Interior Department officials are warning backers of the proposed Pebble mine to halt illegal use of insignia of federal agencies in advertising and to prominently display a disclaimer that the Pebble Limited Partnership has no affiliation with several federal agencies.
The warning to Tom Collier, chief executive officer of the PLP, came in a letter of Dec. 13 from Interior Department attorney Lisa Kilday.
The letter directed PLP to confirm in writing by Dec. 27 that PLP has taken the requested action and agrees not to use the name, trademarks and logos of the Interior Department, Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement, Fish and Wildlife Service or National Park Service.
Kilday noted that at the time she wrote the letter that the federal agency did not yet “have full knowledge of the breadth of PLP’s advertising campaign and the resulting extent of PLP’s unauthorized use of department insignia.”
One mailer distributed by PLP promotes the quality and sufficiency of the proposed Pebble mine project draft environmental impact statement published by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers in February 2019, Kilday said. The mailer implies that the contentious draft document was produced by 16 federal, state and tribal entities, including three Interior Department bureaus, when in fact it was produced by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, she said.
It is misleading for PLP’s advertisements to attribute production of the DEIS to the bureaus, thereby suggesting that the department or other federal agencies endorse the DEIS, she said. While the bureaus participated and will continue to participate in the National Environmental Policy Act review of the proposed project, they did not participate in producing or controlling the draft document and their involvement in the environmental review does not represent the bureaus’ endorsement of the DEIS or any future final EIS, she said.
The letter was prompted by PLP’s use of those federal insignia in advertisements sent by mail and published in Alaska newspapers in a campaign in support of the copper, gold and molybdenum mine adjacent to the headwaters of the Bristol Bay watershed in Southwest Alaska. PLP, a subsidiary of Hunter Dickinson, a diversified, global mining group based in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, maintains that it can develop and operate the mine without adverse impact to the Bristol Bay watershed, home of the world’s largest run of wild sockeye salmon. Mine opponents maintain that the mine would have a very severe impact on the fishery.
Mike Heatwole, spokesman for the PLP in Anchorage, said that company was simply attempting “to visually convey the agencies that are participating as cooperating agencies via the NEPA review of the project instead of just listing them. We disagree with the assertion that it was misleading but have agreed to not use the logos in the future and have removed them – a step we actually took several weeks ago when we initially heard concerns being expressed. Our communications are intended to show the public all of the different federal, state, local and tribal entities that are participating as cooperating agencies in the NEPA review of the project,” Heatwole said.
