Coronado’s Mon Valley Mine gets unwelcome greeting
Meeting draws vocal opposition to plan
Coronado Coal’s plan to develop a large underground mine and above-ground coal processing and loading facilities in Forward was met with heavy community opposition on Wednesday evening.
The Australian company’s challenge to the township’s zoning ordinance got a unanimous thumbs-down from the planning commission, which recommended Forward’s board of supervisors reject Coronado’s plan when the issue comes before them.
That is the next step in what is expected to become a much more public and heated debate on the issue.
Although several hundred people showed up to the planning commission meeting at Elizabeth Forward Middle School on Wednesday and no one spoke in favor of the coal mine except for the company, Forward resident Melissa Thornton is warning neighbors this is just the beginning of the company’s advocacy.
“They are not gonna just go quietly,” Ms. Thornton, who lives next to Coronado’s property, predicted of the company’s response. “Seems to me that they’re in this for the long haul. I hope that everybody in the township actually understands that and knows that this isn’t over.”
As the company presented publicly for the first time on Wednesday through a narrated slide show, Coronado is looking to mine metallurgical coal — which is used in steelmaking — from land it bought from Consol Energy in 2016.
That sale included the coal rights to 140,000 acres, plus ownership of 980 surface acres, where Coronado wants to build a mine shaft, processing facilities and a large lined refuse pile for discarded material from the mine. Its plan would be to access the reserves under those 140,000 acres from the infrastructure built on top of the 980 acres.
The initial mine, which the company is referring to as the Mon Valley Mine, would access a fraction of those reserves — 25 million tons out of the estimated 148 million tons spread across all of its holdings here.
Coronado has challenged the township’s decades-old zoning ordinance that allows coal mining only on land zoned for industrial purposes. Less than a third of Coronado’s land is zoned industrial. The rest is a mix of conservation and residential.
To cure the situation, the company proposed creating a coal mining overlay district over the coal reserves it holds.
Ms. Thornton’s home would
be within the borders of that district, she said.
“I just don’t know how Coronado can swallow my house up in their plans without even stopping by my house to tell me about this,” she said.
The planning commission, whose recommendation is nonbinding, rejected Coronado’s challenge to the ordinance and so didn’t discuss the coal overlay district in detail.
Coronado’s attorney, Shawn Gallagher, of Buchanan Ingersoll & Rooney PC, said the company will make its case in the yet unscheduled public hearings that will be held before the township supervisors.
“We intend to present substantial evidence to the township supervisors demonstrating that the ordinance is exclusionary with regard to the mining use,” he said. “After the record is complete and a decision is made, we will evaluate the next steps.”
In a news release issued after the meeting on Wednesday, Coronado said it has begun environmental permitting but expects the process may take up to five years.
During its presentation, the company said it could start mining in 2027.
Amy Cline, a born-andraised township resident who calls herself the “sort of community organizer of Forward Township,” said the large crowd at Wednesday’s meeting should send a message to the company and the supervisors that, quite simply, “the people don’t want it.”
“We’re still recovering from the historic mining operation that got here before the law caught up and valued the environment,” she said.
Ms. Cline said she hopes Forward’s supervisors vote against Coronado’s plan.
Even if they do, she acknowledged, Coronado could still appeal that decision through the courts.
“We’ll see who’s gonna win the David and Goliath fight,” she said. “I don’t think that crowd that was there last night is gonna go away.”