The Montana Environmental Information Center says that Lincoln County has failed to provide documents requested under the state’s right-to-know laws related to the county’s push to change pollution standards in Lake Koocanusa.
MEIC’s complaint, filed before Lincoln County District Court on Jan. 23, stems from a rule-making petition the county submitted to the state last summer seeking a change to the site-specific standards for the element selenium in the transboundary lake.
The current site-specific standard of acceptable concentration is 0.8 micrograms of selenium per liter of water, much more stringent than the federal threshold of 1.5 micrograms per liter, which is the level the county asked the state to consider.
The Montana Department of Environmental Quality denied the petition, in part because the International Joint Commission, an organization created by the United States and Canada to resolve disputes related to shared waterways, has convened a board of experts to study the issue of transboundary pollution in the Elk-Kootenai River Basin.
MEIC said they filed the lawsuit to ensure the state constitution is being followed, the Daily Montanan reports.
“We’re in the business of holding our elected officials and corporations accountable,” Derf Johnson, deputy director of MEIC, said in a press release. “When our public resources are offered up as sacrifice to a foreign, for-profit corporation with a history of polluting and leaving a mess, we definitely want to know what happened behind the scenes.”
Lake Koocanusa has long been the center of a fight between environmental groups and industry backers over the leeching of the element selenium into the Elk River in British Columbia from Canadian coal mines. The mining pollution flows downstream into Koocanusa, where concentrations are documented to have quadrupled in the last three decades and threaten aquatic species, including West Slope Cutthroat Trout and White Sturgeon.
While a U.S. Geological Survey study published in 2023 linked the expansion of mining operations with increased selenium and nitrate concentrations over decades, and indicated selenium concentrations in Koocanusa had not met Montana’s site-specific standards since 2020, the owners of the mining operations have pushed for moderating the selenium standard in Lake Koocanusa.
Teck Resources Limited, the former owner of Elk Valley Resources, which operates the Canadian coal mines, submitted the same petition as Lincoln County back in 2021, and the current owner, international mining conglomerate Glencore, has continued to dispute the strict standard.
Following Lincoln County’s submission last summer, MEIC and representatives of other environmental organizations pushed back against the petition, saying there is no scientific basis to weaken the standard and pointed to potential impacts to Montana’s robust recreation-based economy that includes a $149 million contribution from boating and fishing.
According to court documents, a few days after the petition was submitted, MEIC submitted a records request to Lincoln County for all documents related to the petition, but has not received any response.
“Lincoln County’s actions could best be characterized as ‘radio silence,'” court filings state. “It has not provided the requested information, nor has it provided a reason for its inaction.”
In the lawsuit, MEIC alleges the county is violating its right to know under the state constitution and public records laws, and seeks a court order forcing Lincoln County to provide the requested information.
Lincoln County Commissioner Noel Duram told the Daily Montanan last year that he had met with representatives of both the Montana Department of Environmental Quality and Elk Valley Resources to discuss the pollution issue. He also said the mining company had given a presentation challenging the science of the existing standard, and offering more recent studies that could be used to argue for a more lenient rule.
This filing is the latest in a long line of legal disputes orbiting the lake’s selenium standard and the rulemaking process.
There is an ongoing lawsuit between the Montana Board of Environmental Review – a quasi-judicial body that handles environmental permit disputes — Teck, and Lincoln County, and a multitude of environmental groups led by the Montana Environmental Information Center seeking to keep the stronger pollutant standard in place, after the review board overturned the standard. In another suit, MEIC sued the Montana Department of Justice for denying access to communications between Teck and the state.
Montana’s DEQ is supposed to undergo a triennial review of the state’s water quality standards, including of Lake Koocanusa, and the International Joint Commission is expected to receive a final report from the Elk-Kootenai River Basin study team this fall.
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