator from Nevada. Stewart came in West during the gold rush. He mined and then made his fortune as a lawyer arguing claim fights over the Comstock load, the great silver strike under Virginia City. When he got to the Senate, he didn't really invent a mining system. He blessed the one that the camps had already built for themselves. Out in the diggings, thousands of miles from Washington, prospectors had written their own rough rules. Find it, stake it, record it, and it's yours. Stewart put that frontier bargain into federal law in 1866, then expanded it in 1872. Grant signed it seven years after the Civil War ended. Nobody drafting it pictured the day that the frontier would run out, so they wrote in no royalty and no expiration. And you can see what that promise was capable of just two years later, a thousand miles east of here. In 1874, an army expedition under George Custer found gold in the Black Hills of Dakota Territory. That was land the United States had guaranteed to the Lakota forever in a treaty signed only six years before. Land the Lakota held as sacred. The treaty didn't slow anything down. The government's early efforts to hold miners back collapsed within months. Some 15,000 prospectors poured onto forbidden ground, chasing that same stake and it's yours dream. Chasing that same, quote unquote, stake it and it's yours dream. What followed was the Great Sioux War, Custer's defeat at the Little Bighorn in 1876, and Congress simply taking back the Black Hills land in 1877. The Supreme Court later ruled that taking illegal, but Lakota have refused the payment ever since. They kept asking for the land itself instead. I tell you that because what's stirring in our own Northwest Corner, a mineral rush meeting a people who hold a place sacred, is not some strange new wrinkle. It's almost the oldest part of this law's story. Now, I want to be clear about how unusual the no royalty part is, because it's easy to assume that a mine automatically means money for the place that it lands in. When a company pumps oil or gas or digs coal out of that same kind of federal ground, it pays a federal royalty. And the state where it happens gets back about half. Wyoming more or less built its budget on that arrangement. But copper and gold got carved out. They were left under that old 1872 rules, and those rules carry no royalty at all. Groups that track this estimate more than $245 billion in minerals have come off public land royalty-free since 1872. And the claim holder's yearly fee to the federal government? I'll have you guess how much it is. It's about $200 per claim. And here's where it connects straight back to that June meeting. Cascade Forest Conservancy told the commissioners something the local forest service had told them. The county would likely see no direct receipts from a mine anyway. When I first trotted that down, it sounded like a throwaway line, but it isn't. That's the 1872 law doing exactly what it was built to do. There's no royalty to collect, and no royalty means that there's nothing for the state or the county to take a share of. Washington doesn't levy a severance tax on minerals either. So there's no state cut on the back end. That business tax a mine would pay goes to Olympia, not to Stevenson. So what would actually land in the county's la? Realistically, property tax on whatever privately owned equipment and buildings sit at the site, plus whatever jobs and local spending the mine brings while metal prices are high. That's not nothing, and I don't want to wave it off. We've spent many episodes talking about the financial position of the county and how it's going to take a variety of different forms of income to try and sort out what our financial future together is going to look like. But we can look a few hundred miles east to Butte, Montana. Butte called itself the richest hill on earth. It mined copper, the very metal this company wants, under these same rules for the better part of a century. What the boom left behind there is the Berkeley Pit, a mile-long crater slowly filling with more than 40 billion gallons of acid water. It's water so poisonous it kills flocks of birds that land on it. It's one of the largest superfund cleanups in the country, and it's still grinding on long after the profitable copper and the company that took it are long gone. You'd think that a hundred and fifty-four-year-old giveaway would have been fixed by now. People have tried. Bills to finally charge a royalty, most recently somewhere around 8 to 12.5%, get introduced and then they die session after session. And right now the pressure runs the other way. Copper landed on the federal critical minerals list because of batteries in the power grid. The current administration is pushing open more public land to mining, not less. It's a Grant era law meeting the electric car era appetite. And so far the law is winning. And now here's the part I want to be careful about because these two mining fights are actually not the same animal. That gravel quarry out west is not a hard rock mine on federal land. Gravel is