Big problems remain with copper permit
Florence Reminder & Blade-Tribune
From Protect Our Water Our Future, Special to the Reminder
Once again, Florence Copper, Inc. (FCI) has submitted an unlawful application to the Arizona Department of Environmental Quality (ADEQ) in pursuit of an Aquifer Protection Permit (APP) to operate a proposed acid leach copper mine in the geographic center of Florence. ADEQ recently announced that it has issued a draft Significant Amendment to the APP for the Florence Copper Project Production Test Facility. The draft permit is based on an FCI application that ignored decisions by an Administrative Law Judge (“ALJ”) and ADEQ’s own Water Quality Appeals Board (“WQAB”) that found the previously issued permit in November 2014 to be unlawful, arbitrary and unreasonable. Because ADEQ’s draft permit does nothing to fix the fundamental problems identified by the ALJ, stakeholders and local residents opposing the mine are requesting that the state intervene and immediately deny the permit.
