US House Presses PLP and Army Corps for Answers

Read full press release here: LINK

Washington, D.C. – Chair of the House Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure Peter DeFazio (D-OR) and Chair of the Subcommittee on Water Resources and Environment Grace F. Napolitano (D-CA) sent letters to the Pebble Limited Partnership (Pebble) and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (Army Corps) requesting records about the proposed Pebble Mine Project after secret recordings of Pebble’s senior leaders—known as the “Pebble Tapes”—suggest that Congress, the Army Corps and the public may have been misled about Pebble’s planned scale and scope of the mine. Pebble’s permit application limits the duration of the mine to 20 years, yet the private recordings show Pebble’s leaders believe it will operate for nearly 200 years and continually expand.

In the two letters that were sent to John Shively (Interim Chief Executive Officer of Pebble) and Lt. Gen. Scott A. Spellmon (Chief of Engineers and Commanding General of the Army Corps), DeFazio and Napolitano expressed deep concern that statements made by top Pebble officials in these candid recordings directly contradicted the information that was presented in both the permit to the Army Corps as well as in testimony by the former CEO of Pebble to the House Committee on Transportation & Infrastructure last year—acts that are misleading and possibly illegal. For example, despite Ronald Thiessen (President, CEO and Director of Pebble’s parent company, Northern Dynasty) and Tom Collier (then-CEO of Pebble) publicly telling the Army Corps and the Committee respectively that they would not try to expand Pebble Mine’s size, capacity or duration, the “Pebble Tapes” made clear that they were saying the opposite in private.