what the law calls a saleable mineral, and because this one is a private operation, it's going through county permitting. And that difference matters a lot because it flips who holds the pen. On the copper mine, the county is mostly a bystander. The real decisions sit with federal agencies, and the 1872 law wrote local government out of the money. On the gravel quarry, the county actually has some leverage. There's a draft environmental study, a county hearings examiner, permit conditions that the county can attach, and a public comment window that's open until July 30th. So if you're a West End resident worried about that haul route, where opponents expect to count a truck roughly every 68 seconds, that comment period is a real lever you can pull. If you're worried about the copper mine, most of the real levers are back in Washington, DC. I'm not telling you to be for or against any mine. That's not my job. I'm telling you this because we're having the copper conversation with a piece missing, a piece I think that we can add back and have a more quality conversation. Commissioners described a county locked in a box. Roughly 80% of Skimania is federally owned, and less than 2% of its land is taxable at full value. Means there are few options left, families priced out and schools closing. All of that is real. I feel the weight of it in those rooms every single week. But part of that box was built in 1872. And the usual promise, let the mine in and the county gets paid, doesn't automatically hold here. And here's the part I don't want you to miss because I know how this usually goes. And if you've lived here for as many generations as I know my neighbors have, you know how it goes too. We're used to being on the rough end of federal law around here. The scenic area taught most of us that lesson, and I think a lot of folks have quietly decided that the only move left is to take whatever we're given. But zero is where the federal government starts and not where this has to end. Let's go back to Montana for a minute, in a rural county not so different from ours. Three grassroots councils sat down with the Hard Rock Mining Company in the year 2000 and walked out with a legally binding contract. They got wanted monitoring stricter than the state required. Company paid buses to keep mine traffic off their roads, and limits on where worker housing could go. That agreement is still in force today. It even survived the mining company being sold to somebody else. None of that came from Congress fixing the 1872 law. It came out of a lawsuit in a permit fight, which is already underway in the Green River Valley. Montana went further. They passed a law making big new mines pay local government costs they create. Michigan taxes copper mines and sends most of that money to schools and a rural development fund. Washington has done neither, but maybe he has the opportunity to do all of the above. So, no, we're not owed a royalty under the law we have, but nobody's stopping us from asking for an agreement, and nobody's stopping us from asking Olympia for a law of our own. Places our size have gotten both. I really want you to hear me on that. We are allowed to ask for more. So before anyone treats a copper mine as a budget rescue, ask what money would actually reach the county, and who has that in writing? Ask what the county can actually require or refuse, and what's preempted by federal law. And for anyone we send to Olympia or DC, we can ask the big one: are you willing to touch that 1872 law and bring it into the 21st century? Whatever you think about mining, we all share the same roads, the same river, the same stakes. I want to see that same change other communities have fought for right here in Scamania, because we, and I include the hardworking folks who run our county in that we, they're our neighbors too. All of us deserve a viable future here together as neighbors. Let's at least walk into these fights knowing which ones we can still shape at home and which were mostly decided for us a century and a half ago. That's how change happens. So, one more date before we all go. Comments on the Storedall Quarry Draft Environmental Study are due on July 30th. That link is in the show notes. And you can read this whole story with every source linked in the written dispatch. Thanks for joining me today for another slightly long and very special episode. I'm always really grateful that we get to have these conversations together. By looking to our history, I think that we all get to have a better conversation about the kind of future we want. You've been listening to a production of opengorge.org, the home of the Scamania Dispatch and the Clicka Tattler. We believe in informed communities are stronger communities. To support our work and stay up to date on everything happening in the gorge, head over to ScamaniaDispatch.com to sign up for our newsletters. You can also find us on Facebook at facebook.com/slash open gorge. Join the conversation and share your thoughts on today's episode. Thanks for tuning in, and we'll talk to you next time.