You turned out for ADEQ APP meetings on February 20th and March 5!

APP comment period still open.

Thank you to everyone who attended the latest ADEQ meetings on February 20 and March 5, submitted comments, rallied your neighbors, and spoke up in defense of our region’s precious water resources.

In response to our community groundswell, we were successful in demanding a public meeting (held February 20th) and granted an extended comment period to review Hudbay’s application for an Aquifer Protection Permit (APP). This permit is one of the things Hudbay needs to start mining.

A legally-mandated public hearing on the draft permit took place on March 5. The comment period has been extended to April 10.

PLEASE NOTE: some people have assumed that the APP is a done deal now that the public meetings are over. Not so! Now more than ever we need you to submit comments to ADEQ before the April 10th deadline. If you’ve already submitted comments and want to add to them, you can upload a second or third comment through the ADEQ comment portal

SSSR has hired three experts in hydrology and mining to produce our organizational comments, which we expect to be ready to submit to ADEQ around March 20th. We will share our organizational comments with you in plenty of time to help you prepare and submit your personal comments by the end of the comment period on April 10th.

Our experts also produced a list of technical questions that our members read into the public record at both the February 20th and March 5th meetings. Our heartfelt thanks to those who spoke out and made sure these questions are on the record! Here is a link to the updated list of questions our experts prepared for the March 5th meeting. These questions could help you in preparing your personal comments on the APP.

ADEQ was allowed to answer our questions at the February 20th meeting, but not at the March 5th meeting. Here is a link to a transcript of ADEQ’s answers to questions at the February 20th meeting.

Also, for those who missed it, here’s a link to a video recording of the March 5th meeting.

Learn more about the ADEQ permit here and submit your own comments by April 10.