By Michael Ganley -- Two months ago, I wrote a story about Vancouver-based Alexco Resources and the company’s planned Bellekeno mine near Keno City, Yukon. I wrote about Alexco cleaning up the messes left behind by 70 years of silver mining in the region and its plans to build a new mine, beginning with the Bellekeno deposit.I wrote that as a self-professed “new face of mining,” Alexco says it will mine the new ore without making any similar mess and without unduly affecting the 25 residents of nearby Keno City.

Now, I find myself wondering if I went too easy on them.

It seems Kenoites are hopping mad about the project; mad that they haven’t been consulted, mad that Alexco plans to put the mill a kilometre from town and the tailings a little bit closer, mad about the proposed location of a haul road and a waste rock pile. “I’ve spent 36 years in and around mining and am still heavily involved in mining,” says Rob Wagner, who has been leading the citizen revolt. “So why am I standing here opposed to a mining company and what part of the process failed?”

What part, indeed. The bottom line seems to be a lack of communication. Now that the dispute has hit the media, the rhetoric is heating up, and company vicepresident Rob McIntyre wants to tone it down. “I refuse to accept that we have to get into the mean old mining company from down south and the poor little locals,” says McIntyre. “You’re talking to the vice-president of the company and I live here.”

To the specific citizen concerns:

Alexco’s plan is to start with the mill at Crystal Lake, near the eastern end of the property, and mine out several ore bodies there. Then it will be moved to a central spot, then to the western end to finish things off. The purpose is to save on ore hauling costs, but it has the effect of creating three new contaminated sites in an area that is already riddled with them. Citizens are also concerned about noise from the mill while it is at the Crystal Lake location.

Wagner would like to see the company put the mill at Elsa, the site of a former mill. It would mean higher haul costs, but the ore around Keno is high grade, and haul costs are relatively low.

McIntyre does have some pretty good answers for some of the resident’s concerns. The company will soundproof the mill as much as possible and not operate at night. Half of the tailings will be returned underground in a paste backfill and the other half will be reclaimed progressively by the dry-stack method (there will be no tailings pond), which even Wagner favours.

As for the waste-rock pile, McIntyre puts its size in perspective: “We’re putting 10,000 tonnes of mildly bad rock on top of several million tonnes of wildly bad rock,” he says. “The skyline from town is the Onek waste rock pile, and anything coming through from a chemical perspective has been there since there’s been a town there. That’s why we picked that area: It’s this hugely impacted area that dwarfs us by a factor of several hundred.”

Certainly some of the blame for the current brouhaha can be laid at the feet of the regulators. The Yukon Environmental and Socio-Economic Assessment Act, which came into force six years ago, sets out certain triggers to determine how detailed a review will be. The triggers generally have to do with the size of the project, and not with its cumulative effects.

Bellekeno is a five-year mine for now, but like most mines the owners hope, and expect, that it will become much bigger. It will therefore come before the regulator incrementally. Cumulative impacts will not be addressed. That is an ongoing failure of regulatory systems across the country, and one that must be remedied.

As it stands, Alexco is at the lowest level of the process, which Wagner says does not require consultations and has resulted in what we have now: a divisive process where both sides are taking swings at each other.

The territorial government itself ought to have taken a more proactive approach and ensured that Alexco hammered out some details with Keno residents before even submitting to the YESSA process.

The town is not opposed to mining and will accept some effects. “We understand where we live and that they’re trying to do a business thing here and we want them to succeed,” says Wagner. “We’re just not prepared to be completely run over.”

So the two sides need to get together and hammer out some details. YESSA is undergoing a five-year review, and it looks like a thing or two ought to be learned from the Alexco experience.