Pebble Partnership Prepares Appeal Of US Army Corps Of Engineers' Record of Decision

VANCOUVER - Northern Dynasty Minerals Ltd. reported that its 100%-owned, US-based subsidiary Pebble Limited Partnership is preparing a comprehensive and substantive ‘request for appeal' (RFA) with respect to the US Army Corps of Engineers' (USACE) issuance last week of a negative Record of Decision (ROD) for the proposed Pebble copper-gold-molybdenum-silver-rhenium mine in southwest Alaska.

The ROD issued by the lead federal regulator for Alaska's Pebble Project on November 25, 2020 denied the project a ‘dredge and fill' permit under the Clean Water Act on the grounds that its ‘compensatory mitigation plan' ("CMP") is non-compliant and the project is not in the ‘public interest.' The Pebble Partnership has 60 days to submit its application for administrative appeal to the USACE's Pacific Ocean Division Engineer headquartered in Hawaii.

"We will take a significant proportion of the time allotted to us to complete an exhaustive review of the administrative record pertinent to the Pebble Project Environmental Impact Statement ("EIS") and ROD, to prepare a comprehensive and substantive appeal and submit an RFA to the Division Engineer," said Ron Thiessen, Northern Dynasty President & CEO. “It is our view that this decision, the process by which it was reached and the facts upon which it is based stand as a significant outlier from standard USACE precedent and practice. We believe there is a sound basis for this permitting decision to be overturned."

Northern Dynasty and the Pebble Partnership intend to challenge the USACE's permitting decision on procedural, substantive and legal grounds. Among the substantive issues to be raised is Northern Dynasty's contention that the ROD - and, in particular, the Public Interest Review (PIR) findings upon which it is based - are fundamentally unsupported by the Pebble Project EIS. Under US regulatory law, permitting decisions for major development projects must be based on an ‘administrative record' - which, in Pebble's case, includes the Final EIS published by the USACE in July 2020.