Mining city’s bid to keep families

A North Queensland mining city will do whatever it can to keep more than 1000 local families that could be affected by a local downturn, with its local council looking at other industries to develop.

Mount Isa City Council announced it would employ consultants to identify how it will respond to Glencore’s closure of its copper mines in the city within two years.

Currently 17 per cent of Mount Isa’s employment is in the copper ore mining sector, while 9 per cent work in silver, lead and zinc.

The next significant sectors are hospital workers, at 5.5 per cent, primary education at 3.6 per cent, and supermarkets at 2.3 per cent.

Some of the ways the council wanted to increase other employment opportunities was by seeking the acceleration of CopperString’s construction, create a transport and logistics centre which could develop a base for transport operations, and establish a common-user facility for critical minerals.

This would adapt Glencore’s existing large concentration facility so that it could process vanadium, cobalt, and low-volume copper.

The council announced a two-stage strategy to carry out the investigation of six economic areas that could be useful to Mount Isa, which were: tourism, energy, resources, critical infrastructure, and small- and medium-sized businesses.

Within the next four months the consultants would consider ideas and would work with a taskforce that focused on the closure of Mount Isa Mines’s copper mines.

After May the consultants would look at identifying essential projects to determine prospects of investing, and this stage is expected to take a year to complete.

Mount Isa mayor Danielle Slade said an advisory committee made up of local and state government representatives, and Glencore had met twice last month to determine the directions it would take to transition the city’s economy.

The council had budgeted for the costs of consultants but would still be applying for additional funding.