The cash-colored revolving door revolves again.
Here and here.
Apart from Brad Moore specifics; but a consideration in general; with the revolving door tradition so entrenched in our political world why would there ever be bribing?
Just wait.
----------------------
Minn.Indy's database on "Brad Moore" gave this one hit. This excerpt - how Pawlenty people operate:
Copper-mine meetings extracted opinion without polluting public discourse
By Chris Steller | 12.15.09 | 2:06 pm
A massive proposal to mine for copper and other metals in Northern Minnesota underwent exactly the amount of public debate at two meetings last week that government agencies had planned for: none, according to Lake Superior Mining News. Citizens wishing to speak on PolyMet Mining’s plans did their business with a stenographer in a small room, while politicians backing the plan held forth in the main hall.
This is how the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources (DNR) describes the project: “PolyMet Mining, Inc. proposes to develop an open pit mine and to refurbish and modify the former LTV Steel Mining taconite ore processing facility to extract copper metal and precipitates of nickel, cobalt and precious metals near Babbitt and Hoyt Lakes in northeastern Minnesota.”
The project promises 400 jobs lasting 20 years. The impact on the environment could be more permanent.
“It would be the largest single wetlands impact that the St. Paul office has permitted,” said U.S. Army Corps of Engineers project manager Jon Ahlness, according to the Tower Timberjay News. He was referring to the Corps’ St. Paul District, which covers 139,000 square miles including most of Minnesota, western Wisconsin, northeastern North Dakota, and small parts of South Dakota and Iowa.
The project has major political backing from U.S. Sens. Amy Klobuchar and Al Franken and U.S. Rep. Jim Oberstar, as well as state Sens. David Tomassoni and Tom Bakk and state Rep. Tom Rukavina, who gave speeches at the meetings. (Rukavina and Bakk are candidates for governor.)
PolyMet also enjoys paid help from people who have held state posts, including former state Pollution Control Agency (PCA) commissioner Brad Moore and former deputy PCA commissioner Ann Glumac.
But with that much political weight on one side, the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources and the Corps opted to hold the Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) meetings without an exchange of views.
“To have a public meeting where the public doesn’t get to comment is really a boneheaded move,” Rukavina said, according to the Duluth News Tribune. The Timberjay News quoted Rukavina as telling the crowd in Aurora, ”That decision was a screw-up on somebody’s part. … If I was governor, people would have been able to talk tonight.”
------------------------------
[italics added] With GOP outlets in the recent past whining greatly about Dayton's appointment of a PCA "sheriff" who respects the badge; (i.e., here and here for repeated representative expressions of what PCA regulation should or should not be from a GOP perspective); this Brad Moore appointment is the next logical shoe to drop.
The GOP outlets likely shall see the Moore revolving-door employment as a positive thing, even if giving lip-service to the evils of the revolving door in the past in other contexts. Such an expected GOP reaction is in line with the parallel dislike of Dayton's showing a spine in appointing someone who most surely will not be a wink and a nod agency head for mining interests (and who had affiliations with MCEA, which told the straight and honest no-hokum no-bunkum truth about mining impacts, as already noted by Crabgrass, here).
_______________UPDATE_____________
Chris S. put links into that Minn. Indy post, which I neither transcribed into the quote, nor checked to see if they've become dead links. If you want the full presentation, from then, please go to the original, again - this link. It should be worthwhile to check links and read the entire item. I only excerpted opening paragraphs. Public input clearly was treated as having second class status to the dog and pony propagandists pushing their agenda. Paid reps being who they were. Two former agency honchos.
____________FURTHER UPDATE_________
Besides the MCEA item which you can reach via the Crabgrass link-back above; Friends of the Boundary Waters are actively concerned about PolyMet impacts and the need for safeguards; and you can reach their website, etc., to explore things, per this earlier Crabgrass post. (NOTE: I give it without link checking, so please email or comment if any dead links show up if/when you link back.)
____________FURTHER UPDATE__________
Dennis Anderson's Strib reporting had this:
In a news release, Moore said PolyMet "can demonstrate that non-ferrous mining can be done in a way that meets Minnesota's high environmental standards."
That wholly begs the major question. Feasibility in the abstract (... can be ...) is less the issue than commitment. A better release would have been, from a public reassurance viewpoint, something such as:
PolyMet will never do any non-ferrous mining at any time in ways that do not completely meet all applicable environmental regulations, and will only mine in the most careful and environmentally respectful way possible and will back up that promise with millions and millions placed in escrow to avoid any future abandonment or operating situation of bailing out as a least cost alternative, via bankruptcy court or otherwise, and all of the PolyMet empire will be pledged to secure such promises without any callous attempt to channel things through an interposed shell operation so thinly capitalized as to own little more than three chairs, a table, and a filing cabinet and will when done and before leaving or attempting to free escrow funds will remediate the earth in all places where its mining has had impact including via airborne distant pollution of waters or land and will do remediation to a standard acceptable to Sierra Club and Friends of the BWCA and will not quit on things absent those two organizations signing off approvals.
That would be touching the relevant bases. Or have I left out an "... and ..."?
Surely, taking ore out a teaspoon at a time and processing it in a research laboratory environment behind a fume hood and with personnel wearing protective clothing is feasible.
It is not commercial, and it begs the question of how to stop PolyMet from getting away with all it can, since that's how the firm will maximize its profits and its return on capital.
All else is hand-waving. Dodge ball.
The world does need copper but this is not the only site where ore exists. There is no benefit to Minnesota to make this the cheapest site to exploit. Rather it should be the costliest, as it likely would if properly regulated, so that if mining on the cheap is the PolyMet firm's true and only objective, it will do so elsewhere.
Finally tax PolyMet as much as possible if it will be removing valuable and irreplaceable Minnesota natural resources for its profit. The more taxes PolyMet pays, the less everyone else needs to pay - and we citizens are not exploiting and expropriating Minnesota natural resources for personal profit so we've no cause to subsidize PolyMet or any other mining operation.
Tax them, not us.