Dozens of residents filed in and out of the Noel Wien Library auditorium Friday to share their thoughts with leadership at Felix Gold, the publicly-traded Australian mining company eyeing gold and antimony projects near Fairbanks.
It was the second of three listening sessions scheduled at the auditorium this month, which drew residents like Jamie Hansen. She lives off Henderson Road, near the Grant Mine site outside of Ester. But on Friday, she was sitting at one of the tables arranged inside Noel Wien, pen in hand, filling in survey questions.
“I am writing about my concerns about what the impact of the Grant Mine would be on my neighborhood,” Hansen said.
She said she’s still in the process of learning about Felix Gold and the scope of their possible mining operation at Ester Dome. But she does have worries. Chief among them are water contamination risks and an uptick in traffic.
“I have two little kids. We bike on Gold Hill. We bike on Henderson Road. So that’s a real, critical safety issue for me,” she said.
The Grant Mine is one of two locations near Fairbanks the company touts as containing gold or antimony resources worth exploring and possibly developing. The other is north of town, by Treasure Creek.
“It’s early stage for us for Grant, specifically,” Catherine Kim said in an interview Friday. She’s the general manager for MDF Global, which oversees Felix Gold’s Fairbanks projects.
The public comment period ended earlier this month for Felix Gold’s application for a 10-year exploration permit at the Grant Mine site. If issued by the Alaska Department of Natural Resources, that permit would allow the company to run an exploration program that they estimate could disrupt and then reclaim up to 13 acres as early as this year.
But they don’t have the permit yet. And Kim says, for now, the only plan at Ester Dome is for a couple small crews to perform surveys on foot, with minimal disturbance and no heavy equipment. That could change, though.
“If we were to receive full exploration permits, and we felt that there was benefit to pursuing exploration activity under our permissible uses under our permit, that could absolutely happen. That’s full transparency,” she said. “But right now, there is not a plan for that and we haven’t budgeted for that.”
Things are further along at Treasure Creek, particularly at a site Felix Gold calls the Northwest Array, about a mile from the Scrafford Mine, a site known for supplying the U.S. with antimony during World War II. Felix Gold has set a goal of extracting antimony from the Northwest Array by the end of this year, though Kim says that’s dependent on completing a feasibility study and obtaining a mining permit in time.
“As we get resource data, we’ve engaged an engineering firm to look at that to provide input on what, potentially, a conceptual mine would look like,” she said. “But at this stage, it’s very early for that – like we don’t have an actual footprint or anything like that.”
Response to Felix Gold has been a bit of a mixed bag so far. The Fairbanks Daily News-Miner has published editorials supporting the idea of a Fairbanks mine boosting domestic supply of antimony, which the federal government has deemed a critical mineral.
Pushback to the projects has largely pointed to their proximity to neighborhoods or recreation areas, like Ester and Murphy domes. That’s the big issue for Deborah Ryan, who’s part of a local group called Save Our Domes.
“Berry picking, fat biking, skiing, dog mushing, hunting – these domes are precious,” she said, adding that she’s been carrying around blank paper copies of the Felix Gold community surveys in her car to give to people.
The completed surveys, which are also available on Felix Gold’s website, will be compiled along with other forms of feedback and then sent to the company by Joy Huntington. She’s the principal consultant at Uqaqti Consulting, which Felix Gold has contracted for community relations.
Friday’s listening session marked the second this month, with one more to come on May 30. Huntington said the survey results will inform how Felix Gold approaches and prepares for more formal community meetings down the line.
“It’s not just going into an empty void. I can definitely vouch for that,” she said.
And wrapped up in that bundle of feedback for Felix Gold to consider will be the perspectives of people who – like Jamie Hansen – call the areas around these projects home.
“It’s really hard for me to believe that a large firm such as this investing in a mine in my neighborhood wouldn’t have really significant negative impacts on us being a rural, quiet, safe community,” Hansen said.