OPENING ARGUMENTS FILED
Many people who get the newsletter just want to know what’s going on in the legal fight. A lot. The Obama Administration just filed a brief in the Rinehart case supporting the State’s position to ban dredging forever. No surpriset here.
We spent the weekend working with the attorney preparing the final briefings for submission. Our final court documents were due today, August 31st. We are impressed with our attorney, James Buchal who worked the entire weekend and well past midnight every night to get the brief findings done.
We couldn’t mention the attorney’s work without expressing our thanks to Dave McCracken and the New 49ers for allowing us to share their attorney and legal costs. This reduces both our costs and the New 49er costs, and ultimately means less money we have to try and raise.
Due today is our opening argument on the challenge to the environmental impact report and the remaining arguments in the other cases, as well as Keith Walker’s opening argument.
Virtually the entire month of August was spent in writing and editing these briefings and they represent the future of mining California.
If you want a copy of the final briefing you can email us, and we’ll send you a copy. It represents almost three years of work researching and reading. We had to read every CEQA appeals case published; virtually every single report referenced in the EIR, and we had to go through the administrative record which consisted of over 100,000pagesofdocuments.
To call this case complex would be an understatement, but you must realize we’re up against what we consider a giant fraud. We challenge, in our briefing, the process they used to ban dredging. We believe we’ve laid out a
strong case for why the EIR was a fraud and was designed to reach an outcome based on political pressure, not based on science.
However, it’s likely we just racked up another $10,000 in legal bills over the past few weeks, and we need some support.Our support comes entirely from you.
There’s only a handful of us doing this research and writing these briefings, and we’re working with a single lawyer,but the legal bills add up quickly.
The good news is we have an end date. January 20 Th will be the hearing and we’ll win or lose. If we win the State has said they’ll appeal the ruling, if we lose, then we collectively have a decision to make on how to proceed.
This legal fight has been expensive, and we’re still short on paying our previous legal bills. Thanks to everyone who has contributed or purchased something to help us fund the fight.Not one dollar goes to any thing but paying legal expenses.
All the cases will be heard on the 20th of January, and all the decisions will follow shortly after that.
What happens with small scale mining in California hangs in the balance with how well we’ve presented our arguments,and how well were searched our position.
Even if you’re not a dredger this court case will have significant impacts on your future mining. If we allow the State to arbitrarily determine what is a major environmental effect, without regards to the truth or science, then this same approach will be used by the environmentalists to continue to shutdown mining.
If you appreciate what we’re doing, we’d sure appreciate some help paying our legal bills