Mining plan near park has environmentalists wary

Illinois lawmakers signed off during their spring session on a plan for the state to lease the strip at the edge of Pyramid State Park to the Knight Hawk Coal Co. of Percy. The company hopes to use it as a staging ground for a 240-acre strip mine just outside the 20,000-acre park, if a deal can be worked out with the Illinois Department of Natural Resources.

The company also would carve for coal underneath the public area.

The bill's sponsors say the project is about preserving jobs in a part of Illinois known for plumbing coal from the earth. But environmentalists, though satisfied with reasonable safeguards in the current measure, worry that it could open the door to future sacrifices of state land meant for conservation and public enjoyment.

The measure was delivered this week to Gov. Pat Quinn, who must make the final decision on the bill.

"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," said Jack Darin of the Sierra Club's Illinois chapter. "There's a very strong historic precedent for not allowing this kind of extraction on our state lands."

Illinois doesn't allow mining or logging in its state parks now, and allowing it in Pyramid State Park _ much of it former mining land that has been reclaimed _ would be a first, state Department of Natural Resources spokeswoman Januari Smith said. The agency has taken a neutral position on the legislation, she said.

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 now home to maturing wheat.

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 get at 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.

The measure's sponsor in the House, Democratic Rep. Dan Reitz of Steelville, some 10 miles from the park, said the coal company's CEO, Steve Carter, approached him to get the bill filed, seeking to strip mine part of the property and chisel out the black ore from beneath the surface elsewhere.

Reitz, who once spent 17 years working the region's underground coal mines, had a hard time saying no.

"He's doing it for the right reasons," he said, noting that Carter has said his strip mine was going to be depleted in a couple of years, and he wanted to open up some new mining for many of his workers in their 50s who don't want to work underground.

"I think this is a special situation," Carter said. "It's not like we're taking park property and taking a piece of it away. We're not really affecting anything from a park standpoint."

Quinn's office offered no immediate comment, other than noting through a spokeswoman that the Democrat "plans to review the legislation."

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.

The coal proposal isn't the first flap about alternative, private uses for Pyramid. A proposed 2,000-acre land exchange for a resort development was shelved several years ago after environmental groups questioned whether the state should part with park land and whether the development would harm grasslands where they say the Henslow's sparrow and other rare birds have thrived.

The economically struggling area is in need of employment; the recent closure of a DVD and compact disc plant cost it 440 jobs. And area leaders note that the state acquired 16,000 acres to expand the state park without local input, promising that the expansion would spur economic development and tourism that never materialized.

Before introducing the coal mining measure, Reitz and others led the Sierra Club and others on a tour of the land, noting "we tried our best just to make sure (the environmentalists) were a part of the process."

The Sierra Club's Darin said the sponsors believe they are acting in the community's interests, but he's concerned about the future and other parks.

"I'm sure there are mining companies that would be very interested in exploiting our state lands if they thought the state was willing to entertain offers," he said.

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