Idaho Maryland Mine (IMM) Project Status

As of: February 1, 2011

No Draft Environmental Impact Report (DEIR) or project decription action during 2010. Grass Valley City gave Emgold a deadline of April 8, 2011 to submit a revised project plan. Emgold has indicated that they plan to meet this deadline. Subsequent to the project plan update, a revised DEIR will be required. Followed by another public comment period.

This sequence of steps was outlined at the Grass Valley City Council meeting of August 25, 2009 by the mayor, city planning director, and city legal counsel. See the videos of that city council meeting.

The first Draft Environmental Impact Report (DEIR) on the proposed reopening of the Idaho Maryland Mine (IMM) was prepared during 2008 and submitted for public review at the end of Oct. 2008. Comments were due by Jan. 20, 2009. The comments that were submitted have been indexed by CLAIM and are presented here. There were approximately 188 comments submitted, of which over 80% were negative.

These comments were reviewed by the City of Grass Valley, the lead agency, and in Aug. 2009, the city concluded that the initial DEIR was inadequate. Also, in parallel, Emgold seems to have concluded that changes were needed to the project description. However, essentially, the City decided that the DEIR needed major revisions, and that these revisions were significant enough that the document had to be submitted for another round of public comments.

ESA, the consultant to the City, who wrote the original DEIR based on input from Emgold, was tasked with developing a work plan for proceeding with the revision. Recently, CLAIM obtained a copy of this work plan from the City of Grass Valley. Please note this document is a draft work plan, submitted to the city by the consultant ESA. The City has not accepted this document as a final approach to complete the EIR.  It is intended to be a working document and the City will likely modify it prior to accepting it as a way to move forward. You can download a PDF of the work plan (NOTE: The PDF is LARGE, over 3MB) and also an Excel spreadsheet of the cost estimate.

As far as we can tell right now, Emgold has some money to continue the process, possibly enough to complete a revised DEIR and possibly not.