Published: February 15, 2018 |

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A committee will be formed to draft regulations for hard rock mining in Pennington County ahead of the April 5 expiration of the county’s current mining moratorium.

The decision came Tuesday night at a special county Board of Commissioners meeting before the board considered the first reading of an ordinance to regulate sand, gravel and construction aggregate mining operations that extract more than 100 cubic yards of material.

At the time of publication, the board had yet to complete the first reading of the ordinance, which must be approved by the board twice before going into effect. The ordinance will be considered again at its Feb. 20 meeting.

Though the ordinance primarily addresses sand, gravel and aggregate mining, a two-paragraph section dealing with mineral extraction — gold mining, for example — attracted the majority of comments during the meeting’s first 2 1/2 hours as citizens from Rochford, Rockerville and Native American activists voiced their concerns about potential gold mining in the Black Hills and the lack of county regulations pertaining to the activity.

Last week, a Canadian mining company, Mineral Mountain Resources, began exploratory drilling on private land about a half-mile southeast of Rochford, a small, unincorporated community in the north-central Black Hills that was a gold-mining hub during the late 1800s.

At Tuesday’s meeting, some of the attendees raised the possibility of future conflict and protests related to this operation, with the Dakota Access Pipeline protests of 2016 and 2017 near the banks of the Missouri River in Cannon Ball, N.D., explicitly mentioned. Mineral Mountain Resources’ project’s lies about 7 miles west of Pe’ Sla, a large mountain meadow sacred to the Oglala Lakota and other Native America tribes.

“Is that (DAPL protests) what’s coming here?” asked James Hawk, an Oglala Lakota activist.

As the ordinance under consideration currently elucidates, a conditional use permit will be required for any mining operation extracting 100 cubic yards or more of material. On April 5, a two-year county moratorium on the issuance of mining permits in Pennington County will expire. Assistant state’s attorney Michaele Hoffman said the county can no longer extend the moratorium per South Dakota Codified Law 11-2-10, which limits such measures to a maximum of two years.

When asked how the county would decide on future mining operation permit applications and operations, commissioners said they hoped the larger ordinance under consideration would be approved before April 5. Section 507N, which deals with the extraction of minerals, has been characterized as a “stop-gap measure” until a complete ordinance dealing solely with mineral extraction mining operations is finalized.

Source: Rapid City Journal

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