Company late on cleanup, tribe alleges

BOISE, Idaho — The Nez Perce Tribe has filed a lawsuit to force a Canadian company to clean up an idle central Idaho mining area — which the company has said it plans to do if it can get approval from U.S. officials to restart mining at the site.

The tribe contends in the federal lawsuit filed Thursday that British Columbia-based Midas Gold is illegally allowing arsenic, cyanide and mercury to remain in the area where the tribe has had hunting and fishing rights since an 1855 treaty with the U.S.

Midas Gold itself has never mined in the area about 40 miles east of McCall but in the past decade has acquired existing mining claims and developed a plan it said will clean up the mess left by a century of mining by other companies.

The tribe said in the lawsuit that it’s time for the company to act.

“The reality is that Midas Gold has worked on and studied the project site since 2009, but has not taken action to address the existing sources of pollution at the proposed project site,” Shannon Wheeler, chairman of the Nez Perce Tribal Executive Committee, said in a statement.

The tribe is suing under the citizen enforcement provision of the federal Clean Water Act, which prohibits a company from polluting waters unless it has an appropriate federal permit. The tribe said Midas Gold is violating the law by allowing discharge from previous mining efforts to pollute the area without that permit.

“It is unfortunate that we are now adversaries in litigation instead of partners in restoration,” said Laurel Sayer, CEO of Midas Gold Idaho, a Midas Gold subsidiary. “We agree there is a problem, but a far better path would be for the tribe to spend its energy and resources working with us on a solution rather than filing lawsuits.”