Gov signs measure allowing mining near Ill. park

ST. LOUIS (AP) ?€" Illinois' governor has given the go-ahead for a plan that would open up a state park to mining for the first time ?€" a venture that wary environmentalists say could be a slippery slope for stewardship of public land during hard economic times.

Gov. Pat Quinn has quietly signed into law a measure allowing Knight Hawk Coal Co. to lease a 160-acre strip of land at the edge of southern Illinois' Pyramid State Recreation Area as a staging ground for a 240-acre strip mine just outside the 20,000-acre park. Percy-based Knight Hawk also would carve for coal underneath the public area.

Environmentalists have said they're satisfied with reasonable safeguards in the measure protecting the park, but they worry that the move involving Pyramid ?€" much of it former mining land that has been reclaimed ?€" could open the door to future sacrifices of state land.

"If we hang a 'For Sale' sign on our state parks, we will get lots of offers, and none of them are what we had in mind when we protected them for future generations," Jack Darin of the Sierra Club's Illinois chapter said recently. "There's a very strong historic precedent for not allowing this kind of extraction on our state lands."

The bill's sponsors have insisted the project is about preserving jobs in a part of Illinois known for coal mining.

Under the plan, Knight Hawk would lease at fair market value a small portion of the park ?€" a place that consistently has drawn 400,000 visitors annually in recent years ?€" for a decade to get around a federal law requiring that coal not be mined within 300 feet of park land. As part of the venture near Pinckneyville, a 5,500-resident town about 70 miles southeast of St. Louis, most of the mining actually would take place off park land, in 240 acres of private land.

Using a giant mechanical extractor, the mining company also would bore up to 1,000 feet into the walls of the pit next to the park to reach additional coal. All told, Knight Hawk expects to reap some 500,000 tons of coal a year from the site for roughly seven or eight years, adding to the 4.5 million tons the 15-year-old company now produces each year at five other mines in the region.

Part of the park also would be leased out for storage of the dirt that will be dug up and later "restored" to state DNR specifications, perhaps creating more wetlands to make use of the land that's been carved out. Knight Hawk will donate the 240 acres on which the strip mining would take place, land worth $1 million.

Messages left Wednesday with Knight Hawk executives and Darin were not immediately returned.

Pyramid State Park can credit mining for its size and name, derived from a coal company that once existed there. The park's original 924 acres, much of it previously strip mined, were acquired in 1968 from Southern Illinois University, which had used the land for research. Most of modern-day Pyramid had been mined before, from the 1930s through the early 1990s.

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