Rosemont wants our water, and NOW they want the Ci

Rosemont wants our water, and NOW they want the City of Tucson taxpayers to deliver it to them.

At its meeting next week ( Tues. May 14th, 5:30 - agenda to be posted soon ), Tucson’s Mayor and City Council will consider connections to a pipeline it jointly owns with the Central Arizona Project (CAP) south of Tucson. These connections would deliver CAP water to the upper Santa Cruz River Valley near Sahuarita and Green Valley.

Unbelievably, Rosemont Copper and its partners Community Water of Company of Green Valley (CWC) are requesting the City of Tucson to allow it to connect to a CAP water pipeline Tucson taxpayers own.

Rosemont, its lobbyists and PR spinners are telling folks that this request has nothing to do with Rosemont. Who do they think they are kidding? This is just more dishonesty coming from Rosemont.

What can you do? Attend the meeting next week and/or contact the Mayor and Council Members (see below for more info) !

Here are the facts:

Rosemont is paying for ALL the costs for the pipeline that will connect to the infrastructure owned by Tucson taxpayers.

Rosemont will get exclusive use of this small water company’s CAP water for at least 15 years and that water will be delivered in the Rosemont pipeline.

Rosemont will purportedly use this CAP for recharge to partially offset its potentially unlimited groundwater pumping for use in their proposed massive open pit copper mine in the Santa Rita mountains. However, Rosemont and CWC do not even have a recharge permit. This leads to the inevitable question as to why are they so anxious to get access to this taxpayer asset when they could be years away from actually using it? Could it be that they need some good news to counteract their own Independent Auditor questioning whether Augusta Resource, Rosemont’s parent company would be able to continue as a “going concern”?

There is another request pending with the City to connect to the Tucson’s pipeline from a company that has been in this valley for years. They have all of their permits in place and are able to put CAP water to use immediately reducing EXISTING groundwater pumping.

What is even more audacious is that Rosemont and its acolytes are going to the City of Tucson with this request even though the Mayor and City Council have unanimously passed a resolution against this mine . Tucson correctly took this action because this proposed mine will threaten TWO sources of our water – the Santa Cruz River Valley near Green Valley and Sahuarita from where they could potentially pump an unlimited amount of our best quality groundwater and the Cienega Creek and Davidson watershed where Rosemont wants to dump toxic mine waste piled 600 to 800 ft high in the drainages. This watershed provides 20% of the groundwater recharge to the Tucson basin.

We have seen evidence of how the key players behind this company have operated elsewhere and there have been numerous news reports of their dishonest PR tactics. Telling people that this request of the City of Tucson has nothing to do with Rosemont is just the latest example.