By Mark Leatham

For The Beachcomber

Just as they have from the beginning, current and former leaders of the group most critical of our project are once again having trouble accurately characterizing our proposal to provide the Puget Sound region with desperately needed sand and gravel in the most environmentally sound manner available.

They are also having difficulty accurately characterizing the 11 years of environmental, permitting and legal reviews our company has undergone, as well as the progress made to replace an existing pier and increase the level of mining at our Maury Island site.

In unanimous decisions, the state Shorelines Hearings Board and Court of Appeals ruled that King County was wrong in denying our project’s shoreline permits. King County denied the permits on the theory that the barge-loading dock was not a water-dependent use. Both the state hearings board and appeals court rejected the county’s position and also ruled that the Environmental Impact Statement and EIS addendum prepared for King County by consultants the county hired described the potential impacts of our project in sufficient detail. They ordered the county to issue the permits.

The Washington Supreme Court denied opponents’ request for review of the Court of Appeals decision. The critics of our project make no mention of the costs expended by King County defending the erroneous permit denial or the state appeals court case.

These critics fail to mention that a state administrative law judge and the director of the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife also heard and rejected their appeal of a permit issued by the department regarding the protection of fish life.

They also failed to mention independent studies of the nearshore environment, hydrogeology and stormwater runoff at Maury Island.

These studies — requested by many of these same project critics, approved by the Legislature, funded by $250,000 in taxpayers’ money, conducted by independent scientists and supervised by the state Department of Ecology — concluded that the project would not harm Maury Island’s nearshore environment, groundwater aquifer or the waters and species of Puget Sound.

They also fail to mention that in 2008, the state Legislative Audit and Review Committee rejected our opponents’ false assertion that our company does not own the sand and gravel on a significant portion of our property, or that the committee’s review of this bogus claim cost taxpayers another $100,000. Nor do they mention that the state Ethics Board unanimously rejected the additional false claims that former Public Lands Commissioner Doug Sutherland violated ethics laws when he issued a lease for a portion of the dock after every regulatory agency had approved the project.

Throughout 11 years of the most rigorous environmental scrutiny ever conducted in this state for a project of this type, our proposal has met every requirement and complied with every request received from every regulatory agency.

We earned every permit needed to proceed with our project based on this intensive review by the agencies in charge of, and most experienced in, applying the local, state and federal regulations designed to protect the environment. These agencies and their scientists have observed Puget Sound for decades and are charged with implementing laws and regulations designed to protect it.

After the full county Envir-onmental Impact Study and addendum, the state Ecology Department studies and numerous other scientific analyses and reports, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers prepared an environmental assessment of the project, and consulted with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and National Marine Fisheries Service on whether our project and its mitigation measures met the requirements of the Endangered Species Act.

Despite all the previous studies and reviews, U.S. District Court Judge Ricardo Martinez ruled that the Corps must now prepare a federal Environmental Impact Statement and conduct additional consultations with the National Marine Fisheries Service.

We will cooperate with the federal regulatory agencies conducting these additional studies. We will work through these additional reviews with full and comprehensive cooperation, just as we have done for the past 11 years with all of the other regulatory agencies.

However, we are also asking the federal Court of Appeals to review numerous factual and legal errors in Judge Martinez’s decision. And it must be made clear that Judge Martinez’s ruling only requires additional process, study and documentation. We look forward to the resumption of construction activities and mining once the studies are completed.

We have also offered our full cooperation and collaboration to Peter Goldmark, the state’s current commissioner of public lands, to answer the questions he has raised about our project and our lease of state-owned aquatic lands. This collaboration is one of the recommended actions in the Maury Island Aquatic Reserve Management Plan.

As a company, we have followed all the rules and gone through the process as required by the regulatory agencies and local, state and federal laws. Despite the inaccurate characterizations of our project, its impacts and the multiple environmental studies and permitting reviews it has undergone, at every stage of the process, it has been found to be environmentally sound.

And we are confident that it will once again pass the additional review and scrutiny that will be conducted by federal regulatory agencies.

— Mark Leatham is vice president and general manager of Glacier Northwest.

For additional information about this project, go to Glacier’s Web site, www.mauryislandmine.com.