Stripping away local control: A reader challenges Oneida County’s mining maneuvers

To the Editor:

Back in 2009 a company called Tamerlane approached Oneida County about acquiring rights to the Lynne Deposit, a known zinc/silver/lead deposit that was discovered in 1990 by Noranda under a glacial aquifer just upstream of the Willow Flowage on county forest lands. Tamerlane, a “mining interest,” never amounted to much, but that didn’t stop our county government from aggressively trying to lease the deposit. The committee of jurisdiction that was established spent three years ignoring public concerns about the leasing proposal. Those concerns were finally brought before the full county board in 2012, and the proposal started receiving resistance from several other board members, ultimately resulting in the defeat of the proposal to lease the Lynne site, known as the “Shidel Resolution,” ending metallic mining as a “policy goal” in Oneida County.  

The defeat of the “Shidel Resolution” did not sit well with the supervisors that had been pushing a mine at Lynne. They were especially upset with Lynne town chair, Dave Schatzley, who vowed to block the mine by opposing a rezone of the area to “Manufacturing and Industrial,” an important protection for area property owners. Committee members led by Scott Holewinski and Dave Hintz wasted no time proposing to remove this important protection by simply allowing metallic mining in “1-A Forestry” so that the area would not need to be rezoned for a mine.

Eventually, the committee dropped this proposed change because of public opposition, but when Tom Tiffany repealed the “Prove it First” law in 2018, those board members pushing the mine, pounced on the opportunity by proposing a new mining ordinance that would allow metallic mining in areas zoned “1-A Forestry” and “General Use.”

Planning and Zoning did not conduct a “face to face” with the towns to explain these changes, as is customary, because of an imposed “deadline,” but once the new metallic mining ordinance was approved by the county board, they neglected to update the county zoning ordinance to reflect the new changes imposed by the metallic mining ordinance, effectively obscuring how property owners had been stripped of local control in order to push a mine at Lynne.

Even now, as I type this, seven years later, the county zoning ordinance contains inaccuracies/inconsistencies and is riddled with confusing cross references, making it hard for a property owner to go online to see what is allowed in his/her neighborhood, unless they bother to dig way down into the metallic mining ordinance.

Seven years ago, our county government decided to remove a critical local control from property owners to push a mine at Lynne that they knew the town and property owners in the impact area were opposed to, and to push highly speculative “mines” in the towns of Pelican and Schoepke. Will our county government correct this mistake, or will it take town leaders and organized groups of property owners to fix it?

Karl A. Fate

Crescent