Now it’s time to step up fight for Centerville

The “Dirty Dirt Train” has been derailed, and it was the public who did the dirty work.

Our children and grandchildren will be the winners.

Josh Bryson of British Petroleum/Atlantic Richfield announced Tuesday that the company now intends to remove all on-site contaminated material when it begins cleanup under the Consent Decree along the Silver Bow Creek corridor.

This apparently means that the Consent Decree cleanup will be done to the standard of the Parrot Tailings cleanup, and that is very good news. There will be no “gray fill” or “dirty dirt” left behind for future contamination.

This news comes no thanks to our local government. In fact, in comes despite the work of Butte-Silver Bow and the chief executive.

This news also proves that public participation in important decisions like this can be a good thing. While the government pushed back and did not listen to the public, it is obvious that British Petroleum and Atlantic Richfield certainly did.

Finally. Thankfully.

It should also reinforce residents of Centerville that we can stand up and fight back our chief executive’s plans to dump toxic waste near homes on the Butte Hill.

The “Dirty Dirt Train” has been taken down. Now it is time to derail the toxic plan that would make Butte neighborhoods unsafe for generations to come.

We owe this victory to a handful of environmental watchdogs who decided to take on this important fight. When the people learned what was coming, those watchdogs had an army of supporters behind them.

With that support, they were able to overcome the secret decision making that was concocted behind closed. They were able to shed some light on what our local government was deliberately trying to keep in the dark.

That secrecy is what has held back the cleanup process for so long. It was that secrecy that put the financial concerns of a rich foreign company over the health and safety of the people of Southwestern Montana.

The first secret plan that we beat back was to dump toxic waste near Copper Mountain Park and by homes in the Timber Butte neighborhood.

The second secret plan was to dump the same waste instead in the Kelley Mine yard, including the historic Dublin Gulch and near homes in Centerville and Corktown.

With some help from my curious dad, who walks the trails by the Mountain Con Mine nearly every day, I was able to expose that secret Dublin Gulch plan late last summer. That led to some public outrage, which insisted on dumping the more than 800,000 cubic yards of toxic waste into the Berkeley Pit.

We were first told by BP/ARCO and our chief executive that the Pit was not an option. We maintained that it should be to the point that suddenly they thought it was a good idea.

All of the waste apparently cannot be dumped into the Pit, so the plan from our chief executive is still to dump the worst of the waste a chip shot away from homes.

Think about that. The waste is too toxic for the Berkeley Pit, but the chief executive says it is OK to bury it under 18 inches of dirt near homes and a park.

At a recent meeting of the Butte-Silver Bow Council of Commissioners, one commissioner who is a member of the largely secret repository siting committee put together by the chief executive, said that the waste cannot leave Silver Bow County.

Oh? Tell that to the people of Missoula.

When they Superfund cleanup of the Milltown Dam was going on years ago, the residents of Missoula County did not have to fight to keep the waste away from their neighborhoods. Instead, they put it on train cars and shipped it away to the Opportunity Ponds in Anaconda-Deer Lodge County.

That toxic waste crossed four county lines on the way to its resting place.

Some waste from Anaconda and Butte has also been dumped at the ARCO-owned Opportunity Ponds over the years.

But our chief executive insists on keeping the Superfund waste close by so it can haunt Butte citizens for the rest of eternity.

Now it appears we beat British Petroleum/ARCO back to where they should have been in the first place. Now, they are back to where they would have been had our local government not done all of its negotiating in secret since the signing of the Consent Decree in 2020.

When I am chief executive of Butte-Silver Bow, any and all meetings will be open because I trust the members of the public to participate in these important decisions that impact all of us.

It appears the center of Butte will get the cleanup the people have been promised.

Now more than ever, we have to keep fighting so the people on the Butte Hill get the environmental justice they deserve, too.

— Bill Foley, who is running to be the next chief executive of Butte-Silver Bow, can be reached at foles74@gmail.com. For more on his candidacy, visit foleyforbutte.com.