Legalectric

For quite a while now we’ve been wrestling with how to assure “financial assurance” so that silica sand operators won’t shut down and leave the area looking like the moonscape.  Obviously this was not done successfully on the Range where mines closed, leaving barren piles, abandoned buildings and sites, and pits overfilling with water, we need to learn from that mess.  So we’ve been talking about it, even to the extent of getting reclamation legislation, which in my mind is in large part to assure “financial assurance” to enable the ability to do reclamation:

Sec. 105. RULES; SILICA SAND.

(b) The commissioner of natural resources shall adopt rules pertaining to the reclamation of silica sand mines. The rulemaking is exempt from Minnesota Statutes, section 14.125.

Add to that the DNR head’s very scary statements regarding PolyMet mining:

“If we ever get to a point in time where (pollution from the PolyMet site) can’t be handled, (it’ll be) because humanity changed, because World War Z came along and zombies took over. As long as there are people, there’ll be people to fix it,” Landwehr said.

The people who destroyed it are the ones who need to fix it, not the “As long as there are people, there’ll be people to fix it…”

So how to do it?  Well, it turns out there is foundational language already in the rules for landfills — something we can use as a starting point.  DOH!  Why is this just coming out now, in the EQB’s DRAFT?  Yes, it’s good to know (sorry, folks, I do not know what’s in every rule in the state) (and apparently I’m not the only one!), but shouldn’t this have been brought out early on when all the local governments started wrestling with this?