Washington Town Looks to New Mine to Revive Its Fortunes

Lynn Kinney spent 42 years unearthing zinc and lead outside this town in Washington’s remote northeastern corner before the mine’s owners shut the operation down amid a 1977 labor dispute.

Kinney retired a few months later, expecting another company would move in to tap the ore that still remains after nearly a century of mining beneath the forested, 7,000-foot-high Selkirk Mountains.

“Every day, I’ve hoped they would open up again,” said Kinney, now 87, who managed the mine for 26 years and today lives in a housing project developed in World War II for mine workers.

Now his 23-year wait may be nearly over. Cominco American Inc., the U.S. subsidiary of Vancouver, British Columbia-based Cominco Ltd., is seeking regulatory approval to reopen the mine in early 2002.

It’s a prospect the community eagerly embraces after a windfall from the most recent promising economic development--the use of the area as a backdrop for a Kevin Costner movie--proved fleeting.

The mine would bring 160 new jobs and an annual $10-million payroll to the sparsely populated region hugging the Canadian border.

Metaline Falls and Metaline-- separate towns on opposite banks of the Pend Oreille River with a total of 400 residents--are trying to weather a downturn in natural resource-based industries.

Mining, cement production, hydropower and timber have been economic mainstays since the Great Northern Railroad created the area’s first boom by laying tracks here in 1909.

The most stable job sources in recent decades have been two Pend Oreille River dams: Box Canyon, run by Pend Oreille County PUD, and Boundary, which provides about half of Seattle City Light’s electrical power-generating capacity despite being 350 miles northeast of the state’s biggest city.

Mining took a big hit in 1977 when the zinc-and-lead operation closed and eliminated 150 jobs.

In 1990, 64 more jobs were lost with the closure of a cement plant that supplied material for local dams but also coated Metaline Falls with gray dust.

The community refocused on tourism, cleaning up the dust and sprucing up Main Street. Community boosters have enjoyed mixed success luring Canadian and American travelers with old-fashioned steam train rides along the river and a scenic highway loop.

The filming of Costner’s 1997 film “The Postman” pumped $10 million into the local economy and raised hopes that moviegoers would leave theaters wanting to see northeastern Washington in person.

Metaline Falls and the mine site were given make-overs for the film, but not the kind that would attract visitors. Buildings were dressed down to fit the plot line of a future America devastated by war.

And the nearly three-hour, $85-million picture was a flop.

“If it had done a better job in the theaters, it might have had a bigger impact on town,” said Pat Zimmerman, a Metaline Falls postal clerk and fabric store co-owner.

Even if Cominco does win approval to restart the mine, the benefits would be short-term. Its projected life span is just 8 1/2 years.

With that in mind, Cominco officials are meeting monthly with a local citizen group to discuss economic prospects after the mine closes.

Some ideas: adding local job-training programs, improving the local telecommunications network, expanding an existing nine-hole golf course over ground containing old mine tailings.

Cominco, which acquired the mine in 1995, is seeking a new source of zinc and lead for its smelters after the scheduled 2002 closure of a nearly mined-out operation north of Metaline Falls in Kimberley, British Columbia.

Zinc is used in everything from steel to vitamins, with less-valuable lead typically used in some types of electrical batteries.

Cominco expects the final environmental impact statement for the project to be finished by late summer. The company hopes to obtain some of the more than a dozen required permits within a few months.

While local support was nearly unanimous in a March hearing on a draft version of the EIS, environmental groups and two Eastern Washington Indian tribes have objected, said Keith Stoffel, state Department of Ecology project coordinator.

Environmentalists are concerned about standards for waste water released into the Pend Oreille River and for disposal of tailings, the crushed rock left after ore is extracted. State officials have proposed an exemption that would allow Cominco to follow less-stringent waste-disposal rules than environmentalists want.

Environmentalists also want existing mine tailings from past operations cleaned up.

“We’d like to see some reclamation efforts going on before another mine is proposed,” said Marlene Renwyck of the Kettle Range Conservation Group.

Cominco’s environmental manager for the mine, David Godlewski, is aware of the regulatory climate that has stalled a proposed gold mine 100 miles to the west in Okanogan County.

That project has been in the works for more than a decade at a cost of more than $80 million to the developer. A state board recently ruled developers have not proposed adequate safeguards for streams and rivers, and the project’s future is in doubt.

Cominco is banking on the fact that its project involves few unknowns because of past operations at the site.

“This has been here for years,” Godlewski said. “People can see what the impacts have been.”