After three hearings in two days on sulfide mining and the need for stricter damage deposits to clean up any messes the mines leave behind, Sen. Jim Carlson pulled his financial assurance bill just before a committee vote Wednesday night.

It was clear that he didn’t have the votes to approve the bill, which would have toughened the rules on when and how financial assurance for sulfide mines are decided. The toughened rules also would have closed any loopholes on who was covered and what kind of financial instrument could be used so that Minnesota taxpayers wouldn’t be left paying for multi-million dollar cleanups after the mine companies walked away.

“This type of mining has done more environmental damage than any other industry,” Carlson said just before pulling the bill after four-and-a-half hours of hearings Wednesday evening before the Senate Environment and Natural Resources Committee.

Minnesota Center for Environmental Advocacy’s Executive Director Scott Strand testified on behalf of the bill, pointing out that most of it’s provisions simply borrow from other state and federal laws. He walked the committee through the bill’s sections, explaining what they were designed to do.

 Despite the apparent demise of the financial assurance bill, Strand said the committee and its chairman, Satveer Chaudhary, did a good job of better defining the issues and the next steps for this new type of mining in Minnesota.

“We wanted to make it clear to the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources what we want and expect,” Strand said after the hearing. “We think these hearings did that.”

The hearings, which began Monday afternoon with testimony from the DNR, centered on the proposed PolyMet copper-nickel mine in Hoyt Lake. The DNR and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers released the draft environmental impact statement last fall and the public comment on that document ended in early February.

However, besides MCEA, other environmental organizations and citizens, the U.S. Environmental Protection agency and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service both found major problems with the impact statement. The EPA gave the review its lowest possible grade, something it has done less than 1 percent of the time over the past 20 years.

In fact, Chaudhary closed the hearing by saying that the problems found in the environmental impact statement and other issues that were raised in the hearings were profound.

“My confidence has been shaken,” the chairman said, adding that many of the concerns raised “are things that effect our children, our wildlife, even our jobs and they are not being looked at to the highest standard.”