All over but the shouting
Things are heating up in the Silver Valley. In response, Barbara Miller of the Silver Valley Community Center has solicited the EPA (all the way up to administrator Lisa Jackson) to declare a moratorium at the site until the issues in the IG report are resolved. The argument against building a repository in a flood plain (pictured right) has always been well-founded. Hey, even the original location of the mission was relocated by the Jesuits in 1846 to the grassy knoll because of floods.
As we posted HERE two weeks ago, the Inspector General for the Environmental Protection Agency finally released a report on the Eastern Mission Flats Repository, a controversial site for dumping toxic soils near the Cataldo Mission. He concluded the site needed further review because of flooding, which could cause a dissolved contaminant release. But that’s not stopping the EPA: In their most recent newsletter, titled “Summer construction season in full swing,” they said dumping would commence next month. The mine waste has to go somewhere, they say. Now. 
Prior to construction, the Kootenai County Commission and the East Side Highway Commission said the site would release toxics into the Coeur d’Alene River and called for better communication. However, most recent stories have not addressed another debatable question about the Eastern Mission Flats Repository: What about the public comment period?
We first became interested in the story two years ago when the Spokesman-Review ran a story with the lead “construction had begun at a proposed hazardous waste storage site near Cataldo, Idaho, even though the public comment period for the site was still open.” Ten days before actually. Strangely enough, this area of the IG report was declared acceptable. As far back as May 2005, the EPA knocked on a couple doors of the low income Mission Flats community where they claimed they were met with support, telling the S-R, we’re not “hearing from anyone in the community they oppose it." But, according to the Outreach Effort, on a July 20th 2005 meeting at the Cataldo mission, residents were "emotional and opposed to the idea." And that was only the beginning. Miller alleged areas quoted in the IG report for acceptable public comment were efforts made after the property was purchased and more than 1,000 people wrote letters and signed petitions opposing the site. Currently, more than 2, 000 people are opposed to the Mission Repository.
Who knows where these voices were before? Most of them probably found out the same way we did. "When public agencies work to uphold the integrity in public process and reach out of public comment, there is a record to point to," said John Osborn of the Sierra Club two years ago. "Show us the record."
Tonight in Wallace, Idaho swing by the Wallace Inn at 6:30pm, if you’re in the area. (Check our events calendar.) There will be a community workshop on how citizen input has helped shaped the criteria for repository sites with representatives from the EPA and the Idaho Department Of Environmental Quality. Given all that has happened (or not happened), it could be a wild night.
