Park City resort a 'green' achievement

PARK CITY — EPA Administrator Stephen L. Johnson on Tuesday visited the future site of a "green" mountain resort that he called a "landmark achievement" and a model to follow for others in the resort industry who want to be more environmentally friendly.

Johnson and Gov. Jon Huntsman Jr. gathered at the Empire Canyon Lodge, overlooking the future resort site, to also launch a new EPA program called Environmentally Responsible Redevelopment and Reuse, or ER3.

The future 16-acre Montage Resort & Spa site, which will include a residential component, sits atop the old Daly West Mine site near the Deer Valley ski resort. Workers are nearly finished cleaning up mining waste there, as part of the ER3 program's first pilot project in the nation.

With an estimated 500,000 abandoned mine sites across the country, with most located in the West, the ER3 program addresses a way to return those sites to "beneficial" uses, said Robert Roberts, EPA regional administrator.

For the Daly site, the administrative and legal process began in 2004, when investors, the EPA, state environmental leaders and Park City officials started to talk about what could be done with the 16-acre property and how to handle waste cleanup there.

Even before that process began, the EPA had struck an agreement with United Park City Mines, which since 2003 has spent over $3 million on cleaning up soil and water sites at Daly that had heavy-metal contamination left behind by the mining of silver, lead and zinc.

About 90,000 cubic yards of contaminated soil now have been removed from the Daly site and transported to the Richardson Flat site about five miles away. Cleanup and covering of contaminated soil at that site are expected to take place over the next 10 years.

Actual mining at the Daly site ended in the 1920s, but it continued to function as a waste dump for decades. Contaminants in the soil throughout the site included arsenic and lead and, to a lesser degree, cadmium and zinc. Researchers have concluded that long-term exposure to arsenic can cause various forms of cancer, while can lead to damage of the brain and kidneys in an adult or impact the developing nervous system in a fetus and cause learning problems in children.

Because the cleanup was handled privately and the contaminated soil was removed from the area, the site was never labeled by the EPA as a Superfund project, which carries with it another layer of government involvement during remediation efforts and, as an EPA official put it, a public "stigma."