Weekly Register-Call/ Gilpin County News

County Management

Again this week there was a very short agenda for the Gilpin County Commissioners’ meeting, but instead of looking 50 years into the past, in this column I’m going to be looking several years – or at least several days – into the future.

On Tuesday, January 19^th, beginning at 6:30 in the evening, there will be a public meeting to receive comment on a proposed water treatment plan to treat the “mining impacted” water of Gregory Gulch, Gregory Incline, and the National Tunnel.

This is the latest phase in a project to clean up North Clear Creek that has been ongoing at least since 2004, when a Record of Decision was signed that established treatment plans for what became known as Operable Unit 4, a small but significant subset of the 400-square-mile Clear Creek drainage basin that was added to the Environmental Protection Agency’s “Superfund” National Priorities List as far back as 1983.

Working with the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment, EPA began a great deal of remedial treatment of waste piles in the Russell Gulch area, which it was hoped would limit further heavy metal contamination of Clear Creek due to excessive runoff during storms. But the water already flowing directly out of these old mine tunnels was to be treated in a plant operated in conjunction with the Bates-Hunter mine, which was then trying to reopen and was required to treat its own discharge water.

Combining the commercial and governmental projects in one seemed like a good idea, but now EPA and CDPHE seek to take advantage of another governmental project – the proposed widening of Highway 119 – to lay in some pipeline and drain the polluted water down to an entirely new water treatment plant.

I’m sure the plant won’t be anything on the scale of the huge Black Hawk-Central City Sanitation District operation further down, but it will still be visible, and thus probably controversial. The plant is expected to cost about $13 million, costing nearly another $1 million a year to operate, so this is not an insignificant proposal.

It will be interesting to see how this project is received, given that the entire Highway 119 widening has already drawn some criticism. There was a recent Denver Post article about how the widening may eliminate Vic’s Gold Panning, one of the last operating commercial reminders of Gilpin County’s mining heritage.

Of course, the very reason for the new water treatment plant in the first place is to deal with some of the unwanted consequences of that heritage. And even here, public opinion is mixed. No one wants polluted water, of course, and everyone would like to see Clear Creek restored to a level of cleanliness that could at least support aquatic wildlife – brown trout, most notably. But should the Creek be restored to its “natural,” pre-mining appearance? Is that even possible?

I don’t know that philosophical questions of that kind will be discussed Tuesday, but they will certainly be hanging in the air. People who can’t make the January 19^th meeting can also submit written comments through February 3^rd, either through regular mail or email; the addresses for both are on the County website, http://co.gilpin.co.us, or you can get them by calling me at 303-582-5214. We’ve got some information on the project here at the Courthouse, too, but I hope to see a lot of people at the meeting to ask good questions. We’re trying to fix a problem that began 150 years ago; there’s no sense rushing into a decision on how to solve it.