March 23, 2022
Members of the State Agency Component:
Thank you for the opportunity to provide comment to the “state agency component of the work group assembled to study gold mining in the Commonwealth.” The following comments reflect the opinions of the 11 undersigned organizations and are focused on recommendations we hope the state agency component (“SAC”) will seriously consider as it finalizes its statement of task.
First, we would like to express our concern with the late hour at which the SAC work is beginning. With only months left before the deadline, there is now little time to clarify the work of the SAC and develop a process by which stakeholders can meaningfully engage with the work of the NAS and influence the final report to the General Assembly.
Additionally, we are disappointed that the work group established by the passage of HB2213 (2021 Special Session I of the General Assembly) has been unnecessarily bifurcated, both in terms of members and roles. HB2213 plainly indicates the General Assembly’s intention that the gold study include community perspectives, not segregate those community perspectives into an alternative component. Indeed, potentially affected community members were the driving force behind HB2213.
The state, however, seems to have lost sight of this chief aim—ensuring interested stakeholders are able to meaningfully participate in all aspects of inquiries mandated by HB2213. Instead, the state has segregated the work: (A) the NAS committee of experts, which studies and handles the “technical aspects” of the bill; and (B) the SAC, which handles the “other” aspects of the bill, chiefly stakeholder involvement.
Importantly, in defining the scope of the NAS work, the state and/or NAS decided that NAS would tackle all of the investigations required in HB2213, while articulating no substantive scope of work for stakeholders participating in the SAC. The effect is that the NAS committee will do all of the investigative work, deliberate on the issues, make its findings, and write the report to the General Assembly. Nearly all of this work will be done independent of meaningful involvement by stakeholders. Then, the SAC, on a parallel track, as drafted by the state, “will host meetings in and around Buckingham County in an attempt to gather as much local input as possible.” This approach does not provide a real mechanism for local stakeholders’ perspectives to influence the results of the final report.
This rigid separation of the “technical work” and the “stakeholder work” misses the point of the bill. Interested stakeholders, including potentially affected community members, care immensely about the technical aspects and must be allowed to affect all investigations mandated by HB2213 (e.g., environmental impacts of gold mining and the inadequacy of Virginia’s current regulations). In other words, stakeholder involvement is not an “other” aspect of the bill that can be handled separately from discussion of environmental impacts and other technical aspects; stakeholder involvement is baked into the entirety of the bill. By assigning all of the real work to the NAS track, which allows for stakeholder involvement in an extremely limited fashion, important stakeholder perspectives will be omitted from the NAS component’s findings and, at best, will simply be tacked on to the SAC’s perspectives at the end of the process. This might check the box of some stakeholder involvement, but it does not satisfy the mandates of HB2213.
To satisfy the mandates of HB2213, the state must connect these two tracks of work so stakeholders have a meaningful role in the entire process. And, because time is running out, it is critically important for the state to act very quickly to define the unique and consequential role played by community members participating in the SAC. Local perspectives and insights from communities and organizations on the ground who would be impacted by industrial gold mining—should it occur in Virginia—are the most important and unique addition that this state agency component can offer. Therefore, we submit the following recommendations for the state agency component statement of task.
1. Minimize Bifurcation. Given the above-mentioned bifurcation of the NAS component and the state agency component of the gold study work group, we encourage all members of each component to attend and follow the substance of both. Materials, content, comments and more should be shared among both components of the work group. Each component will benefit from the other. Their work should not be done in silos.
2. Center Community Stakeholders’ Voices. Perspectives from stakeholders named in HB2213 who are participating in the SAC should be centered throughout the entire gold study. Representatives from the Virginia Council on Environmental Justice, potentially affected communities, residents of Native American communities, and environmental organizations should be acknowledged as valuable and as offering unique insights – their perspectives should be central, not peripheral, to the work.
3. Actively Encourage Public & Community Feedback. The SAC should seek to increase community and public awareness and actively solicit feedback specifically focused on:
Robust community feedback requires the SAC’s time and effort. Therefore, specific tactics should be identified and executed to encourage robust community participation – this will take significant cooperative effort from agency staff and community leaders participating in the SAC. Additional resources may be needed, such as environmental justice staff support from DEQ, local health department support from VDH, etc. Community concerns and impacts should be fully chronicled throughout this state agency component process and incorporated into the final written report.
As listed in one of the draft statements of task, the following presentation topics would be especially useful to educate and encourage community participation: environmental justice impacts; social impacts; economic impacts; cyanide and other chemical impacts; water pollution impacts; and tailings impacts. Advance notice, thorough advertisement, and multiple avenues for participation are critical to executing robust participation in upcoming SAC presentations.
4. Identify All Potentially Impacted Communities. It is worth highlighting that Virginia suffers from hundreds of historic abandoned gold mines. Impacts span numerous localities from Fairfax to Halifax and beyond, when looking at maps of abandoned mines in conjunction with the geologic gold-pyrite approximation. Additionally, downstream communities must be considered as well with respect to impacts from mining. We recommend the SAC take a serious look at identifying all of the potentially impacted communities from both historic and potential future mining operations, local and downstream, and name those communities in any final report produced. This investigation of mining impacts should not be narrowly focused.
5. Thoroughly Identify Deficiencies. Ultimately, the intent of HB2213 is to determine whether our current regulations and laws are sufficient to protect the public health, safety, and welfare of Virginians. The state agency component of the gold work group should be thorough in its identification of problems and concerns. The SAC does not need to resolve each and every one of these deficiencies – but it must identify them. We recognize this process as a first step of many to come to protect Virginia’s environment and public health from the historic and potential future threats of industrial gold mining.
Again, thank you for the opportunity to comment on the state agency component of the work group assembled to study gold mining in the Commonwealth. We hope our recommendations are helpful to you as you finalize your statement of task for 2022. And we stand ready to engage our staff, boards of directors, and members in the process. Please do not hesitate to call on us to support the work at hand.
Sincerely,
Tiffany Haworth, Executive Director, Dan River Basin Association
Chad Oba, President, Friends of Buckingham
Karen Forget, Executive Director, Lynnhaven River Now
Dan Holmes, Director of State Policy, Piedmont Environmental Council
Phillip Musegaas, Vice President – Programs and Litigation, Potomac Riverkeeper Network
Kristin Davis, Senior Attorney, Southern Environmental Law Center
Anne Little, Executive Director, Tree Fredericksburg
Heidi Dhivya Berthoud, President, Virginia Community Rights Network
Narissa Turner, Climate & Clean Energy Policy Manager, Virginia Conservation Network
Chris Leyen, Policy Director, Virginia League of Conservation Voters
Jeeva Abbate, Director, Yogaville Environmental Solutions