A haul road is developing as an issue in J.R. Simplot Co.’s expansion of its Smokey Canyon Mine in Caribou County near the Wyoming border. Simplot wants the road though a 467-acre privately-owned property and has offered $2.1 million for the entire acreage. The owners, Peter and Judy Riede, retired engineers from Michigan, are holding out for $6 million, according to Simplot. Simplot says the property is appraised at $1.7 million.
So far, the Riedes have refused to sell rights-of-way to any part of their land to Simplot. They say a haul road for ore from the mine would damage their land, which has two creeks featuring 20-inch Yellowstone cutthroat trout. After the Riedes declined the $2.1 million offer, the company suggested in public documents filed with the U.S. Forest Service that it could simply use 110-year-old provisions in the Idaho Constitution that give mining companies the right to cross private lands to reach their properties.
Simplot has also broached eminent domain in a June 9 letter to the couple. It asked them to reconsider the offer, and said if they didn’t the company would “move forward with pursuing alternatives that allow Simplot to appropriately develop our phosphate mineral leases.”
Simplot spokesman Fred Zerza told Green Markets the talk about eminent domain is premature, as the USFS will not make a decision about which route is best until December. The USFS is reportedly considering at least four options for the route, and will likely pick the one that is most cost-effective and least destructive. Zerza said the Riede route is the least-destructive to the environment, though another may be just as competitive cost-wise.
The road would run from the mine to an existing milling site, where Simplot mixes phosphate ore with water and pipes it as slurry to a fertilizer plant in Pocatello. The route at issue would cut through about 11 acres of the Riede property. The Riedes said the impact will be significant.
Zerza said Simplot currently has three years worth of reserves to serve the Pocatello plant, and that work needs to begin in early 2007 to get the expansion underway so that the new production will be available when existing reserves wear out. The mine and Pocatello plant employ 520.
Conservation groups say Simplot would be subverting the law if it applied eminent domain in this case. Marv Hoyt, Idaho director of the Greater Yellowstone Coalition, said the provision was added to the state constitution in the 1890s to protect small miners from larger operations that staked claims to block access. Zerza noted that Hoyt’s group has been opposed to the expansion and has now aligned with the Riedes to further try and thwart the project. Zerza added that eminent domain is commonly used in the state, particularly by utilities to run power lines.