In a Memorandum dated August 29, Pima County Manager Chuck Huckelberry, responded to a records request from the Southern Arizona Business Coalition regarding the County’s effort to stop Rosemont Mine. Huckelberry admits that to date the County has spent over $190,000 in legal fees, and could potentially spend up to $354,000 in the future to stop the Mine’s jobs from coming to hard hit Arizonans.
Huckelberry explains that $60,000 of the $190,000 already spent was expended as a result of an agreement between the County and the U.S. Forest Service. The County is a “Cooperating Agency’ with the feds.
Huckelberry says that the county has been unfairly painted as anti-jobs and that the County has a responsibility to assure the public’s health, safety, and welfare. Huckelberry makes this claim despite the fact that it is the State and not the County that has authority and oversight of permitting and regulating the Mine.
In response to a question of how much County staff time was expended stopping the Mine, Huckelberry claims that “only two departments track staff time reviewing or commenting on the Rosemont Copper project on an hourly basis.” Huckelberry claims that the Pima County’s Cultural Resources Office has and continues to track staff time, but that the Department of Environmental Quality did not.
In the memo, Huckelberry offers no explanation as to why the County’s Cultural Resources Office would spend any time fighting the Mine.
Huckelberry challenges an article in this news site, “the Arizona Daily Independent (AZDI) incorrectly stated that none of the Supervisors facing reelection have responded to the records request. However he then goes on to confirm that, in fact, the article was accurate. He claims that the reason that no one but Ann Day turned anything over was that one of the Supervisors had nothing to turn over, and another had only one calendared meeting. Huckelberry wrote, “Unless meetings concerning Rosemont were calendared, there would be nothing to provide.” The public is supposed to believe that none of the Supervisor’s, including Rosemont’s most vocal opponent, Ray Carroll, had nothing about Rosemont in their offices.
Huckleberry also takes exception to the AZDI report that “a recent search of the County’s website shows $400,000 in outstanding contracts associated with Rosemont Mine issues. The article is mixing apples and oranges.” But then Huckelberry confirms that the AZDI report was accurate; he says the County does have $354,000 in outstanding legal contracts, BUT “this does not mean the county will ever” exercise them.
“It is very disingenuous for them to talk about jobs, and here they are turning them away,” said Rick Grinnell of the Southern Arizona Business Coalition. “Huckelberry says that it is not the job of government to help business, but they have Supervisors running as pro-business. What is their job any way?”
In the end, Huckelberry admits that it “is not a County responsibility to approve or reject the Rosemont project. Such is a task that falls to other government agencies.” That hasn’t stopped them though from spending money and preventing jobs in the name of looking out for us.