Arizona opinion: Mining in the state: Don't believe the hype

All those foreign mining companies sniffing around — scooping, drilling, digging, and blasting through southern Arizona’s Sky Islands and its most biodiverse hot spots — they’re promising the world to Arizonans. Jobs. Tax revenue. Economic prosperity. A domestic source of copper to improve national security.

Tucsonans have learned from Copper World and South32 that it’s all hyperbole. By now, residents have learned not to believe the hype.

The same should go for promises by Canadian Faraday Copper, operating its US LLC, Redhawk, to the north in the Galiuros at Copper Creek. The foreign company’s plan to sell its exploratory mining “package” to a bigger player could result in six open-pit and two block-cave mines over a 28-square-mile footprint.

If it happens, it may impact one of the places Tucsonans love best: Aravaipa Canyon, a rare perennially flowing southern Arizona creek. Such a mine would inevitably impact the Lower San Pedro River and the hundreds of millions of migrating birds that pass through one of the state’s Global Important Bird Areas. It would very likely also impact local residents’ wells.

The myth that “copper is king” in Arizona really doesn’t have legs when considering the facts. The non-partisan Common Sense Institute reports that Arizona mining represents only 1.3% of Arizona’s GDP – and that includes quarrying and oil and gas extraction, making copper’s percentage far lower. Mining jobs result in only .5% of employment for the state. Turns out, Arizona’s moniker ‘The Copper State’ is nothing more than storytelling, a fallacy the mining industry is happy to embrace.

And yet the tale-spinning continues. Redhawk Exploration’s website promises of the Copper Creek area $14.2 billion in “direct, indirect, and induced economic impacts,” the equivalent, they say of “14 Super Bowls to eastern Pinal County and nearly $90 million in personal income for Arizona residents.” There’s more to the promises: “$1.6 billion in local, county, state, and federal taxes and approximately 1,200 local employment opportunities.”

When asked for the source of the study and its methodology, no one from the company has answered. And, interestingly, the anticipated employment numbers went from 150 in Faraday/Redhawk’s Preliminary Economic Assessment, to 1,200 on the Redhawk website, to 5,000 during interviews with staff. It’s all laughable, really, considering that the biggest copper mining operation in the state — the Morenci Mine — employs a little over 3,000. And that Grupo Mexico’s operations at the Ray Mine in nearby Hayden have replaced human operators with autonomous vehicles. There will assuredly be more of that, eating away at promised jobs.

So, yes, Arizonans are learning to question the ‘facts,’ as entertaining and fictional as they appear.

But you can help write the story’s ending for Copper Creek in the Galiuro’s Sky Islands, a riparian area that is home to endangered Mexican-Spotted Owls. Arizonans still have an opportunity to voice opinions about Faraday’s proposal for 67 additional exploration sites that guzzle 70,000 gallons of water per rig, per month. The Bureau of Land Management’s public comment period on its draft Environmental Assessment for the Copper Creek exploratory drilling project ends April 14.